Part 1 — When Time Changes Shape

Mental illness doesn’t only happen in time. It can change how time feels.

Most of the time, the clock and our felt sense of time roughly agree. An hour is an hour; a week is a week. But during periods of serious mental illness, the two can come apart, and the experience of time itself can change.

For many people, one of the first things to shift is duration. Time can seem to drag and disappear at the same moment, a day feels endless while you’re inside it, and then, somehow, it’s evening and nothing you meant to do got done. Whole stretches can go missing, hard to account for later, particularly through the darkest periods. This isn’t laziness or a lack of caring. Time is simply behaving differently.

Getting through the stretches that have to be endured

When things are at their worst, people get through them however they can — resting, distracting themselves, waiting for the intensity to pass. It’s common to look back on those methods as failures, but they usually deserve more credit than that. Some periods genuinely have to be endured. You can’t force an injury to heal faster by staring at it; sometimes the only thing to do is rest and let time do the part that only time can do. Those aren’t good stretches, but surviving them is real work.

A past that isn’t always a refuge

People sometimes assume the past is a comfortable place to retreat to. For many who’ve struggled with mental illness, it isn’t — the past can feel more like something to be managed than somewhere warm to return to. So when the present becomes hard to inhabit, going backwards isn’t much of a relief either. What people often miss most is not the past but a sense of forward motion: ambition, momentum, the feeling of heading somewhere.

When the future goes silent

The part that’s hardest to explain to someone who hasn’t lived it is what happens to the future. When a person is very unwell, the future can go silent. It doesn’t come from any dramatic decision — the future simply stops feeling like a real place. Next month, next year, stop feeling like somewhere you’ll actually be. Life shrinks to smaller units: get through today, get through this, wait for the thing in front of you to pass.

Researchers who study time have language for some of this. They describe “felt” or subjective time — the idea that our experience of time isn’t fixed, and stretches or shrinks with what we’re living through. Much of that thinking comes from broader work on how people adapt to serious illness and disability, rather than from mental-health research specifically, but it fits the experience closely. Time isn’t only the reading on a clock. It’s something we live inside, and it moves differently depending on where we are.

A shared strangeness

It helps to remember that a strange relationship with time isn’t unique to people who are unwell. The pandemic scrambled it for a great many people — the sense that recent years feel both very long ago and like yesterday is widely shared. A distorted sense of time can be more intense, and last longer, during a period of struggle, but the underlying experience is a human one, not a sign that something is wrong with a person.

Noticing the future again

There’s rarely a single day when the future comes back. More often people notice it sideways: catching themselves making plans again, imagining next month, taking an interest in something ahead of them. For a lot of people, that return is tied closely to other people — to finding, or being found by, a bit of community. A frightening future is a very different thing faced alongside others than faced alone.

It’s worth being honest that this isn’t equally available to everyone. Reaching out doesn’t always find someone waiting, and safe, welcoming community is easier to come by for some people than for others. When it can be found, though, it changes things — and a future that once felt impossible can start to feel like a place a person might actually want to be.

That’s where this series is headed. Recovery doesn’t hand anyone their old timeline back. What it can slowly return is a sense that time is theirs again, and often one of the first pieces to return is the future — coming back less as a promise that everything will be fine and more as somewhere a person can imagine being. That turns out to be enough to start with.

For anyone in Northern Virginia looking for that kind of company while the future still feels uncertain, Centers for Opportunity is one place to begin.

Sources

• Livneh, H. (2012). The concept of time in rehabilitation and psychosocial adaptation to chronic illness and disability: Part I. Rehabilitation Counseling Bulletin, 55(4), 195–206. https://doi.org/10.1177/0034355212440184 — backs the “felt / subjective time” passage. Note in-text that this comes from disability and rehabilitation research, not mental-health-specific research.

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