Tag: memories

Politics

I have never been a political person.

Understanding politics is a skill that I don’t have.

I struggle to unravel all the confusing wordings of policies. I struggle to find where I sit when it comes to opinions on even some important affairs. I struggle to understand why some things happen instead of what I believe would be a better option. I even struggle to understand the politics and feuds between people.

Everything is always seen in black and white. People forget that there’s usually a grey middle ground.

I tend to see a lot of the middle ground.

Because of this, I often try to avoid politics as much as I can.

I know it’s important, but I can’t bring myself to struggle through the messy politics of people and society that I can’t make sense of. I’m not like those people who’s life revolves around it.

Unfortunately, politics is impossible to avoid.

My Dad is fairly into politics. Every time he drags me into a political conversation, I end up getting lost and muddled.

The news mostly starts with politics these days, and I get lost and confused.

A single scroll through Tumblr will undoubtedly turn up a handful of reblogged political posts. Many of them use long and complicated words and terms I don’t understand, or are long posts that I just don’t have the energy and focus to read and understand, or both.

I don’t know how people cope with it all. It’s exhausting.

Some of Tumblr’s political posts scream at you to reblog them, saying that if you don’t, you must be a terrible person.

Luckily for me, I’ve seen a few posts circulating that tell the people who rag on those who don’t do politics to give us a break.

No one is mentally equipped to see all the bad things in the world and be able to deal with it, they say, Not everyone has the capacity to be able to deal with every single problem in the world. Don’t feel bad if you’re someone who doesn’t do politics or doesn’t reblog every important post. Humans aren’t supposed to deal with knowing every single bad thing happening around the world.

It was such a relief to see a post like that. For the first time, I thought that maybe it’s ok for me to not be comfortable with politics. For so many other people, political indifference or disinterest seems a strange concept to grasp.

I would say the opposite.

Politics are hard and confusing and exhausting. For me, being political is a strange concept to grasp.

But it’s ok to not be political.

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Time Blind

I’ve never been very good with time.

I always say that time doesn’t like me. It certainly feels like that way. It has a habit of disappearing on me. I’ve lost over an hour before; one minute it was quarter to six, a few minutes later it was half past seven. I still have no idea how it happened.

I have never known how long a minute feels like. I have never been able to put something in the oven, come back later and known how long it’s been in there for. If I forget to put my timer on, I’m screwed. Even now as I write this, an hour has disappeared in what feels like half that time.

It gets worse around deadlines. One minute it’s three in the afternoon, then suddenly it’s four and I still haven’t gotten as much done as I wanted to. This past year feels like it’s been nothing but work and deadlines, and so many things have fallen by the wayside as a result; sharing my thoughts here was one of them.

Summer is confusing. Hours blur, and days, even weeks just blend into one another. I always lose track of the days. It ends up just being a period of time-stasis, in which I don’t register the days passing until it’s September. This year has been one of the worst for it that I can remember. I’m pretty sure a couple of weeks in July and August just simply didn’t happen. Yet now it’s September, so surely they must have done?

I found a term sometime around my April-May uni deadlines: time blind.

When I read up on what it was, I recognised it as one of the difficulties I face. To be time blind is to have no linear sense of time, to be unable to feel time passing. To look at the clock at half past twelve and then look up to find it’s half past two and yet it feels as though no time has passed at all. Or even the opposite, occasionally. To be time blind is to have no idea how long is spent on an activity unless timed. To be time blind is to know that there’s something on at this time on this day, but no matter how much time passes, it always feels the same amount of time away.

I’m sure this probably applies to everyone in some form; why else would we have the phrase time flies when you’re having fun? But for me, it’s constant. It’s always been this way. It was a relief to finally find a phrase for it, to find out others have it too. Finding someone else with the same difficulties makes it seem much more real, makes it feel much more like I’m not just imagining it. It seems to be most common in ADHD, especially with the influence of hyperfocus, but time processing and time management difficulties have also always had close links to Dyspraxia and executive dysfunction.

This academic year is the first year I won’t be going back to another year in education. It’s a strange concept to me. I’ve always had school keeping my days of the week structured and grounded, but once my last deadline goes in in October, there’ll be nothing ahead of me to tell me what day it is until I manage to find an actual job. Am I nervous about it? In a way, I guess. I’m already hopeless at remembering dates — birthdays and holidays always creep up on me.

This picture really sums it up for me. I’ve used it before in a post, but there’s something about the character trying to keep the time from disappearing that I find relatable. Because time keeps slipping away anyway, because even when using all the strength in her power, there’s nothing she can do about it. I’ve been known to use countless alarms, have clocks that are ahead of time, and do everything I can to try to keep on track, but to no avail.

So I just have to try to hold on, like the girl in the picture, and hope that not too much time disappears into the void that is time blindness.

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Quiet

The world is quiet out on the canal.
Maybe there’ll be traffic in the distance. Maybe there’ll be the odd cyclist, or the odd bird tweeting from somewhere. The occasional boat passing.
But for the most part, the world is quiet.
When it’s not raining, it’s nice to sit out front as you travel and to just watch the world go by.
Sometimes a book helps the time pass, but sometimes you just sit there and watch.
I read somewhere that everything on earth is made from stardust.
It wasn’t an academic source in any way – in fact, I think it was in fanfiction, but I suppose in someways, it’s true. If you can consider the elements stardust, that is.
But when the sun shines through the trees, and the sunlight glitters on the water, that is when I see it the most. That is when I can look at the world and agree. When the world is quiet, and when the world glitters, I can believe that it is made of stardust.
I like when the world is quiet.
It’s one of the only times I start to feel at peace.
With the constant hectic rush and noise of this world, it helps to have some quiet time away from it all.
Something shatters it, of course – someone talking too loudly, or a noise startles me out of the reverie in which I find myself, but until that moment, the world is quiet, and life is good.
Being on the canal is good for feeling at peace.
The water is so still, and so smooth against the boat pushing through.
Maybe you’ll catch sight of a fish jumping out of the water, or birds flying off as your boat approaches, hopping from perch to perch until you catch up and pass by, or until they fly away from the foliage around the canal and the noise of the boat’s engine.
You’re away from online communication, away from most contact, away from the peace-disrupting politics of this world.
You’re away from the pressures of everyday life, and away from the usual expectations that come with it.
Time on the canal is so quiet.
Travel time is slow, but there’s so much space to think and be quiet and away, it can feel like you suddenly have all the time in the world.
Sometimes I miss it when I’m not on the canal, even though the times when I am on the canal are a rarity. Other times, I’m glad I’m not on the canal; but that tends to be when the weather is cold and miserable.
Most of the times I’ve been on the canal have been in the summer.
Of course, in Britain, as I am, the weather can be poor even in summer time.
There have been many days when we’ve either barely moved or haven’t moved at all because of the bad weather, but I’ve had my fair share of beautiful, peaceful days while I’ve been on the canal, travelling what feels like a long way during the day, maybe operating locks if there are any, maybe driving the boat, maybe just sitting and watching the world go by, enveloped in the peace and gentleness this form of holiday can bring.
These days are the best days, days when I can simply enjoy being there and not have to think about the world off the canal.
Days in which I can just enjoy the quiet of the canal.

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There’s a picture from when I was five, at my Dad’s wedding.
I don’t remember it being taken.
I only really remember sketches of that day – bits of the morning, bits of the ceremony, bits of walking down to the reception, feeling embarrassed when we had to stop every now and then for pictures. The start of the reception. The toys my sister and I got. I still have the owl at home. I don’t know what happened to her doll.
The picture is one I’ve gone past many times, and haven’t always looked at in detail, but even when I do, I don’t think much about it. It’s a nice picture, and in some ways, I look almost exactly the same as I do now, except my hair is much shorter, my face younger and chubbier, and my frame much smaller.
But my expression is the same.
The feeling I get from it is the same as how I feel now.
There were many pictures taken that day.
It was a wedding, pictures are almost always taken at weddings.
I remember some of them, but not this one. I couldn’t say when it was taken, who took it, what they said, what I said. I couldn’t say what happened before, after, and as it was taken. I don’t remember who was around me.
What was I like that day, I wonder? How much have I changed since then? In what ways am I still the same person?
I know who I am now, or mostly, at least, but who was I at the age of five?
In some ways, it feels as though it was another person back then, that I was a different person back then.
But it isn’t, and really, how much have I changed from the little girl I once was? Even after so many years, there are things about me that don’t change, that haven’t changed, that I can’t change.
Instinctual things.
Genetic things.
Thoughts change, and appearance changes, and how you interact with the world changes, but the person you are, the person you’ve always been, does that stay the same? Is it only something drastic that can change who you are, or are the hardships of life enough? Or is the person you are in your core something that rarely changes?
How much do we change over time, really?

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