Temporal Crisis

April 25, 2019

I am terrified by the passage of time, and the longer I live the more it begins to scare me—how I treat and consider and regard time—how it has begun to spin me into a trap of my own making, an anxiety and obsession sometimes so strong that I can barely manage to break out.

I have always been an impatient person, but lately it’s been a lot worse: when I want time to stop, to slow down, it drags at my arm and yanks me forward; later, when I ask for the minutes and hours and days to roll by, nearly tripping in my own haste to make it into the future—that’s what it grinds to a halt, digging in its heels and forcing me to remain still. No, it says to me, you can only be happy with what you have right now.

And I’m not happy with what I have right now, not anymore. And I hate it.

This past winter, for the first time in my life, I began to suffer from panic attacks. I have watched people I know and love endure them—this time, I was the one hyperventilating, shaking, barely able to speak or breathe—as if my brain was stuck in a washing machine, tumbling over and over and over, dizzy—I couldn’t pull my thoughts out of whatever void they’d fallen into. It was terrifying. Jake would take me by the shoulders, try to get me to look at him, to breathe deeply, to tell him what was wrong—and I couldn’t. I can’t. I don’t know what was wrong.

Maybe I’ll be able to draw out some sort of logical conclusion here.

I spent so much of the winter struggling to come to terms with the passage of time—my third year of college, slipping through my fingers—an overwhelming amount of work that on its own was threatening to drive me insane—and on top of it all, the looming threat of change, a concept that I have always been notoriously bad at accepting. Now, spring has uprooted me from my comfortable and familiar campus lifestyle and deposited me halfway around the world in Florence; not necessarily something I’m allowed to complain about, of course, but nevertheless a dislocation that’s requiring a good amount of adjustment. After all, when I return to Stanford in September, I will be a senior, with the added pressure of needing A Future Plan and Life Goals, two things that I do not currently possess.

See? I’m doing it again. Even today, even now—as I write this sitting in a beautiful, sunlit café on my street in Florence, Italy—I am still counting down the minutes until the evening, until dinner, because I am bored, and a little lonely, and I would just rather it be tomorrow, so that I can wake up to a new day and start all over again.

Here’s my problem. I am always chasing perfection and excitement, so much so that it’s hard for me to understand when I’ve found it. (Well, maybe not perfection. But I feel like I’ve gotten pretty damn close to my own idea of it.) Yet in these past six months at school, every happy moment has felt bittersweet. That whisper in the back of my mind, always reminding me that I would be leaving and that everything would change once I was gone. Ruining so many good times. And now, that worst fear—of all things in motion once more, of being unable to control it or make it stop—has arrived.

So yeah, I’m panicking a bit. Not in the same way as before—I will admit, it’s much harder to panic when the pizza and the pasta and the paninis are as good as they are here—but still, it’s always on my mind. And the way I fight change is by forcing pieces of my life into place. Keeping them the way they are. Worse, I fall into obsessive, anxious patterns, like I’m doing right now: seeking out cafes because they make me feel safe. Watching a lot of TV. Spending too much time alone.

It scares me. I hate when I get trapped like this: a puppet on a string, going through the motions. Moments of excitement always tempered, whether by panic or sadness or apathy—or just nothing at all.

So I can definitively say that this has been inconclusive. What do I know? I miss the familiarity of campus and the spaces I have carved out for myself there. I miss the people who never fail to make me smile; the people who were once solid, real, warm—now a phone screen and six thousand miles away. I miss them so much.

Above all, I miss the pure excitement I used to feel about the things I looked forward to. I’m wondering when I will be able to anticipate the future without dreading the time it takes to get there; when I will be able to appreciate the present without clinging to it, terrified of change. I’m working on it. There are already moments here that make me happy: dinners with my host family; new adventures to beautiful, fascinating cities; waffle cones loaded sky-high with fresh gelato; the first time I ever ordered a cappuccino and a croissant in Italian and the waiter did not immediately respond in English.

I’m adjusting, however slowly. Remembering to tell myself, time passes every day. Thinking not about what’s ahead but rather what I am living, in this moment, and in each moment that comes after. Okay. Breathe. You’re going to be okay. 

Yes. I will be okay.