I have a funny relationship with time, and I’ve noticed a lot of other neurodivergent people do too.

Here’s what I mean.

• You might sit down to write an email for five minutes, and then half an hour passes and suddenly you have nine tabs open, you’re baking a cake in the oven, and the email is still incomplete. (No judgment at all here, by the way – sometimes our brains are non-linear like that, and flow in unexpected ways.)
• Maybe you have a hard time remembering what you ate for dinner yesterday, but you have a crystal-clear memory of your first day of kindergarten and what you were wearing that day.
• Your sense of time might stretch and contract, depending on what you’re doing. One minute of sensory overwhelm can feel like one hour. One hour spent hyper-focusing on your special interest can feel like five minutes.
• Maybe Sundays feel fast, because it’s the last day of your weekend. And Mondays feel slow, because it’s your first day back at work.

And so on and so forth. See how non-linear our sense of time can be?

It’s fascinating to reflect on neurodivergent brains and our relationship with time.

There are challenges, of course – like when our brains go to a place where clocks don’t exist, and we end up accidentally showing up late, or needing way more time for a task than we actually planned for.

And there are also the potential gifts of a neurodivergent brain moving through time – like how we can get lost in a deep conversation for hours, or how we can viscerally re-experience the joy of a memory from 2004, with the same vividness as if it were happening right now.

For some of us, time is not a linear experience, it is a circle. Or a spiral. Or a wave. Or whatever other metaphor makes sense to you. (And since neurodivergent folks are not a monolith, some of these experiences may resonate with you and others may not.)

I share this all with curiosity, and with no real point other than to observe how fascinating our brains can be.

Here’s to staying curious, acknowledging the challenges, and celebrating the gifts of our wiring.

Talk soon,

P.S. If you're feeling burnt out & overwhelmed, and need help taking care of your nervous system, I'd love to support you. I offer ​Nervous System Healing Intensives​ — three 90-minute sessions, using brain-body modalities (Brainspotting, IFS, EMDR) that go deeper than talk therapy & help you feel better, sooner.

Intensives are a type of short-term, accelerated therapy — for folks who are looking for something different than weekly therapy; who need longer than 50-min sessions to go deep & get to the root of the issue.

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I help highly sensitive, neurodivergent adults heal their nervous systems & connect with their authentic selves.

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