In Search of the Matter of Time: Healing My Relationship to Urgency For My Birthday.

I’m learning a lot from my therapist, a Black trans-masculine, young and cool-ass lil griot who calls me “my nigga” when he’s particularly proud of my work in our sessions. Pierre, god bless him, isn’t my first therapist. Suffice it to say, he met a quite skeptical client at our first session. I was fatigued by emotional burnout, unable to do much more than avoid my triggers (which dampened any quality of life), and in so much chronic pain from a disabling injury. I was desperate. I was tired. I didn’t want to be here on this gorgeous earth anymore. Having done the typical talk-therapy tango for more than half my life, I was critical of this very young stranger and his claims that his method of therapy could offer me lasting relief. So many other professionals had failed. But, miraculously, I had found a healer who specialized in somatic modalities. It’s an approach (both the somatics and his relaxed use of slang) that has proven to be revolutionary in helping regulate my nervous system and heal nearly three decades of deep trauma and years of debilitating chronic pain. It has changed everything about my life, about the way I orient in my body and in space, and about what I think my work is in the world.

I’m learning a lot from this new therapy and from Pierre. I’m learning that bilateral stimulation is a regulatory pattern that helps curb the impact of dysregulating experiences on our psyches. These novel patterns — these visual, auditory, and tactile stimuli — invite the autonomic nervous system to release anxiety and better compensate for triggers. This skill is especially crucial for survivors of trauma or the descendants of those survivors, people who never got a chance to move beyond coping behaviors and passed on that coping as a way of living. So, it shouldn’t surprise you that I’ve learned, too, how Black people have flooded every facet of our cultural imprint — from language to music to dance, to even the way we approach rhythm itself — with these patterns, an unconscious practice of insulating our nervous systems from the onslaught of systemic violence we’ve been forced to survive. Anyway, so I’m learning.

I’ve been obsessed for a good while with the idea of linear time. Rather, I’ve been obsessed with the idea of time itself and critical of the widely accepted assertion (or western-mandated assumption) that it moves linearly. I don’t agree. I’m beginning to believe that our modern understanding of time in the West is merely a construct of colonial capitalism and other oppressive forces, one whose sole function is to dysregulate, antagonize, or instigate more dysregulation in those already (dys)functioning underneath it.

Okay, okay, let’s pause. I like to consider myself self-aware, so I know a good number of you probably just cut your eyes at the screen. Time is *only* a tool for capitalist disorientation, Aurielle? Really? Believe me, I get the incredulousness. After all, for most of us, the concept of time is fixed — an immovable structure of our realm of consciousness as permanent as three-dimensional space or water being wet. (The poet in me must protest that even in those examples, there’s an assumed rigidity of a thing that is actually quite flexible — what, with there being a fourth dimension that we know of and several stages of matter for water, not all of them being wet.) (But I digress.) I know that I’m attempting to dismantle a core building block of your lived reality. I know. But I mean well. Don’t abandon your investment in this essay yet (lol). Stick with me.

Here, allow me to offer some disclosures. As many of you know, I’m not a quantum physicist or a psychology scholar. I haven’t formally studied horology or sociological analyses of time-place, and my theories haven’t been rigorously tested by any scientific means. I’m merely a nigga, obsessed. Black, fat, queer (and onto something, maybe). A gxrl who has had the pleasure of adding three disorders to her rap sheet since the beginning of the single most dysregulating and asynchronous event in modern memory. That leads me to my damn point: why it’s time to finally leave social media.

With Pierre, I’m also learning that time (linear or otherwise) doesn’t really matter to a body. Stimuli, ranging from songs to a scent in the air, feelings of danger, or being out of control, each impact our ability to register space, location, and yes, time. When we are impacted negatively enough by a traumatizing event, these stimuli register for us more significantly and imprint a little timestamp. Being revisited by these cues are volatile incidents that compress the very matter of time and return us to the site of the primary harm we experienced — that first dysregulating imprint. When we are triggered, we are removed from the present (at least somatically and emotionally) and catapulted backward to whichever point in our lives the originating trauma is located. We time travel. Some of us, depending on how severely we were impacted, do so on a daily basis.

The very day our nation ceased all typical functioning due to the COVID-19 pandemic, I blew out my knee. Straight up tore my MCL. Reader, it was some bullshit. As we all sat in our homes, inundated with news bulletins and unhinged presidential press briefings, I couldn’t walk and people were dying all around me. Desiring nothing more than to drink a cocktail on a patio, or brunch with friends in a quaint public park, or just feel normal, I was forced to sit and sit and sit with myself. The longer I was alone and immobile, the more I felt myself slip out of rhythm with the rest of the world. I felt myself slowing down.

Soon, that change in pacing had tripled and was paired with a sense of deep apprehension that swallowed me anytime I tried to leave my home. I felt too naked and exposed in the world outside my door, concerned always about danger, and felt the need to incessantly doom-plan against the harms that could befall me beyond my doorstep. I received a severe anxiety diagnosis a mere four months into the pandemic, and by the time we were emerging from the cocoon of shelter-in-place (albeit prematurely), I carried a newly minted ADHD diagnosis as well. By the spring of 2022, I was certifiably suffering from PTSD and chronic panic disorder. In other words, time had slowed down, split, or something, and suddenly I was introduced to a wilder version of myself: a mad, sick, and disabled nigga. It wasn’t just that I was more distant from the outside world. I was careening between triggers that had magnified in sensitivity in a mere matter of months. And that hasn’t stopped. Everything in our world is beginning to look like the stimuli that trigger to our brains that we are unsafe. My mind is unmoored to time as a way of compensating. Isn’t yours? It feels, for me, like I’m again surviving the summer of the Ferguson Uprising. The night I spent alone in a paddywagon, kidnapped and tortured by police. It’s the summer nights of that year I spent houseless, struggling to find stability. This year’s horrific onslaught of bombs, dead children, and cowardly fascist governance has returned me to other times. I am there and here, impossibly. I am time-traveling. Against my will. Without the ability to find any peace of mind.

Something is happening to our grasp on the minutes, seconds, and hours that organize our days. Or, something is happening to us. Pandemics erupt, regional catastrophes arise, insurrections ingite, and through it all, we are expected to go on as usual. We emerged from the isolation of the pandemic, and people were *not okay*. Bar fights, airport meltdowns, and Karen-in-the-wild incidents were happening more than ever before. Friendships and intimate partnerships were breaking down. Domestic violence is on the rise. Besides the crises of the world — genocide in Sudan and Palestine, slavery and conflicts in the Congo, fascist governmental takeovers here in the States — there is a denial of the dysregulation we experienced together and of the horrific world of loss we carry with us. For me, being injured this year has made it impossible to regulate, feeling useless to the blow of violences our communities experience. Again immobile, while people die at the hands of the State in Cop City and the State of *srael in Palestine. Again. I know so many of us can say the same.

So, why does it feel like we’re being gaslit about the state of the world? It’s simple: We are of no benefit to the State when we slow down — take our time with mourning, healing, or transitioning, or more tenderly when feeling overwhelmed — because the State’s primary goals are power and capitol. Controlling dysregulated people is quite easy when you consider how infighting, scarcity, and isolation plague those who are at the whims of their triggers. What is solidarity for a people at war with their own psyches? The State benefits from war, famine, conflict, and from suffering. Not just because there is a financial benefit from these things… but because the impact of these travesties renders each of us less able to commit to solidarity, resource-building, and ultimately, the types of communal efforts that can correct power hoarding and inequity that plague our societies.

The things that have always been difficult for me to keep up with — meeting deadlines, texting or calling friends back, and responding to emails promptly — began to feel enormously impossible while watching the insurrection and surviving a global health crisis. I was out of synch and could not find my way back. Instead of finding solidarity in this new reality online, I felt further isolated watching relationships between people who I knew had shared goals for our world, deteriorate. We can’t build worlds together if we cannot co-regulate. We cannot co-regulate in a world that pushes us to our fringes and normalizes a pace at which our bodies can’t sustain rest. The rise of social media’s relevance to how we relate to one another was at one point such a gift, but (word to capitalism) we are now held hostage by the digital ties that tether us, the limitations of these intagible and fragile bonds with people we cannot hold. People who cannot hold us.

I am slowing down. And at one point I would’ve seen this lack of urgency as a de-radicalized position. I would’ve thought that my inability to respond to the urgency of the world in-kind, as a weakness. But now, I imagine what glorious abundance happens when we are allowed to move at the speed of our nervous systems. When we wait, rest, and reconnect with ourselves in the company of one another, what worlds are possible there? I am no longer interested in critique. I don’t want to be known for my ability to de-construct a thing cunningly, swift and sharply. In a world of so many sharp edges, I am cut so often, and I know you are too. I want to invest my gifts in the suturing, the slow, measured work of architecture, and I know that means I must remove myself from the interiority of my heart and create space there so that I may invite folks inward with me. That is a hard thing to value in a world that feels so fast and dangerous, so inundated with death-work and ambulance chasing.

A part of this feels like selfish indulgence — to remove my voice from the chorus decrying genocide, to remove my gifts of direct-action strategy and community organizing from the sites that benefit from them, to retreat. I am worried that you read this and think I want to kumbaya-sway and heal the world, to leave no one behind. That isn’t the case. I am, of course, afraid that my exit will feel like abandonment to some who have followed along with me for a decade. I am afraid too, that I am wrong, that my madness is just that, and there is no answer waiting for me in the analog pacing I am romanticizing both in this essay and in my heart. I am not coming here with answers, just questions, and I am terrified I won’t have resolved any of what I carry the next time we see one another. I am curious about what righteous time — a metronomic pace that is dynamic and flexible based on the capacity of the whole — can look like, but I haven’t read enough or lived enough to be sure it is possible. I am merely trying a thing, beloveds, as I have always done.

What I do commit to is a rigorous self-reflection and an acknowledgement of what I find. This is the first of a monthly blog post with the musings, readings, and material-world happenings I’m engaging in, and I hope that rather than talking at you through these posts, it feels like we are in dialogue. In a few months, I’m launching The Slow Space, a monthly virtual space for artists, organizers, and thinkers to gather and move out-of-time with one another, to be dazzled by our own slowness and creative erotic power. It would be such an honor if you subscribed to my listserv and follow my medium blog so that we can stay in touch.

It’s my 29th birthday, and my invitation for this new year is to fall out of step. To gain by losing ground in the race toward success, or power with the world as-told-by the State. To be slower, and by that I mean more rigorous, more regulated, and more available to myself and my community. My internal clock has been corrupted in such a way that I can’t continue on this way. I am daring to enter a new dimension. A less material and yet more real understanding of what doing this work can look like. I am trying to catch up — with friends, with family, with the futures we deserve. It feels right on time. So, hello to that possibility.

And, for now, goodbye my friends.