I’ve been having some bad moments with my relationship with time lately.

What happens is this :I will be doing something I do once a week, and suddenly it’s as though all the times I have done that thing before telescope into one overwhelming moment and I have to yank myself back to the present before my mind crashes.

It is like deja vu, and I am a litle deja vu prone, but unlike deja vu, which makes me feel like I am going backwards in time to the beginning of the loop (nuuuuu!), this phenomenon makes me feel as if time has stopped and I am trapped in an eternal and imperturbable NOW (NUUUU…no,  that’s not enough. FUUUUUUUCK!)

It’s extremely scary and leaves me feeling alienated and weirded out. It happened just before I sat down to blog and eat, and that’s how I ended up talking about it now.

I was picking out the clotghes I wanted to wear this afternoon and it reminded me that I had done laundry last Sunday at around this time and then I thought “Wow, has it really been a week since I did that? ” and then the telescoping thing happened and I felt that nothing really happens and time was collapsing into this one crystalline moment that would go on forever because time no longer had any meaning.

I am positive that if I had a different kind of mind, this would have been a sublime moment of divine transcendence where the illusion of change slips away and I get a glimpse of the eternal cosmic truth of reality and am thus enightened.

Instead, it just freakes me the fuck out. Guess I am a tad too rational and left-brained for that kind of thing.

More’s the pity. I could use some goddamned transcendence. Instead. I habve to take the much much longer rational route, where I have to figure things out in a way that makes sense to me instead of being able to transcend the need and go directly to the new understanding without needing for it all to fit together.

Thinking can seem faster than feeling, but it’s not. It’s thinking that takes forever.

Anyhow. Back to time. I figure this eternal now business is the latest (and strangest) manifestation of how time seems to go faster the older you get. This is because your sense of time grows longer for your entire life. We go from being toddlers for whom there is only “now” and “not now” to children for whom five minutes seems like an eternity to teens who think being thirty means you’re really old to being young adults who feel like they have an infinite and unbounded future ahead of us to middle aged people who feel the death clock of mortality ticking for the first time in their lives to old people who feel whole months slipping away from them to ancient ones who can’t remember who won the last election because at this point in their lives, they all kind of blur together into one.

Wow. I probably should have expressed that as a list or a timeline or something, because that is one very long sentence.

But fuck it. Makes sense to me, anyway. I have no head for graphics.

This growing sense of time, of how long a moment is, can make it seem like time is speeding up and that can be very scary and depressing. You feel like everything is changing too fast and that by the time you get used to the next thing, it will be obsolete too, just like you, and it can seem like you are un a runaway train headed straight over the edge of a cliff to crash directly into death.

That is a very bad feeling. I know this because I have felt it. It’s an illusion, of course. Days still have the same number of seconds in them as the day you were born, and nothing has actually changed in the outside world. The change is purely subjective.

And that helps. When I get to feeling that way, I repeat my little rationalist mantra of “it’s all an illusion, nothing has really changed” in order to steady myself.

But such rational coping mechanisms can, at best, only offer the cold comfort of their bright but chilly embrace.

It can keep you from going creepy. It can even, on a good day, keep you from freaking out and having a panic attack.

But it can’t truly make you feel better.

That’s a lesson I ought to remember. I need a lot more than cold comfort if I am to get over my past and become more whole and strong enough to stand on my own.

I will need to learn to comfort myself with something much warmer than reason.

I will need to learn how to give myself a hug.

I had nobody to model that behaviour for me. Mine was an extremely chilly childhood. There was a lot of light in that household, because we are all very bright, but there was very little in the way of emotional warmth.

And I think we all suffered because of it. Me most of all because I was isolated from my siblings by time and birth order and being a surprise, but we all felt it.

But we couldn’t see it. We didn’t know that it was the cause of some of our suffering. It was all too easy to blame my father and his rages for all our suffering. He was the obvious villain and so we blamed him.

But it wasn’t his fault that there was so little warmth. In face, this intellectual chilliness might have been part of why he acted like he did.

It came from my mother. And it was subtle – it’s not like she’s some kind of aloof ice queen or detached academic. She’s a very warm and sweet person.

But thr truth is, underneath it all, she is uncomfortable with overly emotional situations and likes us kids best when we are being bright students for her to teach.

And I was the brightest sudent of them all.

No wonder I am such a wreck.

I was emotionally malnourished right from the start.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.