The Inevitable
While I was fearing it, it came,
But came with less of fear,
Because that fearing it so long
Had almost made it dear.
There is a fitting a dismay,
A fitting a despair.
’Tis harder knowing it is due,
Than knowing it is here.
The trying on the utmost,
The morning it is new,
Is terribler than wearing it
A whole existence through.
—Emily Dickinson
I first posted the essay below on Medium on October 13, 2019. I’m reposting it here, because it fits with the themes I’ve been writing about.
Also, because you are a captive audience (sort of), I feel compelled to share that last week, while visiting my dad, I was viciously attacked by a turtle, which bit my toe. Twice. It was an Eastern Box Turtle, to be specific. Here is a close up of the attack, which my boyfriend captured on video and in photos.
Note that neither he nor my dad hastened to my rescue. They did, however, laugh. You would think my dad, a biologist who wrote his dissertation on turtles! - would have warned me about this hazard. But no. He was too busy chortling.
Also, to add insult to injury (alright, it was more of a tickle than an injury), Eastern box turtles are - well, were - my favorite animal. So I am taking suggestions for a new favorite animal, preferably something with less aggression and propensity for violence. Feel free to share ideas in the comments.
Anyway, here’s my essay. Thankfully, it is devoid of turtles:
Time Is Not On My Side
When I was in my mid-twenties, I dated, on and off, a man I’ll call Bad News. I was living in Manhattan, and it was a Friday evening and my college-age brother was coming to visit and I called Bad News in the city where he lived and a woman answered. Startled and hurt, I slammed down the phone so hard that the receiver landed slightly out of the cradle (this was in the pre-cell phone era), and so the phone — unbeknownst to me — was off the hook.
What happened next was that I sat by the phone and I waited. I waited for Bad News to call and explain, or apologize, or anything. But no call came. Minute after minute I waited, and each minute was agony. My stomach was in knots, I was beginning to panic-breathe, and my heart was racing. I did not realize was that my brother was at a pay phone a block away, trying to call me because he didn’t know how to get to my apartment, and encountering a busy signal every time he called. And Bad News was trying to call too, as it later turned out, to explain, or apologize, or whatever. I did not realize anything because I was frozen — unable to move or leave the phone, unable to do anything but wait. My brother’s visit disappeared, the darkening day disappeared, the whole world disappeared, all sucked into the vortex of my anxiety.
In her book, Little Panic, the author Amanda Stern writes: “Countdowns are how my body tells time. Everyone else lives in a clock-and-calendar world, but my clocks and calendars are countdowns that start light and safe like ocean bubbles, and end dark and dangerous like animal extinction.”
I read this book soon after it was published last year, and reading this passage stopped me in my tracks. I read it again and again.
I was 42 years old when I read this, and for most of those 42 years I had struggled with the ebb and flow of an inherited time-based anxiety, and for all of those 42 years I had never really considered that perhaps other people perceived time differently than I did.
Once I thought that time was an objective fact, but reading — as much as my brain could fathom — about quantum theory put that to rest (apparently time isn’t real, or linear, but try telling that to my limbic system). Yet I never considered whether the personal experience of time might be variable as well.
As it turns out, it is.
I wish I had known this long ago, and I wish I had learned to explain to people how time works for me. “Time,” I might say, “is often synonymous with waiting.”
“Waiting,” I might continue, “is always long, and I am always waiting. Some waits are just opportunities to fill time.”
For example, at this moment it is 3:16 in the afternoon, and my middle daughter’s bus will arrive at 3:50. I have been thinking about this for roughly 30 minutes — imagining what I will work on as I wait (this essay), and when I need to leave for the bus stop (3:40 if I walk; 3:45 if I drive). Before I was waiting for the bus, I was calculating, again and again, exactly when I would work the 15 hours of my part-time job this week. I had already factored in the hour I worked on Sunday, and then worked through the days and hours I would need to work the rest of the week. Making these calculations made me feel a bit better about the week, but I will still be counting the hours until they are fully worked on Friday, and worrying a bit about what might derail my plans.
This waiting, these countdowns, are manageable. They are the tinnitus of my life, and always have been — a constant thrumming tone in my mind that doesn’t let up. I have PhD-level skills in calculating time: fractions of hours, elapsed time, time between here and there. If a train leaves Chicago at 8am, traveling south at 90mph, and another train leaves Boise at 9am, traveling at 100mph, well then you can be sure that whatever train I’m on, I got to the station two hours early, just to be sure.
And so I live under the dangling sword of time and mostly make do, although I do wonder how much freer things would feel if I didn’t feel compelled to constantly keep track of the minutes and the hours as they tick by. But it also doesn’t take much for the sword to fall and dispatch me into an anxious hell, where the countdown and the tracking begin to feel, as Stern so eloquently puts it, “dark and dangerous like animal extinction.”
When waiting and uncertainty meet, my mind spirals. The school bus comes at 3:50, and that is okay. My oldest daughter walks home at 4:00, and that is okay too. Predictable time is a yoke around my neck, but it doesn’t choke me. Unpredictable time is a noose.
The medical term for the sensation of insects walking on or under one’s skin is “formication.” When I am waiting for something uncertain, time is an endless line of ants, marching over my skin. It itches, and can’t be scratched. My cells are always crawling with time.
In the children’s book The House With a Clock In Its Walls, spookily illustrated by Edward Gorey, a boy comes to live in a house where a clock, hidden in the wall, ticks incessantly. His uncle tries to mask the sound by filling the house with clocks, but there is no avoiding the hidden clock, which was created to bring about the end of the world, and which must be destroyed.
This is an accurate description of life inside my head, where the ticking of an ominous clock is ever-present, and no tricks I’ve tried will silence it or drown it out. It is a hard place to live.
When I am waiting for something uncertain, all the logic in the universe falls short. Perhaps in the first hours I am susceptible to reason, to the likelihood that nothing is as dire as I think. But as the clock grinds through the day and night, reason fails, and the fog of waiting envelopes me completely. I can’t sleep or eat, my heart pounds, I feel flooded with dread. I don’t know what is going to happen, but I know it is to be feared. And that is how I live, in the Meantime.
The Irukandji jellyfish, which lives off the coast of Australia, is a small but fearsome creature. Its sting results in Irukandji Syndrome, which, among other awful things, can produce a feeling of overwhelming doom in the victim. Cardiac arrest (understandably) can cause the same feeling, as can an overdose of nutmeg (inexplicably). Despite loving nutmeg, I’ve never been the victim of any of these, and so I can’t say for sure, but I bet there are some neurochemical parallels between the feeling of doom that results from these sources and the feeling of doom that hits me in the Meantime.
When the Meantime breaks, as it inevitably does, the fog is gone, just like that, and I no longer remember why my anxiety soared to catastrophic heights. When the waiting ends and the uncertainty is resolved, I don’t remember the uncertainty either, or why it felt so bad. And in these moments I try to tell myself that there’s a lesson to be learned for next time, and then next time comes, and my amygdala goes into hyperdrive, scattering all my lessons learned, and all my good intentions heave out of me in a burst of shallow breaths. And so it continues.
I don’t remember what happened there in Manhattan, the Land of Severe Time and the Land of No Time, both. I must have finally picked up the phone to call someone and realized it was off the hook. I know I finally retrieved my brother (thankfully), and finally received an inadequate and stupid apology from Bad News, and time moved back into its normal rhythm. But I can still viscerally remember that feeling of waiting, in part because it was so brutal, and in part because I have felt that way so many times in my life.
I’ve known for a long time that I have anxiety — as my father does, as my oldest daughter does, and as runs strongly in my family — but this revelation about time is new. Since discovering that my relationship to time drives my anxiety, I have asked people close to me about their perceptions of time, and honestly it amazes me every time I hear that there are people — millions, maybe billions, of them! — who simply let time roll on by the way it will anyway, instead of trying to grab it like some ever-elusive brass ring on a carousel that never stops (to steal an image from Joni Mitchell). That sounds like a beautiful way to exist.
I’m not sure what it will take for me to be able to escape the constant ticking of the clock, but if there’s a way, I hope to find it. I haven’t found a clinical description of this specific kind of anxiety; it seems to be a subspecies of other forms of anxiety disorder. Regardless though, I will never stop striving to shrink the significance of time in my life, and to find ways to avoid being swept up in the madness of the Meantime. To paraphrase another singer, Harry Chapin, I know now that time goes lightly for others. Perhaps one day it will go lightly for me, as well.