Of Time and Tenderness

On how living with chronic illness alters time and an interrogation of the ways holding onto the past keeps us from stepping into our lives fully in the present.

I hesitated to post this for fear that it is too navel gazing or that people are tired of hearing about how chronic illness has affected me. My hope with anything I write and decide to publish is that it is not interpreted as self-pitying (because it wasn’t written that way), but that it lays out a human experience that resonates with others. Perhaps you have chronic illness or experience with it and can relate to the way it abstracts time? Or maybe the idea of being stuck in a loop with something you are unable to let go of softens a place inside you that struggles with letting go too.

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We’re fully into fall. The trees are dropping their leaves en masse. Maybe it’s something about this time of year and the dramatic changes that surround me, but I’ve been thinking again about time and it’s abstract nature. I felt it around my 50th birthday at the end of July when the concept of having lived half a century felt impossible and yet very real all at once. I’m feeling it again as I take stock of the chaos of the last 3 years along with the last 8 years of chronic illness.

The best way I can put it is that when I got sick in the summer of 2015 and then never got better, my life took a sharp turn in a very different direction and I have never been able to course correct. In the blink of an eye, the trajectory I was on changed entirely. Another way to explain it is that I walked through an unexpected door and entered another life that exists parallel to my old one. Time didn’t stop and I am still me. I have continued to live and grow and learn and change, but my concept of time has shifted profoundly and the ways in which I have changed were not on my bingo card. 8 years is a long time. So much has happened, and there were days, weeks, months, and years where the suffering and fear was so profound that it was enough just to get through each passing moment. Time felt stretched out into one endless, dark night. On the other hand, I look back in disbelief that 8 years have passed so quickly. Poof. I’ll never get those 8 years back. The decades prior felt much longer, probably because my life then was richer and full, less contracted and small.