What would you say is the organizing force in your life? Is it your family? Or maybe your friends, your job… Or your passions?
How about TIME?
The Oxford Dictionary defines time as: “The indefinite continued progress of existence and events in the past, present, and future regarded as a whole.”
When you think about time, you probably think about it in different ways. You can probably imagine what your week will look like, your day, the next hour, or even the next ten years. You can think back to what you did yesterday, this time last year, or the summer before your Freshman year of college. Time allows us to organize and structure our experiences in the future, the present, and in the past.
But did you know, that not everyone is born with the capability to think in terms of time? Sounds kind of strange, right? There are actually parts of the brain that allow humans to think temporally, or in terms of time.
Not all animals have this skill. In fact, most don’t. But humans are unique in their capability to think abstractly about the future, past, and present. Some humans, however, are unique in that, like animals, they are only really able to think about NOW.
My name is Taylor and I have NVLD. NVLD is a condition that affects one’s ability to process nonverbal information, like emotions, facial expressions, tone of voice, visual and spatial information and…TIME.
I put time in capital letters because it is such a big concept, and so crucial to what makes us, us. Being able to think about time, manage it, plan for it, to manipulate information mentally using it, is crucial to getting by in the world.
We need to manipulate time in our heads to organize our day. We need to be able to think abstractly about time to plan for our week, our month, or our year. We need to be able to manipulate time to plan for our long-term futures, to anticipate problems, to come up with solutions. It is literally one of the most important cognitive skills we have.
But like I said, not all people have that skill.
Not being able to process time is like living your life on a second-to-second basis. There is no ability to think, well what happens next, or what happened before, or what will happen if I do this, or don’t do that. In some ways, it’s a bit like being a Zen Buddhist monk. We are in a constant state of now. But unlike a Buddhist monk, we are not able to turn that part of our brain on or off as the need arises. It is always just off.
Over time I have learned how to think about time somewhat. But it is a hazy, ill-defined concept. When I think of the future, I have trouble thinking abstractly about the passage of time and the effect it has. And while I can think about time in some basic sense, I know it exists, I know people get old, I know I will die one day, thinking about what my life will look like in ten years and planning for that, is next to impossible. Organizing my day into temporal parts has never gotten easier, even as I have matured. If I have one thing to do in a day, my day is centered on making sure I get that one thing done. If I have two things to do in a day, or three, it becomes a nightmare.
Everything I do, I do in a rush. I always feel like I am rushing, even if I have nowhere to be. I just cannot stop and think: how long will this take, how much time do I have, what will the rest of my day look like, and how does this activity fit into it. Extrapolate that outward into days, months, and years, and you start to see the problem.
I know what an hour is, a minute, a second. I know how to think about time concretely. But it’s FEELING it, SENSING its passage, UNDERSTANDING the emotional, psychological and cognitive implications of it, that I cannot do. I cannot think, manipulate, or grasp time in any sort of abstract way.
Like a bird that flies around never knowing what it will be doing from one moment to the next, or a dog that aimlessly goes from one activity to another, I simply do not have access to the part of my brain.
To exist outside of time is to be robbed of a certain sense of humanity. I feel broken in some way. Not just because I cannot plan my day, month, or year, or because I feel like I am always rushing whatever I do, but because FEELING time, KNOWING it in an abstract sense, gives richness and meaning to our human experience and to not have access to the part of my humanity feels like I am just not “getting” life the way that other people do. My feeling of “being” tends to be more superficial, I am not processing time, the passage of it, the way it unfolds like a normal person, and that makes life not just harder, but more alienating as well.
But I did not write this so that you would feel bad for me, or tell me to cheer, up, or that everything will be okay. I wrote this because I know that there are others like me, who struggle with this very same thing. And I wanted to share my experience so that others who may have family, friends, coworkers, boyfriends, or girlfriends, with the same struggles could perhaps better understand that person in their life. So that the person reading, this who feels different and alone, and like nobody could possibly understand, could read these words and think, maybe for the first time, I’m not a freak, somebody gets me, I’m not the only one after all.
Taylor
I was diagnosed with NVLD at the age of twelve. As an adult, I hope the information I share will help others to not feel so alone.
