“I’m late, I’m late, I’m late for a very important date!” – The White Rabbit

Or am I? Time and I have a very unique relationship. It’s a very odd mix of time blindness and an acute hyper awareness of time. I have absolutely zero concept of how much time it actually takes me to accomplish anything. This in an of itself causes problems when I either don’t allow enough time or have allotted way too much time and am left twiddling my thumbs. Idle hands and I are not good friends.

When you add to this mix that hyper awareness of time, is a whole battle with the clock and the calendar. For example, today is Thursday and it’s 645pm at the time of writing. I stream at 8pm on Thursdays. I on average need about 30 minutes prior to my stream to get everything set up. So why am I sitting here writing with 45 minutes of time? Because my brain says it’s plenty of time. However it also says that I don’t have enough time, that its not 45 minutes its 15. Somehow it want to cut my time off at 7 because it is sure that if it doesn’t set that buffer, I’ll be late. To be fair, I’m often a few minutes late to my own stream. Something is always forgotten or not working and no matter how hard I try, I seem to be off by just a few minutes. Sometimes though, I am so concerned about that, that I’m ready like 15 minutes early and my very AuDHD brain doesn’t want to just start streaming early because I’ve set a schedule and thats what people expect.

Another example of this comes in how I perceive time in terms of dates. It’s December 11th. To me the month is not only half over but basically over. Why when it’s not even technically half over? Well, when you factor out days for holidays we only have 17 days left for the month. Now take out days that I assume will be non-productive for some reason, be appointment or proximity to holiday, and I lose another 3-5 days. That takes me down to a minimum of 12 days which seems like a lot but my brain basically sums all that up to a giant “the month is practically over” response because it pushes all the things together even though they are actually spaced out and when it looks at it that way its not able to see the free time, it just sees giant blocks NOPE!

This is a very frustrating element in my life and yet also very useful. Being hyper aware of time means I rarely forget something that needs to be done by a certain date, but it also is a huge factor in why I can’t wait in lines. My brain doesn’t process the idea of standing still very well because its time wasting and wants to know why we aren’t moving.

As for why I am writing about time right now? This morning’s prompt about physical activity got me thinking about the long walks I enjoy but how I never go on them anymore because it never feels like I have the time. I probably due but I can’t see it in the haze of all the other things and how my brain truncates the blocks of time.

If you stuck around for this, I hope you’ll come back for the next random insight into this strange world inside my brain. For now, I’m off to stream and stress about time.

-Flower