Ordinary Time Adjustment Disorder
trying to find myself in space and time
**If you want to listen to me read this newsletter you can hit the play button. Beware it’s oozing of authenticity**
The song that kept me company as I wrote this piece:
Lately, time feels less like something I experience and more like something that happens to me.
I’ll check the calendar and feel a jolt—how is it already December? Wasn't it just a few weeks ago that summer was ending? The days stretch on, but they never feel real, as if they're a string of disconnected moments I'm not fully part of.
Recently, I attempted to tell a friend how many holidays I’ve spent without my parents. I typed, "It’s been two years," but as soon as I hit send, something didn’t feel right. I quickly typed another message, "No, it’s three," but even that number felt off. I sat frozen, trying to do the math—how many holidays? What year is it? Time has become a fog, and I am lost in it.
A few days ago, I looked at my credit card statement and saw that the 0% interest period ends 12/2025. My thumb hovered over the "pay" button ready to pay off the balance, but something in my gut made me hesitate. I closed my eyes, trying to pinpoint what month and year it was. FUCK, that’s a whole year away. I tossed my phone down, watching it slide across the table.
It may seem small, but when you lose track of time, it feels enormous.
I’ve been trying to explain this feeling of being untethered—of not quite being part of the present.
But when I try, I see the confusion in people’s eyes. They tilt their heads, listening, trying to understand, like a dog when you ask, “Do you wanna…..” It’s clear that the words I’m using aren’t landing.
Relief came finally came in a grocery store parking lot.
The engine of my Jeep hummed as I listened to
’s No Cure for Being Human. She mentions the three distinct times in the church calendar—ordinary/pastoral, tragic, and apocalyptic. As the words came though my speakers, I slammed on the brakes and threw the car in park. "THIS IS IT!" I blurted out to no one but myself and the quiet interior of my Jeep. I frantically tapped my cell phone screen to rewind 15 seconds so I could hear it again. It wasn’t the modern calendar I knew, but this framework—these three distinct ways of marking time—suddenly felt like the Sorting Hat I was missing. I quickly began to file my chaos into neat categories.My sense of relief was quickly replaced by shame. How I sorted the events of my life did not match up to what the book was describing. Bowler’s experience of getting diagnosed with colon cancer at the age of 35 was her tragic time, a time when “the problem of evil has swept away the illusion that all things will be right and suddenly we wonder at the goodness of the world.”1 What did I place in my tragic time bucket? Most of my life.
As my cheeks grew red with shame, and my mind instantly fell into comparative suffering mode, I attempted to course-correct and lean into curiosity.
What if I just allowed myself to categorize my life this way? What might I learn? Clearly, it resonated. I let my initial assessment stand and realized that if you were to ask my nervous system, it would concur that yes, most of my life was spent in tragic time—not because it was riddled with constant death and dying, but because everyone around me was always prepped for the worst-case scenario and drenched in a scarcity mindset, happy to drown out the fear and sadness rather than ever talk about it.
The next time period was apocalyptic, “a time when the veil has been lifted and now we see ourselves on the brink. Systems are irredeemably broken and injustice reigns.”2 A shiver down my spine as the sobbing phone call to a friend right after I heard the news of my dad’s death resurfaced. “I can’t fucking do this,” I wailed that day, not referring to living in the world without my father, but because I had to turn my life upside down to take care of my mom, who was diagnosed with ALS just three weeks before, without him. My apocalypse.
Lastly, there is the period of time that feels foreign to me, the one that I no longer know how to navigate—ordinary time. Ordinary time is “most of life.”3 It’s sports, rom-coms, holiday decorations, getting upset at someone in traffic, and leaves falling from trees. I promptly diagnosed myself with ordinary time adjustment disorder while sitting in the parking lot.
I actively avoid many ordinary experiences of life, part of me afraid of being triggered, the other in a constant quest to make the most of my life on this earth.
Ironically, this amounts to me not truly living at all—instead, frozen with the logical knowing that participating in the minutiae of ordinary time is living life to the fullest. Yet, when I approach it or friends share ordinary time dilemmas, I find myself internally dismissing them, pissed and unable to relate. I am on the outskirts of ordinary time in a glass box, unable to participate.
A few days later, I watched my new therapist visibly exhale with relief as I rambled on about the new calendar I discovered and described my dilemma with ordinary time. Despite her best efforts, I could tell she’d been struggling to navigate the landscape I tried paint each session. Now we finally had a shared vocabulary.
Not long after this revelation, I was sprawled on the floor in front of my fireplace.
My Pilot G2 glided across the page until I realized I wrote a really interesting word—purgatory. Purgatory is a fucked-up and uniquely Catholic construct that I was probably first exposed to before I hit double digits. It is a fiery limbo between heaven and hell where the dead people who aren’t quite pure enough yet get a crack shining themselves up by atoning for their sins so they can go to heaven (or until their loved ones pay the church enough). Fuck. I’m in fucking purgatory—lingering, just outside ordinary time. Not knowing if I will ever get back there.
Each time purgatory came up in class, whether I was 5, 15, or 20, it always felt so uncertain, unpredictable, and scarier than hell to me. If you just knew where you were going to land—heaven or hell—you could prepare, know what you are working with, but purgatory is a glorious crapshoot. My 34 year old logical brain tried to argue: Why are you so terrified of being in the middle? After all, we are all technically in the middle. Somewhere between the moment we were born and the moment we die. Why can’t you just accept this is where you are? Why is it so disorienting? You’ve been here for your whole life—how come suddenly you can’t orient yourself?
This is where I am again grateful to someone else’s words for offering me a possible explanation.
In Meghan Riordan Jarvis’ memoir End of the Hour, she writes:
After the loss of my parents, I didn’t know how to belong to myself. Despite my previous years of therapeutic work and my clinical training, I never really stopped belonging to my mother and father. I still lived by most of their rules and their beliefs—women were helpers who minimized needs in order to be loved. Without them to please or impress, I was a boat unmoored.4
Suddenly, it clicked into place. I am navigating the middle with a sense of self that was tethered and built upon other people and roles that I played in relation to them. Each time I reach into my pocket to pull out my compass to find my way out of purgatory and into ordinary time, my hands find a hole where it slipped through.
I haven’t told my therapist about purgatory yet.
I’m spiritual, not religious, I swear.
No Cure for Being Human
No Cure for Being Human