The Relentless March of Time

Or, Time waits for no one

This is my first newsletter of the year for a few reasons. The most important one though, is that I was ill. Thanks to the new system I find myself in and its absurdly glacial public healthcare system, my medication ran out and my health started to deteriorate. I’m well on my way to recovery now though, after an intervention by friends and some drastic action, so this newsletter is not really about my illness. Rather it is about the consequences of said illness on my ability to function in a time-bound society.

In 2014, I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder after a manic episode that lasted at least a week. What followed was weeks of taking medication that rendered me drowsy and barely able to function. Afterwards, I tried to salvage my academic situation at the University of Lagos but I was ultimately to withdraw from studying Law. I lost 3 years of academic work and this was the first chunk of time my illness stole from me. It was also the most expensive, up till the occurrences of the past three months.

Between then and now, Bipolar Disorder has regularly robbed me of time. A week lost to mania there, a month lost to depression here. I barely made it through my undergraduate degree in Psychology because I often had large swaths of time when I was unable to fulfil my academic responsibilities. I spent so much time trying to make up for lost time that I was almost never truly in step with the rest of my colleagues.

In the last two years or so since I completed my undergraduate degree, I have done my best to manage my illness. I’ve had a few relapses, but nothing major. I was able to hold down two jobs as well as I could and make plans for self-improvement in the form of a Master’s. Then two months into the MSc. programme, I run out of medication while dealing with stressors like a different environment, rigorous study, work and culture shock.

What followed is one of the worst depressive episodes of my life so far. My (school)work suffered because I could not focus through the frequent weeping spells. My finances suffered because I couldn’t work. December and January were a complete write-off and February wasn’t much better because I was in recovery. In that time I dropped many many balls, personal and professional, and life did not wait for me to catch my breath. It simply went on.

It’s said that adults process time differently. It seems to move faster for us than for children is the consensus. Not only that, but the timeliness of actions matters more. Resilient is a word that is often used to describe me and it is a word I have come to resent slightly. While others may admire my ability to bounce back from set-backs, I am fed up of making little to no progress because for ever 3 steps I take forward, I seem to take 5 back, like a yoyo gaining ground only to be pulled back in, over and over again. When I’m supposed to be making timely moves, in my personal and professional life, I am instead having do-overs and playing catch-up.

Imagine the loss to their careers that women suffer when they become pregnant. Then imagine a situation where you regularly lose time in that way, with zero warning or the ability to plan to mitigate its effects. You begin to have an idea of the problem chronically ill or otherwise disabled people like me have to deal with a lot in the capitalist, productivity obsessed society we currently live in. Even the World Health Organization qualifies depression and anxiety in terms of the loss to the global economy.

Is this an excuse for the balls I dropped? No, because I still have to take responsibility as an adult even if matters were out of my hands. I’m not quite sure what I hope the outcome of writing this is. It’s cathartic for me, yes but I should hope it makes people more considerate of those who are chronically ill, mentally or physically. I hope it gives insight into the many layers of struggle we have to face on a daily basis to have a semblance of a normal life. I hope it helps someone feel seen and their struggle understood. Most of all, I hope it helps me forgive myself.

Thank you for reading, and hopefully, I’ll write to you sooner rather than later.
Peace and Tick Tocks.