The infinity pool

I keep falling out of Time

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been fascinated with Time. Quantifying it, qualifying it, and observing how it acts on things, places, people.

I would say my fascination began when I was born into a family that had seemingly fallen out of time.

Our household was made up of items from 10-20 years before I was born. Our history was made up of stories I never lived through. Our family was made up of people that had lost some vitalizing, organizing influence I couldn’t understand, people who were now listless and strange, knee deep into ruts they trudged decades ago. And it all seemed to have something to do with the one member of my family everyone spoke fondly of because in death a child becomes perfect. In death, potential, in its unrealized state, is purified.

Most kids (eldest children, at least) watch their parents enter the final quarter of their life when they themselves are bulldozing their way into puberty. They get to watch their parents identities solidify or transform. They are privy to who their parents were before (even in a childlike sense), who they become after, and that slippery liminal state where what is undeveloped fights its way to the surface of an aging consciousness and struggles to be reborn. There’s a symmetry there in that midlife can often be like a second puberty, a final crucible for the animating force of the soul to be clarified and expressed.

I was born into my mother’s 42nd year, my father’s 47th. The moment I gained consciousness, I saw the light leaving my parents’ eyes. Whatever had existed before was lost to Time.

And whatever existed in that slippery liminal space just outside it was the shadow I saw fixed in their gaze.

Time, in its long hallway of closing doors, has estranged me from my family, though in a sense I have always been estranged. Whatever familial roots existed, I have tried to dig them up. I have tried to examine the calcified remains, the petrified wood of my family tree, and all that returns from this investigation is a continuous sense of profound alienation.

In place of an inherited history, I have kept careful tabs on my own. At times, my personal history has felt like the string and stake tethering me to the ground.

When I lost all sense of routine and structure as a high school dropout and later a college dropout and finally a chronically ill and terminally haunted life dropout, without the ritualistic, self-imposed chaos and suffering of my family to organize Time for me, having a sense of history felt like a reason for being—a crucifix to ward off the persistent attacks of depersonalization and derealization that cast me back into those liminal spaces where time pools into a small reflection of infinity.

I use medical terminology (depersonalization, derealization) because these identifications are specific and phenomenological. But having pathologized myself into nociceptive oblivion and found the liminal space unchanged, I’ve come to have a rather different experience of it now: Time travel.

It appeared to me this way during a particularly uncanny chapter of my personal history; one where my mind and body were once again at odds with each other.

In effect, everything in my life seemed to be coming together. I had just started my very first coaching program with my best friend, helping people develop the nervous system tools, mindset and awareness technologies, and emotional coping skills to pull themselves out of their own inner darkness just like I had. Intellectually, everything was exactly as it should be. But physically, psychically, a hole was tearing through the center of me.

First I tried to fight it. I dug my claws into the earth of what I hesitantly called the Present and I refused to cede to the maelstrom of unordered Time pooling around me. But the earth turned muddy beneath my feet and before I knew it I was neck deep.

So I let Time carry me away from what I couldn’t face and what I couldn’t make sense of. I let the strands of the Present—what I knew about it, what I had decided to know—slither away from that ripped hole until whatever fabric remained of reality was threadbare.

I tried repeatedly to cobble a consistent plot from a life I had psychically abandoned. Mostly from fiction. Binging a TV show. Playing the same, simple puzzle games on my phone every day until my dreams were filled with shooting bubbles and tiny matching tiles in place of the mnemonic symbols and fleeting impressions of an unconscious desperately trying to figure itself out. As I started to come out of deep freeze, I began drawing again; moving my hand across paper, beating the ceaseless chatter of my conscious mind back in the hopes that Genius would emerge. In the hopes that some part of me that existed Before or After would grab the helm and steer me somewhere.

One day, I looked up at the walls of the room I had been submerged in day after day and I was lost in Time.

If you’ve never experienced an emotional flashback, I can’t properly explain it to you. You look around and see that you’re Here—all of your things are right where you expect them, the trees outside look exactly as they did yesterday—but physically, emotionally, with a certainty, you know that you are There.

I knew exactly where There was. I knew the year, the conditions, and the state of mind. It had all come back again, like I had stumbled across a secret closet in my brain. A hidden part of myself I could pass into but not through.

It was, after all, the past. I hadn’t built a doorway yet.

In the green golden brightness of mid-morning and the dusky blue shadow of midnight, I looked at the walls around me as if they might collapse to reveal a film studio. I eyed the objects in my space suspiciously like a voice might boom through, sending a bumbling intern from the prop department skittering forth to grab them all one by one while the camera moved elsewhere and I was left in the dark. I stared at the space above the TV like I could see through it and saw apparitions of a dense, luminous purple fog on the other side. I lived in a floating square tucked away in a black hole orbiting nothing, hallucinating sunlight.

I regarded these moments with intense fascination. Having worked extensively to train my awareness, I was able, for the first time in my life, to experience them from a place of neutrality.

As I tried to explain to my husband, I knew the words for this phenomena—depersonalization, derealization, and not necessarily in that order. But something about these words seemed to truncate the experience. I could feel great gobs of meaning being lost every time I tried to apply them. I became occupied with the task of reaching for them, pulling them back in, trying to trap them in the glass of a microscope slide.

I magnified and magnified the experience until I realized that I didn’t want to leave. Living in a body, experiencing life…forgive me for being a little overly 12th housey here, but it paled in comparison to investigating the mystery of these liminal spaces. Why would I want to leave my tiny reflecting pool of infinity?

My reason for being, the modes of operation I used to dictate my life to me, became farther and farther away. They shrank back and shriveled into nothing—dehydrated husks. All the water—all the Time and Vitality—had gone downstream, pooled elsewhere.

What I’ve learned over the years of moving in and out of these states, of experiencing blended states of infinity, is that we are always falling out of time.

Every moment where you pass through the market and the smell of fresh pears summons the memory of an old dream, the tail of an old thought, you are experiencing transcendence. Every moment where you decide to take a new route to an old place, where you decide to do something different that leads to an epiphany, a moment of pure Genius, a call from an as yet unrealized version of you, the quantum Time crystal of your consciousness is tuning itself to a new future, building a door in the back of a closet you forgot existed.

There is nothing to ‘figure out’ in these spaces, though the impulse to decipher twinges like a phantom limb. Instead, liminal, timeless Time, the pool of infinity, has come to figure you out. You are an unwitting surveyor to your own remodel.

Years after my first unfiltered, unmolested experience of my own remodel, I was caught in the grips of a more malevolent riptide. It’s still hard to say exactly how I landed in that space. I suppose the simplest way to put it was that a series of unfortunate events, of bad trauma triggers, of severe challenges to my OCD, had repeatedly looted and discarded critical components of my psyche, identity, and worldview, and I had hastily slotted them back where they don’t belong. I was using the wrench from the garage to fix the busted pipe under the sink while the car was falling apart in the other room. I was wandering too close to the edges of myself, trying to find my way back to the center.

As often happens when you misassemble something crucial, everything broke.

On the eve of my rehabilitation, as I had finally began plotting a way forward for the first time in 2 months, my dreams still filled with the cartoonish figments of phone games, pinned in place between sleeping and waking, a sonic pulse went through my body, and before I could fully regain consciousness, I was having a panic attack.

I woke with the most white-hot, paralyzing, vivid and visceral fear I had ever experienced and the burning never left me.

I scrubbed the bathroom tiles and I panicked.

I edited old writing and I panicked.

I wandered through strip malls and I panicked.

I sat in the artificial twilight of movie theaters and I panicked.

The stony pallor of my sleepless face loomed in the steam of untouched dinner plates and still, I panicked.

Everything I did, every movement I performed, was done with the weight of mortality itself on my chest. I forgot what calm felt like. I forgot what most things felt like while my body was on fire.

I fell out of time in a way I never had before—this time into some nightmare realm where every single moment I could not help but label the Present ticked by fully accounted for by the burning in my nerves.

I was convinced that I had flipped some kind of switch in my brain that couldn’t be unflipped. I could feel the serpentine slither of some inherited sin snaking through the strands of my DNA, coiling at the back of my throat where a scream would not form. A month into whatever this was, it seemed there was no coming back from it. I was no longer Here, only There. But this time, I wasn’t sure exactly where There was.

This There came from a time when I had no words, no long-term, autobiographical memory, and no cognitive construct of Self or Other.

What I did have an awareness of was Fear and Loss—something I developed from gestating in my mother’s fresh grief, from nursing at a breast that no longer produced milk, from knitting my own nervous system into one that curled itself around an absence.

As panic flowed freely through my veins, I was reborn into a world of Death and Loss as if my life had circled back on itself to form a mobius strip of misery. I woke up into the same day and the same buried past exactly as I had left it and then I laid down at night, the muscles of my eyes taut and unyielding, to do it once more.

All of my early childhood neuroticism was laid bare in a way it never had before—and that’s quite a statement given that it’s been my most consistent personality trait since birth.

After about a month of enduring the endless panic, wondering each day if I should finally follow the tradition of many great 12th housers before me and commit myself to an asylum, it began to level off. I stopped clawing away from the fear and forced myself to feel it. I stopped trying so hard to control it, flailing for certainty, and allowed myself to experience it. In the process, I learned something vital about myself and it changed how I related to Time forever.

My greatest power—a spiritual gift, if you will—is that I live in the worlds my mind creates and I organize the environment around me to make them real.

My persistent experiences of disorientation, alienation, exile, are simply different shades of transcendence. The valve inside me that metes Time is perhaps not faulty, but given to extremes. I am endless and finite over and over again. And when I refuse to make space for the uncanny infinity, the cthonic mystery of liminal time, it drags me into its depths and fills my lungs with cold.

I still do what I can to control things, but now I think of it as supporting the vulnerable valve—stewarding the channel to God inside me. I am careful with my routine. I am careful to plant stakes in the ground that the flimsy wire of my consciousness can weave through—signposts that tell me where and when I am.

But in between those fences, in every day, I dig a small hole for infinity to pool—as an offering. I dip one foot in and then the other.

I let myself fall just a bit out of time, just for a moment, so that I can snap back again.