Clive Wearing is a case that is often presented to students in psych classes. He is a man with a short-term memory of 7 to 30 seconds. Being unable to remember context for any of his present moments, he always explains to doctors that he feels like he is just waking up from a long sleep. In his diary, over and over he writes different iterations of “I am now completely awake for the first time in years”, and then will cross out every previous time that he wrote it, because he couldn’t remember writing it before so he was convinced each time that this was the one true time that he felt that way.

Lately I’ve been finding myself in the middle of moments of my life without being entirely sure where I got there. I’ve started calling these time voids, periods of time where I’ll be so focused on the tasks that I need to do that my mind will feel like it’s barely present enough to create memories of my interactions with the outside world. I feel like Clive Wearing, emerging into the surface of my consciousness, feeling that I have not been awake for years. For me, this is a problem of my own doing, one caused by being constantly in motion.

I recently apologized to a friend for always being in the process of leaving. It's a bit hyperbolic, but I move between activities and spaces and I find it increasingly difficult to center myself in each one without thinking about the next one. I am not a person who exists in the present—my present is voided and sacrificed in order to live in futurity. When it’s at its worst, I’ll find even simple conversations difficult because trading presence for constant motion means that I build up momentum, momentum that is difficult to slow down in order to have verbal connections with other people. It’s like the cartoons where a character starts running so fast that imprints of them are left behind—think Road Runner. The imprints are there, they’re still visible, but the Road Runner is not. He’s already gone.

I have diagnosed with a major depressive disorder and generalized anxiety disorder six years ago, though I started displaying symptoms at least ten years ago. If at this point in my life, I ranked my activities in order of how much time I’ve spent on each one of them, wallowing would easily make the top ten. I could make CEO of Wallowers Inc and not show up because I would be too busy wallowing.

Mental illness tends to keep you mired in the present. Any misstep or hitch in life will balloon into the entirety of your existence and it feels impossible to conceive of a future where this misery, this upset, this will not be your life. One of the most common pieces of advice given to people with mental illness is to try to just keep moving forward, to set small goals for yourself and focus on those. Living in futurity allows the present to shrink in significance.

I may have overcompensated a little.

Clearly, I’m not arguing that this strategy doesn’t have merits. Wile E. Coyote can’t Acme bomb the Road Runner if he’s not there, he can just shoot at the imprints and dust still left behind. Moving through time at a breakneck pace has helped me negotiate stability. That being said, living in constant futurity does not take into account living, because the future by nature is unattainable, it is not a space that is meant to be lived in.

While I can trace my constant motion back to mental health reasons, I am far from the only one who lives like this. Present-day America is a society focused on efficiency and thus presents life as a series of goals to be completed as rapidly as possible, presents life as something to be completed as rapidly as possible. My fifteen-year-old brother is in his freshman year of high school and he’s already thinking about how he’s going to get his MBA. There is a version of this story where I am glad that he has dreams and a purpose. There is also a version of this story where I mourn that in his mind he has already left high school even though he’s barely started it, skipped through years of his life. Is there a point where he will stop blotting out years of his life and prioritize the present instead of the constant future? Will any of us?

We are a country full of bodies astral projecting our minds into a future that never stops receding. We are taught to seek out distractions—we place ourselves in oceans of work, alcohol, material acquisitions to create distance between us and the present—it is a thing best seen on a distant shore, we think. I worry that we will collectively suffer burnout, hurtling towards the present until we spiral.

It is incredibly important to keep moving forward, especially when things get bad. But as in all thing, we must strike a balance. When we can, we have to be able to sit in front of other people or be able to sit with the world and say, I hear you, I see you.

An ex of mine used to have a piece of paper hanging in his room upon which he wrote in all capitals, “BE PRESENT”. Sometimes nowadays I’ll realize that I have not existed in my body for the past five, ten, thirty minutes, and the image of that sign will flash through my mind. BE PRESENT. I repeat it to myself because I do not want to find myself awake, again and again, after swimming through a sea of unconsciousness for many years. I want to stay awake, stay above the surface, BE PRESENT. Say it again.

BE PRESENT

BE PRESENT

BE PRESENT