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- Herausgeber: Icon Books
- Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
- Sprache: Englisch
'I FELT RECOGNISED ON EVERY PAGE, LEARNT SO MANY NEW THINGS, AND LAUGHED SO HARD I CHOKED ON MY WATER. READ THIS!!!' NAOISE DOLAN, AUTHOR OF EXCITING TIMES 'CANDID, WITTY ... A BRAVE BOOK THAT PUTS VULNERABILITY FULLY ON SHOW' INDEPENDENT Obsessive was, still is, my natural state, and I never wondered why. I didn't mind, didn't know that other people could feel at peace. I always felt like a raw nerve, but then, I thought that everyone did. Writer and journalist Marianne Eloise was born obsessive. What that means changes day to day, depending on what her brain latches onto: fixations with certain topics, intrusive violent thoughts, looping phrases. Some obsessions have lasted a lifetime, while others will be intense but only last a week or two. Obsessive, Intrusive, Magical Thinking is a culmination of a life spend obsessing, offering a glimpse into Marianne's brain, but also an insight into the lives of others like her. From death to Medusa, to Disneyland to fire, to LA to her dog, the essays explore the intersection of neurodivergence, fixation and disorder, telling the story of one life underpinned and ultimately made whole by obsession.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022
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obsessive intrusive magical thinking
MARIANNE ELOISE
For my Sunny Baudelaire
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
I won’t claim to know what my first sentient thought was. I do, however, know with absolute certainty that I didn’t just have that thought once. I know this not because I have such a big smart brain that I can remember my first twinkles of consciousness as I lay kicking (or whatever babies do) in my crib.
No, the opposite. I know this because I don’t have a regular brain at all, if a regular brain is a pink, fleshy mass making sensible decisions. Instead, in the cavern of my skull sits a Scalextric track. The electric car is loaded by an invisible force beyond my control with ideas, phrases and images, and without an exit ramp they swoop endlessly through the abyss in my head, an infinite figure-eight of looping thought patterns.
This is the way it’s always been for as long as I can remember, so as far as I am concerned, it has always been true. At first I shared those obsessive thoughts with others, asking questions like a tic and seeking reassurance from adults on everything that came into my head. When will I die? Is the house on fire? How do we know we’re alive? Is Medusa real? Is she after me? What will happen if I wish for what I want? What’s the point of being alive? What’s the highest number I can count to? No but really: is Medusa after me?
Repetition was the only state I knew, whether in my movements or my thoughts or the food I ate or the shows I watched or the colours I wore. I did and thought about everything obsessively. Everything everyone hoped I’d grow out of I just didn’t, and even when I tried to stop talking, it was never quiet in my head. The cars just kept running, even when I didn’t want them to.
Now I know that I don’t exactly have what anyone would call a ‘normal’ brain. Where most people are neurotypical, I’m neurodivergent, a big word for just being wired differently. Neurodiversity covers a lot of ways of being different, and my particular way is being autistic and having ADHD. I experience the world in extremes that often make it difficult to function; I feel everything, emotionally and physically, much more than someone else might, and I have less tools to express it. I get overwhelmed by everything: sounds, smells, emotions, textures, food.
Being autistic also impacts how I think. I fixate on both good and bad thoughts and images to a degree most people would consider unhealthy, but I can’t help it. Sometimes I say them out loud, too, over and over again, not knowing when to stop. There are lots of big words to describe the way I am: perseveration is one I learned recently, and it means the repetition of a response, such as a word, phrase or gesture, despite the lack of a prompt.
Some people do this after a brain injury, but it sums up my incessant, lifelong impulse to talk and think about whatever interests me. When I googled it I found a lot of panicked parents trying to figure out how to stop their kid talking about dinosaurs, so I stopped wanting to learn any more.
I choose instead to look at it in a more optimistic way than killjoy parents who long to suppress their kids’ healthy interests. I like it because its root is persevere, to keep going against all odds. I like the idea that I am just so determined to persevere talking about theme park rides or the last book I read or the likelihood of alien life, even long after the life has drained from the other person’s eyes. I’m not boring or bad at spotting social cues! I’m determined.
Obsessive was, still is, my natural state, and I never wondered why. I didn’t mind, didn’t know that other people could feel at peace. I always felt like a raw nerve, but then, I thought that everyone did. When I was just a few years old, that tendency pushed me to develop obsessive compulsive disorder, but there weren’t the words for that yet, either. A lot of autistic people have OCD, and it makes sense to me, that we’d latch on to something that thrives in an anxious, overactive mind that craves control.
As a child, I didn’t have any power to actually control the things that scared me, so I invented it. I used something that mental health experts call ‘magical thinking’, the belief that unrelated events are causally connected and our thoughts can alter or influence their course. People with OCD often believe that arbitrary actions or thoughts can impact the things that we are afraid of.
I’ve learned that very few people have any clue what OCD is, but I sympathise, because the most agonising things about it happen inside the brain. From the outside, where the intrusive thoughts aren’t apparent, it might look like ritual cleanliness, fussiness or weird tics. I understand why popular representations are so lacking – it is difficult to comprehend how debilitating it is if you’ve never had it.
So imagine this: the worst thing your mind can come up with.
The most violent image, your deepest fear, something uncomfortably sexual, an annoyance you’ve been working to avoid. If you had to try at all to muster something up, we are very different. Now imagine that image, or thought, repeated. It echoes around your brain, constantly, without respite. Maybe you can forget it, for a while. Maybe you’re on a picnic, or holding your niece, or driving along the coast. It comes from nowhere, interrupting a perfectly nice day, bludgeoning you with the dregs of your own psyche.
You’d start to worry, wouldn’t you? That there was something deeply, terribly wrong, somewhere at your core. That you not only didn’t choose to think of things so terrible, but that you couldn’t stop them. Anyone would do anything to stop it.
So your brain tells you: I can make it stop. All you have to do is everything I say, when I say it. The actions don’t require much of you, but they’re completely arbitrary. Run up and down the stairs, tap something 100 times, step into the road without looking. Sometimes they’re less arbitrary. If you’re worried you’ve left the hob on, perhaps, you’ll go back and check it. Again. And again. And again. Your brain will trick you into believing that you’ve left it on and you’ll think you’re going insane, but it’s less trouble to check than it is to have the house burn down.
Or so you think, anyway. These ‘small’ actions build up as you try to control every aspect of your brain and fears and life, to a point where you don’t have much of one anymore. What your compulsions and obsessions demand of you starts to take over the parts of life that you used to love, that you want to partake in. You feel at the centre of a very miserable universe, the sole saviour of everyone and the only person who can prevent bad things from happening, so to speak. So you continue. You persevere until you can’t anymore, until you realise that you need some kind of intervention to save you from the one thing you can never escape: your own brain.
OCD is personal: it feeds on whatever you are most afraid of; on your guilt, fear and sense of responsibility. It’s born from a need to seek order in a world that doesn’t have any, often developing in childhood, when we’re at our most powerless, with one in 200 children suffering with it. Mine started manifesting when my parents were fighting and divorcing. I often felt alone, responsible for outcomes that I shouldn’t have even been considering yet. If I did the right thing the right amount of times, I could save everything, protect everyone. I could even make my parents love me.
Not having the words or treatment for what I felt left space for OCD to run rampant throughout my adolescence, trampling anything good or spontaneous. I was plagued with intrusive thoughts that manifested as everything from compulsive cleaning to self-harm to an eating disorder to an exercise addiction. When my friends spent the summer holidaying in Magaluf and going to clubs and festivals, I stayed inside and made heavy concessions for the few activities I did partake in. If I was going to go out with my friends, I had rituals, set things I had to deprive myself of. I punished myself obsessively for the freedom of one night, and even then the penance didn’t stop.
It all came to a head when I was seventeen, when I was so physically and mentally destroyed that I just couldn’t do it anymore. I had to either die or get help. I was diagnosed and referred to cognitive behavioural therapy, but the only thing that helped was moving out at nineteen and leaving the immense responsibility I had felt there behind.
In my own home, with my dog and my housemates, some of the guilt that had been stoking the fire seemed to lift. I was eating again, going out again, enjoying things again. I allowed myself to be free, to go out without checking everything hundreds of times, to have parties, to eat. My disorder was still there, sure. But it wasn’t everything anymore. I could see who I was.
Did I stop obsessing? Did the Scalextric track ever stop its relentless march? Did! It! Fuck! I had spent so long worried that if I got treatment for my OCD, I would lose the parts of my brain that had the capacity to obsess in a good way. I was worried that I would stop following my interests down all-night rabbit holes or watching hours of TV or committing to being a world-class Tetris player. I needn’t have worried. While my disorder dissipated, my tendency towards obsessive thinking never did.
It soon became clear that my disorder wasn’t the only thing that made me a little different. To an outsider, I seemed fidgety and antisocial, prone to tantrums if I wore the wrong clothes or ate something new or if the room was too loud. Everything seemed to tip me into immense distress, and it didn’t stop as I ‘grew up’.
I assumed, naively, that everybody felt this way, that everyone else had these impulses and obsessions. It took many years of many people telling me I was ‘weird’ to consider that they might be right. So many people had to tell me what was ‘normal’, how much I should have been thinking about certain things, how I should feel, how I had to communicate. I didn’t even know that I had to look in people’s eyes until I was twenty years old, and when I tried it felt so intimate, as if soft jazz would start playing.
After I left home I started bartending, and the differences that had gotten me in trouble or ostracised at school became stark. (You ever hear the one about the autistic barmaid? No, because it is not funny.) My customers complained a lot that I was too blunt, that I didn’t make eye contact, that I actually told men off when they crossed the line. It didn’t matter that I could be very sweet when people deserved it, that I went the extra mile to offer support to customers who needed my help. I needed to suppress who I was to be good at customer service and I couldn’t.
I didn’t really want to, either. I couldn’t help but feel that I wasn’t wrong, that it should be OK to communicate or think about things differently as long as no one got hurt. But they wore me down: colleagues, friends, family members. A lot of people made me feel shit for being who I was, but they really had to persevere to get it through to me in their passive aggressive, vague ways. Without clarity, I could never understand what I was getting wrong. After bartending, I had a few office jobs, and sitting still made everything that much worse. Participating in the world, going to work and doing my errands, felt impossible. I only felt comfortable alone, hyperfixating on my special interests, and as an adult I couldn’t do that anymore.
I started to feel as if something was wrong. I wanted to understand myself, to be able to explain who I was to exhausted colleagues and friends and strangers. I wanted support at work, if I ever got a job again. The word ‘autistic’ had come up in my worst fights with my ex, and after some research I sought a diagnosis, and I got one. ‘But you knew that already’, said the psychiatrist who assessed me for autism spectrum disorder. I did. She asked how I felt, and I said I felt good, but mostly I just felt the same as I had always been.
Before that, I met with a different, thoughtless psychiatrist who told me: ‘a diagnosis isn’t a cure, you know’. I felt crushed that she would think I wanted a cure for the person that I had always understood myself as. Would I sometimes like to soften my sensory processing issues, wear anything other than cotton without having a screaming fit? Sure. Would I like to feel more restful, or be able to try new foods or deviate from my strict routine without a meltdown? Maybe. I’m not a fan of a lot of the physical problems, like issues with my joints or stomach, that come with being autistic, either. But there is so much in being neurodivergent that is who I am, and to cure the bad, the things that make life harder, would be to pull out the person I am at the root.
The idea of being diagnosed as the person I had always been felt pointless. Sitting through quizzes where the answers felt obvious but another person was judging the results for reasons why I was a bit off was funny to me. They may as well have printed out a piece of paper that said: ‘your name is Marianne and you’re a Pisces.’ Bitch, I know. Now tell me how to stop other people getting angry about it.
Having that diagnosis finally brought me to the understanding that I am not obsessive because I had a disorder – I just am. It was never just the bad thoughts that zoomed around my head constantly, like my fear of chaos or fire or death. It was everything. I was either fiercely invested in a topic, wanting to know everything about it to the detriment of my relationships, or bored to the point of tantrums. When I found something that I loved, I could spend hours, weeks, a lifetime on it.
I have spent the last several years trying to untangle the parts of my brain that are obsessive and the ones that are me, ultimately finding that there is no separating them. I am obsessive. I am autistic! I am a lot of the associated stereotypes that I saw reflected on those forms: I am sincere, logical, curious, naïve, empathetic. Sometimes to a disruptive degree, but I don’t mind. Understanding that my brain is wired differently has been key to not only knowing myself but also liking her a little bit, too. I am a neurological phenomenon, and now I know that, I can meet other people who are, too. I like us.
With that knowledge, living a life that I enjoy surrounded by people who love me for who I am, things are better. I’m also free from the tentacles of a cruel disorder that did nothing but take, take, take, and I have found time for the obsessions that drive and fulfil me. I will never be able to think about anything once or in a linear, not all-consuming way. It’s all or nothing, baby, it’s Scalextric or it falls straight out of my ears.
So I embrace it. My obsessions, especially my special interests, saved my ass through a difficult childhood and a painful adolescence. If I wasn’t able to hyper-fixate on topics, particularly movies and TV, I wouldn’t have a Master’s degree and something some people call ‘a career’. I have ADHD and I’m lazy. I’m a shit student and a worse employee. Without obsession, I have nothing. It’s taken me on journeys across the world in pursuit of the things that interest me, and it always wins against the things that I find hard about being alive.
These essays are a culmination of a life spent obsessing, and through them I hope to offer a perspective of my own small, dysfunctional brain. Tracing a map of my obsessions from death to Medusa to folklore to magic to Disneyland to fire to my corporeal form, they explore the intersection of neurodivergence, fixation and disorder, telling the story of one life underpinned and ultimately made whole by obsession.
OBSESSIVE
I AM OLD NOW, BUT I WASN’T THEN
I can recall in technicolour the first time I shared a truly unhinged thought about the passing of time. It was summer, 2002. I was standing on my school playground towards the end of year four. At the start of year five, as a treat for our maturity, we would move to the upper playground, a slightly different slab of concrete flanked by two basketball hoops. Where my classmates were excited to scope out the new digs, I was petrified.
In my mind, time hurtled forwards: after two years on that playground, I would start a new school, and then I would leave that school, and then I would someday be eighteen, and then an adult and then dead. This was just how my brain worked, which to me meant it was the way everyone’s worked; I turned to a normal nine year old and confided in him that it would all be over soon. He regarded me with a well-deserved suspicion, and I fell silent. I learned to keep those thoughts to myself in future.
In Vladimir Nabokov’s powerful memoir Speak, Memory, he references a friend with ‘chronophobia’, a fear of the passing of time. That friend, upon seeing a home movie of his parents in his house before he was born, suddenly realises his place as just a speck in the timeline, a brief blip, an aberration. There was a life in this house before him, and there would be one after he was deep in the ground.
This realisation becomes a restrictive obsession that affects his capability to truly live. A casual awareness of the passing of time is as necessary as one of death; knowing that time always passes faster than we anticipate allows us to make the most of moments while we are in them. It’s a gift in a world that tends to move carelessly.
However, if we are aware, at every second, of the infinite cruelties of the universe and the swiftness of our time on earth, we can become paralysed into inaction. Children are, usually, very good at living in the moment, even looking forwards with hope. They’re impatient, anticipating a future where they can experience true freedom: late bedtimes, staying out, choosing what to watch on TV. They want to grow up. They look forward to their birthdays, and adults remind them, ‘you won’t enjoy them anymore when you’re old’, but they can’t comprehend that unknowable future; they see a distinct boundary between themselves and their parents. I never really had that innocence, and the future seemed murky, frightening to me. I didn’t want to become my parents, didn’t want to have to work or argue. I wanted to be small forever.
I became hyper-conscious of the relentless passage of time, feeling the days of the summer holidays disappear beneath my feet. I looked forward to my birthday for the gifts, but felt inappropriately morose at the whole thing, like a woman reassuring herself that life begins at 40 after her husband has left her for someone half her age. A few weeks before my ninth birthday, a friend of my stepdad’s crouched to meet my eyes and told me, ‘double digits soon’! I turned away, mourning the loss of single digits rather than celebrating my encroaching adolescence.
After the ‘this will all be over soon’ incident, I realised two things: the first was that, in order to make friends, I had to keep my thoughts to myself. The second was that I had no control over time; that any perceived grasp was slippery at best and an illusion at worst. I didn’t have magic powers to control it, to slow it down at will. Instead, I started keeping a diary, diligently recording as much of my life as I could. Time might never stop its relentless march, but if I could remember every second, I could feel it slowing.
Journals were a big deal back then. Thick, padlocked, pink diaries with passwords and invisible ink. But I didn’t want to hide the minutiae of my crushes from the prying eyes of siblings or friends. I instead saw myself as the early-noughties iteration of my heroes, the record-keepers who had come before me, like Samuel Pepys and Anne Frank. I held an image of myself as a modern-day chronicler, not of the Great Fire of London or the Holocaust, but at least my own, very small subsection of history. At eleven I wrote, When I die, I want this diary to tell peeps about typical life in 2005 England for a pre-teenager, which seems like an optimistic intention, but I respect it.
Writing anything, especially a diary, is an attempt to make time more elastic than it is; to preserve singular moments, feelings, thoughts. When it comes to people like me, who really only want to record in an effort to live in their favourite moments or revisit less favourite ones to gain a deeper understanding, maybe it’s an egocentric act. But when it’s other people, ones less selfish than I am, it’s a historical necessity. Records like letters and diaries show us how real people lived, how they processed what happened to and around them. In the case of Anne Frank, her own crushes and fights with her family offer a deeper insight into a real, teenaged life disrupted by the Holocaust.
Of course, my earliest instalments don’t offer insight into much beyond my own small psyche. In 2003, I took to my Winnie the Pooh diary to interrupt regular entries about what I’d done at school, to inform my would-be readers of the saddest day of my life, writing that my dog had DIED alongside crude drawings of tears and paw prints. In 2004, my stepdad left my mother and I, and I scrawled a blue-biro sketch of his boxes in the hall in my Tracy Beaker-themed journal. How will me and mom cope? Will we have to sell the house? were my only thoughts – precocious ones, hinting at the sad reality of the immense responsibility and pressure I felt. I wanted to remember my life, every painful moment of it, so that I could return if I chose to, a kind of low-rent time travel. It turns out I chose not to – I threw out both journals, ashamed of my own feelings. In the future, I wouldn’t write down my saddest moments at all, thinking that if I didn’t record them, I could forget them. I was wrong.
I started the first diary that I actually held on to when I was eleven years old. Or, as I put it, 11 and 10 months and 2 days. My fear proliferates throughout the pages: when I was twelve, I panicked that, I’m 13 in 3½ months, a teenager, and that I have 26 days left until I am a teenager. I will make the most of it. My peers didn’t think that way, really. They looked forward to being older because it meant maturity and freedom. I saw only my life slipping away, having a job, growing up.
Time became, for me, not just a nebulous concept, but a physical enemy to be defeated. I wore a watch religiously, a silver-banded Eeyore piece, with a turning outer bezel that I would fiddle with when I got bored, which was often. I learned that time was unreliable, which frightened me. I wanted to watch it tick by, knowing that if I turned my eyes away, the sands would dissolve.
I had a child’s grasp of Einstein’s special theory of relativity, the idea that time moves differently depending on your frame of reference. I took it at face value, believing that if I could just watch the seconds go by, I could slow them down, not let them turn to weeks or years. If I were bored, squirming through a lesson or lunch at a grandparent’s house, I would count seconds to minutes in my head, one through 60. All I wanted was control, and counting gave me some – if not over time, then over my own distraction.
I understood relativity as the reason why a ten-minute assembly had me fidgeting in my seat, while a two-week trip was over before it even began. My brain, deficient in attention and dopamine, was under-stimulated until it very much wasn’t. Time is relative to everyone, but more so when you’re neurodiverse, when your two states are chronic distraction or hyper-fixation. If I’m down a rabbit hole, reading about earthquakes or looking at photos of celebrities wearing sneakers, time melts, 3pm turning to 5am in the time it takes to click on a link. If I have to focus, listen to someone speak, stay still even – a minute is a lifetime.
My main frame of reference for anything was, and still is, TV. In 2000, sitting in front of the boxy set in my great-grandma’s living room, my fear of time was made manifest. I was transfixed, as usual, by Cardcaptors, the dubbed, Westernised version of the magical girl anime Cardcaptor Sakura. The show centres on the titular Sakura’s quest to trap and control a set of mystical cards that she accidentally set free in her dad’s library. She does so with magic powers and style, wearing a series of cute outfits week after week.
As far as I was concerned, I literally was Sakura; I’d tie my brown hair into little pigtails and wave around my pink hiking stick, telling anyone who’d listen that I, too, was chosen, tasked to control the Clow Cards. Usually, though, it wasn’t scary to be Sakura. I was magic, after all.
In the season one episode ‘Time and Again’, Sakura wakes up, as always, late. She is a relatably unreliable magic girl. The episode opens with her dad giving a lecture about how the pyramids will be lost to time, setting the children in Sakura’s class panicking: ‘One day there won’t be anything left!’ they cry, innocence stolen. Sakura finds herself trapped in a Groundhog Day-style repetition of her school days, taking the same music test over and over again.
The culprit, it turns out, is the Time Card, a manifestation of time itself. He sits, a hooded, cloaked figure crouching in the clock tower, yellow eyes and long, creepy fingers poking and prodding with time, turning the clock back at midnight, fiddling with Sakura’s reality. He became the star of my nightmares.
The figure alone creeped me out, even at 4pm, but it was more that this was my greatest fear made flesh: here was evidence, however fantastical, that time was malleable. It exposed the irrelevance of clocks, how time slows and moves depending on who’s in control. Time is one of the hardest foes Sakura has faced, but even after he’s safely imprisoned in a cute pink card, time is still her enemy; she’s late every morning, as the days march on.
As the Time Card meddled with the hands of clocks and with Sakura’s sleep, I watched, transfixed, from my great-grandmother’s floor. I imagined that he had his crooked fingers in my life, too, speeding up and slowing down at will. His decrepit visage followed me into my sleeping world, and I harboured elaborate fantasies that I was Sakura, waiting to trap and trick time itself.
That confused boy on the playground in year four made me feel weird, but the TV and films of the noughties show that a newfound obsession with the passing of time is not uncommon in children. They spend so long desperate for time to pass, but at some point they realise that they’re on the same timescale as their parents, bound by the same mortal laws. It’s the first real shedding of innocence – how can you be carefree when you know that this too will end?
In Spike Jonze’s 2009 adaptation of Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are, young Max sits, distracted in class, as he’s told that one day the sun will die. This is part of what catalyses his spiral and temper tantrums as he disappears into the land of the Wild Things, carrying his obsession with him, asking one: ‘Carol, did you know the sun was gonna die?’ Once he knows, he can’t forget it, the logical steps of exactly what that means intensifying the anxiety already ruling his tiny body.
Strange Days at Blake Holsey High, a Canadian science fiction teen drama about nerdy teenagers solving even nerdier mysteries, played with time, too. In season one episode ‘Thursday’, which aired in 2002, perfectionist Corrine finds herself stuck in a Groundhog Day-esque loop of her Worst Day Ever. She tries, over and over, to correct the mistakes that made the day bad to begin with. Her lesson, in the end, is that she needs to just loosen up; let the day happen, let time wash over her. I watched the episode repeatedly, to learn about my enemy, but I didn’t take away the actual moral: I would never learn to loosen up.
These themes were everywhere: in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, unrepentant dweeb Hermione Granger wants to take more classes than she’s allowed, and for some reason a teacher gives her a Time Turner, a tool to make it possible to be in two places at once. This seems, knowing all that we do, wildly irresponsible, and the Time Turner is, of course, a weak allegory for Adderall or any of the other tricks that struggling students use to get ahead.
Bernard’s Watch, a corny nineties–early noughties British kids’ series based partly on an episode of The Twilight Zone, centres solely on manipulating time, as the titular Bernard finds himself in possession of a magic watch that he can use to stop it at will. He uses it for the most mundane, pedestrian reasons: going to the zoo, playing football, doing well at school. In one episode, a friend borrows the watch and uses it to give herself more time to write stories at school, but fucks up and finds herself ‘trapped in time’.
It’s hard to find a TV show from that era, particularly ones with magical themes, that didn’t play, in some way, with the concept of time travel. It was never just confined to science fiction. In a 2002 episode of Sabrina the Teenage Witch, ‘Time After Time’, Sabrina finds out that her aunt Zelda wishes she’d accepted a marriage proposal from her ex, and goes back to the past to ‘fix it’, finding of course that, on her return to the future, she has destroyed her own present.
It is telling, of course, that the fictional characters who most often seek to seize control of time are the nerds, the uptight Type A queens, the proto-girlbosses. They can’t accept that there is a limit to what they can achieve in a day, that they are human, too. They want immortality and infinite hours, not to have more time to spend with their friends but to get ahead, to punish and deprive themselves. They don’t really want their childhood at all.
The takeaway of all time-related storylines is leave it the fuck alone. Vampires gain immortality and lose sunshine and meaning; their human friends die as they continue to thrive and fuck, hot and horny yet miserable. Time travellers fuck up something integral, preventing their own birth in an attempt to kill baby Hitler. People who stop time miss out on truly living, and nerds end up even more burned out, finding that the real cure for their ills is to just relax. Most fiction, overtly or otherwise, centres on some kind of mission to control, bend or stop time to the will of someone; it ultimately becomes a way of denying or putting off mortality. We’re scared of time because we’re scared of death.
In the nineties and noughties, these stories were ubiquitous, and that’s before you even take into account actual time-travel movies. Everyone played with the concept, because everyone could relate to the desire – we would all manipulate time if we could. Through them, I started to absorb the idea that I could be the one to get it right. In my own mortal way, I internalised the idea that to understand time was to control it; I had to confront that youth fades, childhood disappears, the sun dies. If you aren’t careful, in the blink of an eye you’re full up of regret. I vowed that I wouldn’t let that happen, and in doing so I lost the ability to enjoy a moment.
I got a little older and stopped watching tween paranormal dramas, but still I feared every passing day. I didn’t need to grow up! As a teenager, I already had freedom. I went out all night and day, got drunk, took trains alone, went to gigs, slept on my friends’ floors. Nobody noticed I was gone, whether I was twelve or twenty. I knew that adulthood was coming for me, that in some ways it was already here. Why rush?
A preoccupation with time underpins everything I do: the way I record every second of my life, the boxes of souvenirs I keep, the way I insist on doing everything I want now, now, now, because who knows if I’ll get a chance again? It’s implicit in the keeping of a journal at all, but throughout the pages, that fear becomes explicit. In 2009, when I was just sixteen, I wrote, I’m scared. Scared of exams, my future, being old. Death. In my mind, even thinking about having my GCSEs immediately threw my brain into a Star Tours-style hurtle towards the grave.
In 2015, when I was just 22, I wrote, I can’t believe this year is more than half over. I may well soon be dead. I was conflicted, writing, 23 is old. But it isn’t. Torn between what I knew – that 23 is, objectively, young – and the terror I felt, the motor inside me still drove me towards something. The following diary pages obsess over just what I wanted to do by 23, what I had not yet achieved, what I may never. Every year I look back on the previous year’s diary and I think, ‘wow, I was so young. But I’m not now,’ and in a year I’ll read back and think the same again.
It wasn’t just time passing in the broader sense, years to decades, that spooked me, that still does. My fear pulsed with the changing of seasons, too. The winter made, makes, everything that I am already experiencing feel much worse. I have never known a day when it didn’t feel as if my body were failing me. I’ve had chronic migraines since around the time I started school; blinding, debilitating episodes that make my nose bleed and sent me to bed for days. While these are under better control now, I can’t recall a single headache-free day in my life.
Very recently, I was diagnosed with Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, a genetic disorder common in autistic people. It affects our connective tissues, and basically means that I’ve felt as if I have the bones, muscles and joints of someone much older for a long time. These things have never not been with me, but in the winter, combined with a seasonal depression, they all conspire to put me totally out of action.
When I was younger, I didn’t really know what was happening, why I felt so completely shit. When dark mornings and frost descended, I fell apart. I did everything I could to mitigate the inevitable: I’d stay in bed, skip school, drink coffee, wear thick socks. I did everything I could to hide, knowing that by March I might feel like a person again.
My brain turned to sludge as the weather got colder, mixing with the grey half-snow that spread across the streets. I don’t have any real, vibrant memories from any winters. My brain just functions less good. When I reach into my head to rifle through mental filing cabinets of images of summers, I see blues and greens and golds. I see the smiles of my friends, lit by waning evening light, and I see the potential of a not-freezing night that lies ahead. When I try and remember any time October–March I see a grey soup, weak recollections thinly veiled by a haze of deprivation and the things I took to make that deprivation feel bearable. The way that nothing ever changes, that the sky is blanketed in the same grey day after day, makes me fucking insane.
When I was seventeen, I took a renewed interest in feeling like a human being and bought a light box. It made a small difference, but not as much as when the season actually changed. When April came, and then May and then June, I felt myself thawing. The cold, hard edges of my personality that had been put up as some kind of defence against just how shitty I was feeling fell away and I became the person I saw myself as, the person I wanted to be. When summer finally came, I always suffered a kind of amnesia, forgetting just how much the season had taken from me. I could fall under the illusion that who I was in July was who I would always be, that the miserable, pained bitch I’d evolve into in November was an anomaly, a stranger.
Year after year, I tried to manipulate time, to delay the inevitable. All summer, I did everything in my power to be the careless, sun-loving bimbo I knew I could be. I went to the park, I took every opportunity to go out, I … went to the park (there wasn’t a lot to do near me). I did everything that would be snatched away in winter, writing and reading and making the most of my functioning serotonin resources. I had a new enemy, but it was only really time in a different guise.
Of course, I could never really enjoy the summer. At the onset of June or July I braced myself for the oncoming winter, knowing that if things were good now, they’d be bad again. The only time I felt some small peace was spring; the worst was behind me, the dead grey trees were coming back to life. I marvelled at bright flowers, cherry blossoms falling from the sky, that they could thrive on what had once been so dead. But summer, which I longed to kiss freckles onto my arms and suck the bad thoughts from my head, wasn’t here yet. Which meant it couldn’t go anywhere yet. When it was here, it was gone already. Anticipation was the only state I found tolerable.
Winter came; it always comes. I knew I would lose everything I had gained for myself, every shred of sanity and health, but I forgot how bad it could be. Still, I sat in front of my SAD lamp and gobbled vitamin D like it was candy. But always, inevitably, it arrived, no matter how bright and promising the summer had been. The bony fingers of darkness and time snatched away everything that made being alive bearable, and the only hobbies available were drinking and sleeping. The more I drank and slept, the less I saw a sunrise, the worse I felt. The two hours that we got something approximating daylight were not enough to instil anything approaching a schedule in me. I lost myself.
