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Im not in therapy right now, but my twin sister is, and sometimes I ask her for insights. Your twin should be able to be your therapy plus-one, I say. The other day, she missed an appointment for no discernible reason. She had been doing some law school work on her computer, making lunch, just puttering around, and she looked at the time and her session had passed. My therapist said it was time blindness, she told me later. Were all time blind. I thought, Oh yes, thats right. Time blind, just like being unable to distinguish between red or blue.

Im self-isolating 3,000 miles away from my twin, who is staying with our parents in Southern California. Im in New York. We FaceTime every day, but I havent seen her in person since Christmas. I know how much time has officially passed. A whole season: the last time I hugged her I wore a big winter coat. But it feels much longer, like we unknowingly entered into a new century since then, another era. When I finally see her again we will speak a different language than the one we used to. Maybe we wont even look like each other any more. Other times I swear I heard her laugh just the other day.

Time blindness is a term coined by doctors who treat people with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Dr. Ari Tuckman, a Pennsylvania-based psychologist who specializes in ADHD, said adults typically develop an innate awareness of time and an ability to track its passing. Some people have what he calls a harder, or sharper time awareness: they know when theyve been out for lunch too long, or when something hasnt been in the oven for long enough. Others have a much softer one; they can miss appointments and trains, or play a game for hours and not realize they havent eaten dinner. At the severe end of the spectrum, toward the soft end, is time blindness, which can profoundly impact someones life, if they cant ever keep deadlines or make social events. People with ADHD are often more time-blind than others.

On top of our individual time awareness, Tuckman says, context plays a role: Sleep deprivation, anxiety, depression, being drunk, anything that might impact how we process the world, can make us feel more time-blind. And context has wildly changed for us all at this moment in history, he says. Without the usual time-marker cues we might use to divide up our days the school bus arriving, standing on a crowded train platform, the line at the coffee shop, weekend nights spent at restaurants with friends were swimming in a sea of sameness. Its like driving through a haze where theyre just not as many distinct landmarks, he tells me. Even if before all this, you mightve called yourself a stickler for time, youre likely having a hard time sticking. Youre throwing darts into a viscous, slippery time jelly.

Grief is one of the biggest causes oftime blindness, according to Tuckman. What am I mourning? People who are gone. Places I used to go. Seeing my sisters face, for real. Holding onto time is a skill of your mind, like doing math, and sadness sucks up its computing strength. Its why time goes faster when I talk to her, when Im not so sad, even though I want it to feel longer.

Tuckman said it might be nice for more people to understand time blindness, if only to help normalize this feeling that clocks have stopped working, or theyve stopped being applicable to our lives. Trains and appointments were our context clues, yes, but so were other people. He says talking to them, even while physically apart, can be a way to keep time. Loved ones are good clocks.

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What Is Time Blindness and Do You Have It? - The Cut

This entry was posted on April 12, 2020 at 9:44 am and is filed under Blindness. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed. |