I’m fascinated by decay, and I’ve grown to love the limitations of life. Time feels like it’s fading, and so are you and I.

To be honest, I’ve thought about death and decay more or less everyday since I was ten years old - yes, in a depressive way at first, but now as more of an embodied appreciation after healing my own trauma and old wounds.

To be clear, I am very happy in life overall, so it might seem strange to admit that I’m simultaneously feeling confronted by the speed of time passing through me.

If I were to speak transparently about my internal experience, I would have to admit that it isn’t ideal to experience a series of unwelcome bursts of mortality awareness.

Time distortion isn’t necessarily an enjoyable space to walk through.

This is what happens inside:

I’ll be in the flow at my desk, for example, and suddenly be flooded with a sense of loss as if I’m about to pack up the library and leave.

I’ll be having my first session with a new client, and simultaneously feel the grief of our final session in four months time.

I’ll be on a walk in the forest, and flash forward to a mundane moment of hobbling along a similar but unknown forest path in 2073.

Twisted time, and this is all very much ending.

I’ve explored my inner world extensively, but I’m still not sure what this spatial-stretching or time-distortion means… it’s certainly not normal.

My best assessment is that my sudden moments of decay are the by-product of being chronically dissociative in childhood & having a hyper-realistic narrative imagination.

For context, I’ve dreamt 4-6 dreams per night since age three or four, and research has linked this kind of brain wiring to spontaneous immersive daydreams - so maybe that’s it?

I honestly don’t have the answers, but I’ve grown to accept that time is always happening and sometimes time feels non-linear for me.

Since healing my past, I now experience a baseline gratitude which imbues positivity into these moments of micro-loss.

Bittersweet appreciation, heavy presence.

Each moment fades before printing, and yet life feels all the more precious as we watch our lives fade away.

Jordan