Hi

May 25, 2020
Hi
It’s been so long that my writing voice is hoarse. Imagine finding a rug buried in dust and whacking it against a wall just so you can ascertain what colour it is. That’s me trying to write.

This parallel universe steeped in dystopia has given me a lot of time to dust off things I’ve shoved into the corners of my life and just tonight I was casually unpacking some childhood trauma while brushing my teeth. Multitasking.

Whenever people ask me what my biggest peeve is, I’ve always said “lateness”. It’s become somewhat reflexive. I no longer think about why I hate lateness so much, in the same way that I don’t think about the words when I recite a prayer or the national anthem.

Day x of quarantine had me wondering what it was about people being late that made me so upset and I remembered all the years my father was late. Overachiever that he is, he’s never just late by minutes, he’s been late by hours. Regularly. And not only would be be late, he’d be late and unreachable. Late and unapologetic. Late and nonchalant. Late and not giving a solitary fuck about how his lateness might have affected my plans or just my life in general.

Adult me has steam coming through my ears when buses are 5 minutes late, when people are minutes late and don’t call and I’ve realised that I hate lateness because time is very important to me. It always has been. I always feel like I don’t have enough of it and people wasting it doesn’t sit right with my spirit. It never will.

It has created a lot of anxiety and I find that the anger I experience for lateness is far more intense and more unhealthy than it should be. I didn’t really have the opportunity to voice my annoyance when I was younger, and now that I do, I overcompensate for it. My tolerance for lateness is under so low, so far buried under the core of the earth, that it shares a tile with Satan’s balls. Because I had to tolerate it for so long, I’m unable to do that anymore. I read something somewhere that said that being unable to cope with very small things or having very intense reactions to small triggers is a trauma response.

One day, I’ll unpack that in therapy. Not today though. Until next year.