Time

“I’ll be quick!” I tell my partner as I walk into the bathroom preparing for a shower. I can hear her skepticism through the silence. I close the bathroom door and realize that I did it again. I forgot my towel!

“Oh, Andrew! Why am I like this?” This is a joke because I know my ADHD effects executive function. Executive function is what helps people organize, plan out and carry out their daily tasks. Some people like to think of it as if your brain had an office manager. In a nutshell, executive disfunction for people with ADHD feels like a never ending to-do list without a work-plan or task management system. You know you need to take a shower, but you may not always be prepared with everything you need.

But this post isn’t about executive function or my hygienic routine. It’s about time.

Months before my official ADHD diagnoses, I attended a spiritual gathering with family. We call these gatherings Misas Espirituales, where we use prayer, faith and intuition to communicate with our spiritual guides. At this gathering, spirit had informed me that I needed to have working clocks throughout my home. I say luz y progresso, light and progress to that spirit because that message was well received.

As an oral historian and anthropologist, I am learning that time, or what we might think about time in the west, hasn’t always been thought about linearly. In my research I think about time- or the spaces between time -that I relate with my encounters with spirit and liberation. But how we think about the present, the past, and the future depends on our own social and cultural contexts. When does a memory get conjured up to inform the future? How does the present trigger a past emotion?

One time I had the distinct blessing to dance afro-cuban music with an elder, who was mounted by a spirit who lived during enslavement. I was dancing with an elder Black women, AND dancing with a spirit who did not live in my perceived present who used her ancestral spiritual gifts to provide guidance and healing to her community. Our drums, ashé and faith reconstituted our understanding of time in a way that is more cyclical or counter-linear. It grants us access to ancestral practices required for us to survive.

But that doesn’t mean I can outright refuse the general conventions of time.

My relationship to time is complicated. I have moments where I am time blind. Sometimes I underestimate how long it would take for me to get to a location. A masking technique I learned along the way was to always leave 15 minutes earlier than it would take to arrive 15 minutes early. This usually works, but sometimes, occasionally, I lose track of time and leave 15 minutes AFTER I should have arrived. But really, what is time?

Back to my shower, where I try to convince myself that I’ll only take 5, 10 minutes tops, I close the door, and listen to the newly installed wall clock that my partner gifted me. It reminds me that time is moving. If I wanted to catch my next appointment, I need to be present. But as soon as I turn the faucet the soothing sounds of the crashing water drown out the racing thoughts-the liminal spaces between time that my brain constantly inhabit go away, and I can finally think. I get my best thinking done in the shower.

But before I get stuck, I listen with intention to the metronomic noise coming from the wall. Tick-Tock. Tick-Tock. It’s time!