the disabled theory of time

note from the author:

0. the tenets of time

-there is no past, and there is no future, there is only right now, today.

-time is either solid or fluid, but time is also both solid and fluid concurrently.

-time only exists in the places our material bodies are connected to it, like threads weaving us to this plane of existence.

-all bodies experience time differently.

I. a misunderstanding of time

It’s 2:31pm in the afternoon in EST where I live near Detroit, Michigan in the US. Which is almost meaningless in the context of my life. At 2pm on any given day, I could be running an errand, going to an appointment, taking a nap, eating lunch, watching television, or doing any number of things.

My bodymind is, and has always been to some degree, incapable of standardizing my own time, and incapable of capitalizing on my own time. As a child my school remarks from teachers were always a “lack of time management” and an “inability to complete tasks in a timely manner.”

This remained an issue for me in jobs, relationships, and social groups. My inability to properly manage my time and capacities has often led to disastrous results.

But for the average, everyday westerner, how do they use and manage their time? With clocks, watches, phone apps, fancy planners, reminders, calendars.
They get up in the morning and have routines and habits that get them to their place of work, they get off and have routines and habits that carry them through their evenings, and then they have routines and habits that get them ready for bed. They sleep, they socialize, they rarely break routine in any large or disruptive ways.

Large and disruptive ways you say? Like being sick for two weeks and unable to work? Or cook for yourself? Or clean the apartment? Or take a shower?
What about like getting hospitalized? Drugged and disoriented, reestablishing your medication regime, out of your pattern of habits and struggling to reestablish equalibrium.

But what about…when you never had equilibrium to start with? How can you navigate when no amount of tools or support can get your bodymind through the hoops and loops of a clock?

II. the shifting and unsolid future-past

• what is the shifting and un solid future-past?
• the shifting and unsolid future-past is any moment not bound to the present.
• a bruise you had a year ago is not bound to the present but an injury from five days ago that left a bruise that still exists today, is bound to the present by the burst blood vessels.

III. disabled bodies

• Living in a disabled body requires a shift in focus from the shifting and un-solid future/past to the solid and material present, because:
• disabled bodies can’t trust that what they could do once they can do again, or that what was once safe or accessible or accomodating will stay that way
• and disability often requires a decolonization of time—it’s the colonization of time as a form of capital that disabled people are often forced to face in ways ableds are not, because disabled people are incapable of moving through capitalized time, our bodies were not created to be means of production.

IV. the solidity of time

• the solidity of time for the disabled can only be measured in the ways our beings are bound to it—the threads connecting us to our mortal experience.

V. the insolidity of time

• the insolidity of time for disabled people is found in all the ways we are unbound and disconnected from the movement and flow of “normal life” within the rest of society, it’s found in hours of dissociation, of extra sleep from fatigue, in brain fog, in skill regression, in missed events and parties and appointments, in cancellations, PTO hours, in transition time, in lost hobbies.
• insolid time is found in all the lost pockets of our lives; all the days lost to flare ups, all the unanswered emails and texts, all the extra hours spent managing an illness or disability—lost to other hobbies or chores or interests. insolid time is a wisp of smoke, try to catch it in your hands but you never will—it will always be slipping through the cracks.

VI. the fluidity of time

• disabled beings live both in and out of time, sychronously—both tethered to our bodies and also able to (at times) move our mental capacity away from our material forms
• disabled beings often must move faster, slower, or not at all compared to the pace of the norm
• the fluidity of time is found in the coping; in the systems we build to scaffold ourselves and our lives.
• the fluidity of time is the friendship only for quietly watching movies, the group of knitters and crocheters meeting at the library, the slow shuffle of my feet below my rollator, the extra 30 minutes my friends spent to walk slowly by my side.
• the fluidity of time is knowing well the lesson that there is enough time because there is only this time right in front of us, and if we make it enough, it can be enough.
• the fluidity of time is understanding that all the capital in the world could not raise a dead lover, or call back the day two weeks ago when your legs worked enough to walk in the park with your child.
• the fluidity of time says that time is indeed made of water, but it isn’t a river that flows only in one direction. it’s the entire web of wet ecosystems running across the entire planet—that’s what time is.

VII. the disabled theory of time

• the disabled theory of time supposes that sick woman theory is correct; that only when everyone is cared for will everyone be free. yet even a step further—it says everyone can only be cared for with the complete and full halt of capitalized time.
• time is not money, it is time. it can stretch on forever or end in a flash. it can’t be industrialized, standardized, or fixed, because every body on earth is experiencing it differently.
• imagine we’re all in the water; do you imagine we are all in the same space of water? is it moving against your legs or face the way it is against mine? are you in a river, a lake, a pond, a stream, an ocean? are there sharks? salt? waves? currents? i don’t know what your body is moving against or with, what visitors are in your water, what barriers restrict your movements.
• if we are all in the waters of time, experiencing it at different speeds and intensities and depths—how can any of us be expected to move in synchronicity? and why should we? if it takes me three hours to shower but only takes you 13 minutes, which one of us is making better use of time? and does it matter?

sources/ resources:

• built on the work of johanna hedva, bell hooks, adrienne marie brown, octavia butler, ursula k le guin,