Time Isn't Linear (At Least, Not Anymore)

Apr 27

Growing up, I thought of time the way everyone says you’re supposed to, the way we are taught as little kids.
Time as a neat little straight line that ends in the tik and tok of the clock.
Breakfast first, then lunch, and ending on dinner (no breakfast for dinner unless dad is away on a business trip).
Mushy birth, a fun filled childhood, going to school, paying your bills, growing old, then death.
Monday bleeds into Tuesday, into Wednesday, and the clock keeps clicking like that cheap plastic one in my mom’s kitchen that never actually told the right time (she liked to set it 7 minutes fast so she wasn’t late anywhere).

At least that’s the story we’re told.

Then trauma hit me in the face, and the nice neat story broke into about a million pieces.

Time didn’t move clean for me anymore.
It bent, doubled back, slipped sideways, and sometimes it shoved my head under and drowned me.
A day that felt like ten minutes, a minute stretched until my jaw ached from clenching it.
I’d swear hours had passed, but the oven timer hadn’t even beeped yet.
I lost weeks of my life to the blur without realizing a day had passed.

And somewhere in that mess, I realized: the neat line was never real, we just liked pretending it was.

How Trauma Bends Time

If you’ve ever had your world ripped apart, you know the absolute bizarreness of time that follows.

A second of panic can stretch long enough for you to count every thud of your crazy racing heartbeat.
It took the police 7 minutes to get to my apartment after I called them, but it really felt like 7 hours.
Then whole weeks slide past where you can’t remember a single dinner you ate, a person you saw, or which way was up or which way was down.
The calendar keeps flipping but it doesn’t feel like you’re the one checking off the days.
What did my sister get me for Christmas again?

Sometimes an old memory barges in like it just happened…not politely knocking, just crashing in the middle of the room while you’re trying to pour wine into someone’s glass.

Trauma doesn’t just hurt feelings (but, boy is it good at that).
It messes with your entire internal clock.

For a while I told myself healing was about “getting back on track,” like I could tape the line of time straight again, but it didn’t work like that for me.

Healing felt completely sideways. It was like trying to live in three versions of myself at once: the person before it happened, the shell right after, and the messy, still-becoming version I keep meeting in the mirror who looked too pale, too thin, and slightly empty.

None of them cancel each other out, they just overlapped in a weird way, alive all at once.

The Moment It Hit Me

I came to this realization one day during an EMDR therapy session.

In the middle of the session, I was suddenly pulled into a memory I hadn't touched in years: I was fourteen years old, staying at a haunted hotel in Italy. My dad was sleeping in the bed next to me. It was around 3AM when the water in the bathtub turned itself on.

I was terrified back then. I froze under the covers, trying to make sense of it, and in the middle of that fear, a sleepy thought popped into my head:
"Maybe William is taking a bath."

It made no sense to me at fourteen, I didn’t even know William. I shook it off, thinking it was just a random, weird thought that came to me from fear.

But sitting there as an adult in that EMDR session, remembering that exact moment with perfect clarity, it gave me chills.
Because I hadn’t met William until I was twenty-nine years old. And his explosive death in front of me happened when I was thirty.

How could I have thought his name…his name…all those years before he even entered my life?

Maybe time isn't a straight line, maybe everything, every love, every grief, every crossing of paths, is already flowing, already echoing through us, long before we know.
After my trauma, there was another thread that didn't make sense until much later.

I became obsessed with finding Zak, my now-husband.
We had only met twice before, barely enough to even call it knowing each other.

But something in me knew. He was the only person I felt safe around. The only one who didn't overwhelm me, scare me, or make my nervous system spark in panic.

It made no logical sense, but somewhere deep inside the folds of time, some part of me already recognized him, and already trusted him.
People thought I was a little crazy at the time, I was reaching out to everyone I could to try to find Zak, and oddly enough, he added me on Instagram just a few days later.

I like to think just like the haunted hotel memory, his presence was always echoing toward me, somehow waiting for the right moment to become real.

Maybe Time Was Never Linear At All

I don’t buy the straight-line thing anymore.
It just feels like something people say because it’s cleaner that way, the easier way, the way that doesn’t scare the shit out of us when we’re in the shower thinking about it.

Time, at least for me, is more like a river that doesn’t follow the rules. Sometimes it drags me so fast I can’t breathe, other days it just…stalls. And then out of nowhere it throws old crap at me: memories I swore I’d buried, faces I didn’t want to see again, smells that shouldn’t mean anything but suddenly make me feel like I’m drowning all over again.

And that whole “time heals” phrase?
I really don’t think it does.
I think we just get tired of fighting it.
We learn how to float ugly, sideways, clinging onto whatever piece of crap that drifts past us. Healing isn’t forward, it’s just surviving the damn current without choking.

The past still barges in like it owns the place after all these years, and the future still makes my stomach flip.
I’m not sure if that’s the point, or the point is figuring out how to sit with both without coming apart.

The Strange Gifts of Living Outside Linear Time

If you stop pretending time is some clean arrow moving forward, you start noticing some odd things, sort of like some strange gifts from the universe.
Only, these gifts are not shiny or wrapped up neat, more like scraps you find in the dirt that suddenly you can repurpose for a dopamine hobby.

Grief, for one, is more odd than most people want to admit.
Everyone likes to act like it’s some sort of ladder: climb long enough and you’re done, you hit your destination.
But it’s really not. It comes back whenever it feels like it, sometimes gentle, sometimes knocking you on your ass.
And that doesn’t mean you’ve failed at healing, it just means grief still has your number and is going to call whenever it’s feeling needy.

Joy shifts a bit too.
It feels sharper and much less disposable.
When you’re not guaranteed more time, even dumb little shit hits different like a laugh that almost makes you snort, the exact shade of pink in a sunrise, the way someone’s hand feels solid in yours, or the silly face your dog makes when you are cooking bacon.
You stop calling those just little “moments,” they’re whole damn universes, beauty you wish you could live in forever, nestled down into.

And hope…hope gets weird.
You don’t chase some perfect “future you” anymore, you just start dropping seeds wherever you can, like maybe one will stick. My mom calls it throwing pasta at the wall.
You don’t know when the seeds will bloom, or if you’ll even be around to see them, but you throw them out anyway.
Because that’s really all you’ve got at that moment in time.
It’s my blog, gaining a reader here and there with the hopes that one day it will speak to more than three people per day, or touch someone who desperately needed to feel seen or understood in the vastness of this life.

Time’s not a straight road, it’s more of a messy garden, overgrown as hell, unpredictable with what is sprouting up, and sometimes brutal with all the thorns.
But it’s alive, and so are we.

How I Anchor Myself When Time Feels Fluid

Some days it feels like the clock is a joke.
Hours blur, days collapse, memories fold in on each other like the laminated brioche we serve at work. I have to find weird little anchors just to keep from drifting off in the riptide.

I try to write only happy thoughts in a notebook, and focus on what I am grateful for.
Writing the negative really seems to put me in a mood I can’t shake throughout the day.

Other times it’s the routines I make that probably look ridiculous to anyone else. Lighting the same candle at night (lavender again, yes!). Letting my tea go cold because I’m drinking it too slowly, then adding extra honey and heating it up again. Touching the leaves of the plant in my kitchen and talking to it like I’m checking in on a friend. These small things remind me: I’m still here, my body’s in the room, breathing, and sometimes that’s all that counts.

And when the past or the future starts screaming louder than the present, I lean on whatever grounds me. A heavy blanket, a weighted eye mask, the feeling of my own hands pressed together, a cold shower, or I start naming things in the room with me. It’s not really profound or all that original, but it helps to tell my brain: we’re safe right now.
And sometimes that’s the only lifeline I need.

Time Is a River, and You're Still Swimming

If you’re here, maybe you’ve felt it too. It’s possible that your internal clock is “broken” just like mine.

You might be at that point where the calendar stops mattering, or where healing refuses to be a staircase or a checklist and some days stretch and some vanish completely, and you can’t tell if you’re moving forward or just treading water.

I live in that swirl now where memory, hope, ache, and wonder are all tangled together.
You might be there too.

If so, you’re not broken, and you’re certainly not behind.
You’re just living outside the clock, like me!

It doesn’t always have to move in a straight line, some days it loops, others it drags.
But it does seem to carry every version of you: the hurt ones, the healing ones, the ones still figuring it out.

Just the strange, uneven rhythm of being alive.

Sources for this post include: my own trauma and experience with time.

Reads of Mine You Might Enjoy:

Michele Gargiulo http://michelegargiulo.com