My experience of being stuck in the past and left behind by the present.

What The Heck

At the beginning of 2021, I was dealing with this truly bizarre phenomenon. We were almost a year into the COVID-19 pandemic, and I was spending yet another semester of college in remote learning.

I knew my perception of time was really starting to change. It had been changing since I was in my senior year of high school, in fact. I noticed that the days had been going by so much faster. And along with it, my senses were getting duller as well.

Being a recently-aged person, I figured it was just a process of that aging. That whole thing about perceived time as a percentage of your lifespan and yadda yadda.

Going outside didn’t even feel like being outside anymore. I always wondered how the heck people fell asleep while outdoors. But now I sort of understood.

That change certainly wasn’t slowing down at home. But what I knew was one hundred percent for sure, it was the year 2021 A.D. It said so right on the calendar.

Yet for some reason, it didn’t feel like it. Upon even hearing the year “2021”, I went into full existential crisis mode. After all, the rate of change in the world was pretty terrifying.

Holy crap, it’s 2021? Are there like robots taking over the world now? Are there flying cars, do we have mind control?

For some reason, I just couldn’t nail the fact that it was the current year then and not the setting of some sci-fi movie. But if it wasn’t 2021 now, then what year was it?

I couldn’t answer that either. It was like I was in some year folded inside 2019/2020. What does life even mean anymore? How much has society changed since I last was outside?

Even searching online about the problem yielded no results. I’m pretty sure I had looked pretty meticulously and tried different search terms. Had no one else experienced this sort of thing?

I was completely fearful. Because not only was the present in the future, that future was becoming the past. The years would only continue to move forward, while I remained stuck in place.

No, it was actually worse than being stuck in place. Because if it was already the future, and I still hadn’t achieved my goals, then I was not just stuck in my life.

I was behind. All in whatever the hell this temporal limbo was.

And that was terrifying.

Back In The Present

Right now, it’s the year 2023 A.D. Gregorian calendar, all that stuff. And it actually feels like it to me now.

I’m no longer trapped in this rumination about how society has evolved into this dystopic cyberpunk world and that we’ve all turned into cyborgs. I don’t fear that time will continue to pass.

So what exactly changed for me to feel time like normal again? Well, I can’t really say for sure.

But I’ve got some ideas.

The Boring One

One reason why I may have felt this was simply because I had never vividly experienced this transition between decades before in my life. I was never really conscious of it before.

The last time this happened was in 2009–10. Surprising, I know.

When the “1” was added to the tens place in the year, I was 9 years old. So there probably weren’t a lot of eventful things happening in my life before then.

I was probably slightly more than a babbling toddler at around 6 years old. Anything before that I’d be surprised to remember, but I’ve got a few memories from the four to five years afterward.

• Learning times tables, goofing around with friends...
• Getting a pencil slapped out of my hand and yelled at by my Chinese school teacher (had no idea what she was saying to me before that)…
• Only two people showing up to my birthday party in 1st grade despite everyone acting excited about it…

…

On second thought, let’s just say I don’t remember anything.

But most of the more significant events of my life happened after that in the 2010s. I graduated from grade school, middle school, and high school. I went through puberty, I became an adult. A much more significant portion of my life had been spent in that decade than in the last.

So perhaps when the big number flipped over and signaled the end of that era, it was almost unbelievable to me. And so maybe I just never accepted the fact that I was no longer a kid anymore.

I certainly didn’t feel like an adult. Hell, I still don’t feel like one.

A Whole New World

The world before the pandemic was vastly different than how it is today.

I still remember when it was all just beginning in 2020. Some mysterious virus in China was spreading rapidly. Hospitals were overwhelmed, doctors were passing out from exhaustion, just overall a terrible scenario. There were a single-digit amount of cases in the U.S. at the time.

And then, the numbers started to climb. Fourteen cases. Thirty-seven. Two hundred. Four-hundred. Fifty-five hundred, then ten thousand.

My grandmother, who I was living with at the time, warned me to use a cloth when opening doors. A lot of people were getting sick.

That was certainly an understatement. Eventually, in-person classes were canceled, and we all transitioned to remote learning. Social distancing was imposed, and I deemed it too risky to even go outside.

Months passed. The cases continued to climb. Forget ten-thousand cases, try ten-thousand cases a day. It felt like the world was ending. And in a sense it was.

But that wasn’t the only malady spreading throughout the world. Hate crimes, violence, and collapsing democratic ideals. Division and fighting amongst everyone on nearly every topic imaginable. It just felt like everyone was at each other’s throats.

It almost felt like I was living in a movie. But it wasn’t fiction. It was real life.

I would say that I couldn’t believe it, but I kind of had to. Because I was living it. And so maybe it wasn’t so unreasonable for my mind to play tricks on me to cope.

To make me believe that I wasn’t actually living in this messed-up version of 2021.

The Past Was Not Past

All of that being said, there were a couple of significant events that occurred during this time that could certainly explain a lot.

For a very long time, I had extreme anxiety. I still do to some extent. But back then, it was really difficult to let go of things like being slighted by a stranger in public or being completely misunderstood.

Some of the most benign and inconsequential moments in my life were constantly replaying in my mind.

Hey, remember when you were crossing the street and tried to be nice by letting the car go first but they kept waving for you to go and you kept going back and forth until both of the people in the front seat just started aggressively gesturing to just effing cross the street? You looked so stupid.

Or how about when you yelled at a family member in the distance to move over because there was a car coming, but an old couple thought you were yelling at them? They think you’re a jerk.

And a bunch of stuff like that would just replay over and over. Ugh… now that I’ve written about them and immortalized those experiences in text, they’re all coming back even now.

I’m not even getting paid to do this, why am I doing this to myself? I regret everything.

It was to the point where I was physically slapping myself in the face to try and punt the memories out of my brain. Making weird noises alone in my room. I have the urge to do it now, in fact.

Urghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh…

These thoughts were tormenting me at almost each and every waking moment of the day. And every waking moment of the night, because I couldn’t sleep because of it. It was absolute torture.

It certainly didn’t help that I was thoroughly depressed. The stereotypical kind as well, with the not wanting to live and hating yourself sort of thing. Different from the type I’ve experienced more recently when you’re not feeling anything at all (maybe a topic for another article).

But that aside, the depression at that time only exacerbated the amount of rumination I spent on those incidents. As a result, I believe I was becoming more and more frozen in those moments of time.

However, the years kept going. Traveling further and further away from me.

So about 6 years passed, and then came 2021. The year that I would make the biggest screw-ups I had made in my life yet. Ones that I truly believed I would never recover from and would be paying for the rest of my life.

However, it’s precisely those screw-ups that lead me to me finally address the issue. I was in so much dismay that my heart felt like it was about to give out. That chest pain lasted for three months, and it was still resurging intermittently after that. I was incapacitated.

I had to find a way to cope and come to terms with my mistake and work with the immutable consequences of choosing that path. Only then could I start building myself up again.

Perhaps it wasn’t the best idea, but I started reading articles online. As well as meditating using my brand spanking new VR headset I had purchased in January of that year.

There was a lot of advice given. Some may have been good, others not so much. But it didn’t really matter, because I was rejecting it all anyways.

There’s no hope. You blew it.

None of this is true. There’s no coming back from this.

I didn’t believe any of it applied to me. So I was unable to take that knowledge and use it for myself. But even if it was falling on my deaf ears (or, I guess eyes), the seeds were planted. They just needed time to grow.

There were a couple of those seeds that were planted. But the most prominent of those ideas was probably this.

Nobody cares about you (me).

Wait a minute. This sounds like something my mind would’ve come up with during my high school wave of depression. If anything it’s encouraging me to do the opposite of move forward.

But I think this piece of information also needed to be put in juxtaposition with another idea. Ideas that come from a condition that I am also affected by. Let’s go back to that example…

Hey, remember when you were crossing the street and tried to be nice by letting the car go first but they kept waving for you to go and you kept going back and forth until both of the people in the front seat just started aggressively gesturing to just effing cross the street? You looked so stupid.

Or how about when you yelled at a family member in the distance to move over because there was a car coming, but an old couple thought you were yelling at them? They think you’re a jerk.

In the case of my anxiety, I believed that even after many years, the people in the car were still thinking of that one stupid kid who didn’t understand the concept of the right of way.

Or that old couple, with their decades of life experience, are still fuming at that insolent boy who yelled at them to move in a Safeway parking lot over ten years ago.

Everyone cares about me.

But that can’t be.

Nobody cares and everyone cares. These two ideas can’t co-exist. Either one or both of them has to be wrong.

And perhaps that’s exactly the point. My depression and anxiety were obviously irrational. I mean, I knew that, it’s in the very definition of the terms. But now I had more definitive proof for myself. Quod Erat Demonstrandum.

I’m not saying that noticing this discrepancy immediately solved all my problems and I was never depressed or anxious again. That would be ridiculous. But it definitely gave me more reason to question these thoughts of being forever trapped by those mistakes.

I started to think about all of the times someone has done something to make a fool out of themselves or when they were outright malicious in public. And I asked myself how many of those people I actually remembered.

Asking myself that question right now, I can only recall two incidents off the top of my head. And both of them are from relatively recent 2021 college courses at Zoom University.

Most people don’t even think about celebrities constantly on a day-to-day basis. Or let’s say a murderer. Taking a life is definitely worse than a parking lot misunderstanding, yet even those sickos aren’t people I think about very often. There’s nothing special about me.

Clearly, we can disprove the idea that everyone is thinking about me.

But we then have to look at the converse statement from prior. I would hope there are at least some people thinking of me. Friends, family, co-workers, so that’s maybe around 15 people.

Maybe there are a couple of people reading my articles, playing my games, or consuming other works. I’ll be generous and say… 10 people.

Yeah, I consider that generous.

So that’s 25 people. And there are over 8,000,000,000 people in the world now. Compared to that number, one could say that virtually no one cares about me. It would certainly be more accurate than saying everyone cares.

But that is perhaps the most hopeful statement I could receive. Nobody cares. They don’t care about me, and they certainly don’t care about any of the lows I’ve had.

But well… I do. I don’t think I can move on. But then I tell myself this.

No one cares what you (I) think either.

Nobody cares about me. And nobody cares what I think. My opinion, including that of myself, is worthless.

Thinking highly or lowly of myself doesn’t change the fact of who I am. Changing who I am, changes who I am.

I keep doubting all of my work, including this very article. But what makes my opinion so much more important than how others also perceive it? Who cares what I think?

If I really think so lowly of myself, perhaps there’s some truth in it. Maybe I need to get to work on fixing that. It sounds tough and blunt, but honestly, I like that as a motivator.

Of course it felt like the year 2021 was still in the future. Because I was still living in that moment in 2014. And in 2009. Maybe 2012 as well.

I was unwilling to let go of what had already happened. Those were the defining moments of my life.

As I’ve said before, it really does feel like the present now. It seems like I’ve caught back up for the time being. 2023 is 2023. There are still no flying cars, and the robot apocalypse hasn’t started either.

There’s nothing that the world and I “should be” just because it’s 2023. It’s just a number representing now.

While I do still hold the lessons learned from the past to heart, I feel like I am finally moving forward. I still get irrationally anxious. I still fall into despair sometimes. I wonder when the third wave of depression is coming, or what the next big screw-up will be.

I worry about being wrong. I worry about missing expectations. I worry that I’m a bad person deep down.

But I’m beginning to recognize the patterns and bounce back quicker. And by doing so, I’m planting more seeds of thought to sprout in the future. Even if I can’t fully believe it now, maybe I can later. It’s worth a shot.

As this present turns to the past, the past will continue to grow farther and farther. And perhaps the future will bear a new present for me.

I hope to make the most of this decade before it turns over once more. In terms of my career, my hobbies, and most importantly, slowly taking steps towards becoming the person I want to be.

If I manage to do that before 2030, that would be great. But if I don’t…

No one cares.