You can add me to the list of people noting that time itself has gotten so weird during the pandemic. It's true: My sense of time has become totally suspect!
I've long had routine of reviewing a month's worth of journal entries, at the beginning of a new month. I make some summary notes of what went well, what didn't, ideas I want to pursue and so on.
It was through this process that I started to realize over this plague year that my sense of time was getting a little...hinky. As I read through my daily journals at the end of the month, I've been startled when I realized that events that happened only a couple of weeks ago, felt like that they happened much longer ago.
It's so disorienting! As best as I can figure it, events have become pretty unattached to their correct chronological time in my mind, after roughly 48 hours.
For example, I'm writing this at 9:45 a.m., and I can easily remember what happened yesterday and when in time it happened: exercise class in the afternoon, what I photographed and edited in the morning, what I had for breakfast. I can pretty much do the same with the day before.
Reaching back beyond that though, my memories lose their "time stamp." Monday might as well have been a few months ago. I'm not going to say I remember events from earlier in the week in the exact the same way I remember things from college or high school twenty years ago — but more recent events have that darker, fuzzier, sepia-toned quality of a memory of a time much longer ago.
I've struggled to explain this, even to myself. This isn't an issue with my memory per se, I remember things just fine. (Or just has fine as I've always done — I remember conversations and events almost with complete recall, I've never had a good memory for proper names.) It's memory by chronology that's gotten warped. My mental filing system has gotten— and this is the technical term— fucked up. The memories are fine, but if feels like the "metadata" has gotten corrupted.
As I mentioned, a lot of smart people have been documenting the pandemic's effects on our mental health and on our very brains themselves. If I'm reading all of it correctly, we're experiencing collective brain damage. Our sense of time is all about how we encode memories, and that process is dependent on dopamine — and life in lockdown and/or stress and/or fear messes with our dopamine levels, among other delights!
If we’re all brain damaged in similar ways, I suppose that make it…the new normal? I don’t know. It’s a comforting thought, anyway. If you are also experienced corrupted memory metadata and want to feel a little better about it, I recommend:
This episode of On Being with Krista Tippet, “What’s Happening with Our Nervous Systems?” I listened to this as I was feeling the side effects of my second Covid shot, and it was very soothing and informative.
What is Happening to Our Sense of Time During Covid? One of the first things I read that clued me in that I wasn’t the only one experiencing the time warp, and that it was a real thing and not just more pandemic bitching.
This study on “Novelty Input and Novelty Output” during quarantine, if you like reading studies. (I started taking some steps to increase my novelty inputs, which I’ll probably write about in a later post…if I remember, ha.)