When I wake up in the morning, the first thing I do is take my medication. A small white long pill that has the text “S489 20mg”, an extended-release tablet that delivers me the goods. Its content doesn’t bring forth happiness or ecstasy, no it only brings forth a proper clock for my brain. This pill, brand name “Vyvanse,” allows me to feel time usually like neurotypical people. At the same time, its addictive and anxious withdrawal qualities are low compared to the previous medications I had before. Vyvanse took me about 3 years to obtain from the pharmacy. In fact, I started this medication this month during the pandemic, since before last year, I did not have health insurance and thus could not afford this medication. This is highly problematic for those with ADHD, who do not have the means to pay for medication. With insurance, Vyvanse costs 80 dollars for 30 days, and without insurance, it could cost up to 500 dollars per month.
To live life without Vyvanse or a mind-altering medication had always been the norm for me, I’ve still seen myself as different from all the other neurotypical American kids. This difference in brain chemistry from the neurotypical people is only one layer of difference in how I perceive time. Other layers that construct me, the writer, is also my Chinese, specifically Mandarin and Fujianese languages that I speak, and lastly, the Chinese culture that I came from. All of those are now different forms of layers on top of my being that can alter my perception of time.
Layers of Acclimation in Time:
- ADHD: The Neurological
- Illegal: Past Effects on the Future
- Chinese Culture and Language: Eastern Social Upbringing
So how do I now see time? I would think of time as a forward arrow. Shooting out into the world from the vast nothingness of the big bang and infinitely going into the future. This linear notion of time is what I would argue that most Americans view of time, a straight shot of understanding and predicting what will happen in the future. But this straight-arrow view of time doesn’t question all aspect of us interacting with time: What would happen if time was a place of fluid motion that always interacts with each other, rather than time being a straight arrow? Could time stretch that would cause one to experience time in a slow, steady notion? Yes, when one about to go to the public bathroom and the feelings of being hurried slows down your time. Then what about speeding up time, similar to when I write this article, the flow of the words dictate how much time goes. The flow of time is altered with all the examples in my life, in my everyday-ness, in public, and in space.
I’ve always tried to interact with time in a timeless way. In the last few years of living alone, I’ve lived with the visibility of clocks in precarious positions around my home. Instead of having clocks around the house, I only have clocks on my phone and my computing devices. Those personal (ruling) devices are time dedicated devices in the social and economic life that we live in. It is because we are living in a world where time measures all aspects of our lives that I rebel against time. However, I can only do so much because I must still attend work for 8 hours per day, for 40 hours per week, for 52 weeks per year (of course, there are vacation and sick days). However, those are still being counted and dictated by time.
When I arrive at work, my smartwatch vibrates and tattles on the hour each hour. A physical reaction my body feels due to its unique vibration, to remind me that an hour has passed. This method of reacting to time is a way to balance my ADHD brain, to acclimate my mind back to the one o’clock, two o’clock, three o’clock, and four, oh crap I am late for my meeting. Even though I wish to escape the linearity and the productivity that time provides for me, I do not want them to dictate how I view the way I live my life. The irony of this all is my love for productivity, and thus time management.
My love for time management and productivity were my attempts to capture time because time always seems to be lost from me. For many folks, time is a prison, because, in America, Time is Money. However, for me, I wished that I could be in jail of time. I want to follow the rules of time well so that the customs that we develop will be met. I wish to capture time so that I can be on time, to have control of my time, my life.
And yet how much control does one have over their life? My big sister told me that she was a psychic, that she had foreseen my past lives and there are intertangles between the past and my current life. Apparently, I was a Nazi in my previous life, and the life I live now is a punishment for the crimes against humanity. This cursed Karma against me set forth my life in the United States as an illegal immigrant, where time is cyclic and that what I live now is a punishment for my existence of being dehumanized. To what extent should I listen to this psychical-cynical view of time, and yet parts of me believe what she said. To live in this world as an illegal immigrant for so many years of my life dehumanized me as an Other in this country. To force my perception of time as a child growing up in the United States, and seeing into the future that doesn’t exist. The karmic debt I hope was paid because for 13 years of my life, my view of time was a straight arrow into the abyss. For the future did not exist in clarity for my participation in it.
I would ask the question to those above, why me, why have you forsaken me in this hell hole of a country. Why would you tear me away from what I already know, and when can I go back. When can I go back to a world that I can see, where I can truly understand what the world really is, rather than this land called America. For me, there was not enough linguistic fluency that I could explain my childish behaviors. I was away from my friends, away from my extended family, away from my language, and away from my time zone. Going from one world to another also brings forth the difference in how we perceive time in the United States. In China, kids don’t ask the question of what do you wish to be when you grow up, it just happens. In the United States, all the kids already know what they will be doing, to an extent. At home, my family is all at work in the restaurant business, and they were not set up culturally to understand why my time is different than their time.
Their time was 10am – 11pm every single day, six days a week at a Chinese restaurant. They provide the American Dream, that American dollar per hour so that I can live that American dream. They suffer their time to allow me to exercise my rights over my situation. They sacrificed decades of their life so that I can have full control over the time I have on this country and this planet. They do not understand how Americans understand time, they barely speak English, and they continuously get the verb tenses mixed up, they literally vocalize their lack of understanding of how American time works.
For my parents it’s not: “I am done working.”
It’s “You will rest one day when you retire.”
In the end, how I experience time is heavily influenced by the amount of effort that I put forth learning about my self, my mental self, and now my temporal self. How time operates for everyone is different, for they are differentiated by their social status, race, sexuality, gender, and boundless other characterizations of life. And now in the days of our Covid-19 stay at home regulations, we must learn about how we interact with time in a new circumstance. For the first time in history, everyone in the world must pause and not go outside. Everyone has a new opportunity to collectively live through their new and unique notion of how time moves. Thankfully for me, I have high-speed internet and my job allows me to work from home. This change allowed me to observe some phenomena of time.