How Do You Deal With Losing Years of Your Life?
It's the one thing we can't buy or retrieve, yet we're fixated on everything but the time we have lost or left.
“You had the kind of childhood most don’t recover from and…”
“And?” I think about the hour commute I make every two weeks and wonder if we can do this over video. My therapist seems to think that won’t work because I’m better at hiding my emotions with physical distance. So, here we are.
“And here you are.”
“And here I am,”I pan around the small office in a non-descript building in Century City, gesturing to the boxes of tissues and degrees hanging on the wall. The laptop that sits idle. The building blocks in an open cabinet because my therapist works with kids. Works with all kinds.
I’m 47, a woman nearing her best-by date, and here I am running circles around old terrain. Like crows hovering in the sky, above the dead. But the good news is we’ve established breakthroughs, that, while seemingly obvious (making me wonder if I’m spending money just to hear a professional confirm I’m on the spectrum because I’m possibly, mildly, self-absorbed), airs new life into old bones.
I write a lot about what’s been stolen from me—my childhood, a greater part of my thirties. Some as a result of that which I couldn’t control and some of which I dove willingly into. And I’m realizing it’s not the resentment of my mother or the sociopathic ex-boss everyone seems to have forgiven, it’s the resentment of losing time.
If given the chance, I wouldn’t want a childhood do-over because I find childhood tedious, but it’s the loss of hours, days, months, and years I can’t seem to shake.
A child’s recognition that she will always have fewer years ahead than what she’s left behind. An adult’s realization of this frightening reality.
Last night, I watched the three-part documentary, Stolen Youth. It’s probably one of the more chilling films I’ve seen, and know this is coming from someone who is desensitized. I’ve seen the junk-sick and the dead with their eight-ball hemorrhages since I was five. I don’t squirm while watching open-heart surgery videos. Horror movies calm me. There isn’t much I haven’t seen. But this film was so brutal I had to actually fast-forward through parts of each episode because it was…too much. At the end, I wept. I wept for the adults who’ve lost a decade of their lives —perhaps their most thrilling and profound—to a cult leader cum sadist.
And that shocked me. The tears. I weep for animals, rarely for people—not because I don’t have empathy, of course, I do, it’s just my programming. It takes a lot for me to cry because I was raised to believe tears were for the weak.
The documentary centers on a group of Sarah Lawrence college students who fall prey to a delusional sociopath, who systematically isolates, destroys, and re-programs them. We see this all the time with cults—smart people who are vulnerable, falling prey to a method of love-bombing, isolation, erasure of self, forced idolatry, shame and abuse, and horrific re-programming.
What made Larry Ray particularly vile and depraved was how he manipulated memory to a point where a Harvard and Columbia-educated resident in psychiatry, Felicia Rosario, was left broken, unable to decipher which childhood memories are real or planted. His followers were left wondering what was actually real or the fiction of Larry’s making.
Larry video-taped nearly every moment of their lives, including the physical, sexual, and emotional abuse he inflicted on these kids. And I’m loathed to say kids because they are technically adults, but it was as if he manipulated their childhood memories to steal their twenties, leaving them trapped in time.
The filmmakers show the lives of their friends—first loves and first jobs proudly announced on social media—while this group remains frozen in their sophomore year. There’s no venturing into the unknown, no finding out who they are and what they want from their lives—it’s only, and always, Larry.
In the final act of the film, we witness the ruin. Larry being arrested, indicted, and imprisoned and the mess he left behind. We watch the members’ journey through and out and back to themselves, their families, or some semblance of normalcy in varying degrees. The pain and loss are palpable, almost too much to bear.
Contrast and perspective make you think how many of us lose time. Maybe it’s from a bad relationship we never saw coming, a sickness that steals parts of us, or a job that shifted your moral compass. Or maybe it’s from years of systematic abuse from which it takes years to recover.
What do you do when faced with the time you’ve lost? How do you recover from that? I think about that a lot. Especially now. Especially since my life didn’t turn out how I envisioned it. Especially since I feel something in me telling me I have to act now, act fast, because I don’t have much time left. I tell my therapist my paranoia about getting dementia and losing memory, losing self, and how I have to use as much of my mind as I can right now. How I have to write even if it’s at a glacial pace. How I have to move even though I feel tremendously untethered.
“Always the same. The deliberate consciousness of Americans so fair and smooth-spoken, and the under-consciousness so devilish. Destroy! destroy! destroy! hums the under-consciousness. Love and produce! Love and produce! cackles the upper consciousness. And the world hears only the Love-and- produce cackle. Refuses to hear the hum of destruction under- neath. Until such time as it will have to hear.” —D.H. Lawrence
We are forever in chrysalis. Destroying or bearing witness to destruction, and being reborn. Perhaps the losses are part and parcel, a path taken than cannot be erased or rewritten, and our job is to love, rebuild, and move on. I’m taking liberties with Lawrence, for sure, but I always turn to art for solace, for deeper answers beyond what I learn from science, from a method of sitting across from another person performing surgery on my life in hopes of stitching myself anew.
I wish I had the answer to the question I’ve posed but I’m still learning. The urgency to create hasn’t abated. I am stressed about time daily because each day lost is one that can’t be retrieved. I do think constantly about what I’ll do next. Where will I live? What will I do for work? How can I continue to exist in a world that often makes it difficult for us to survive? How can I love and rebuild when I feel barnacled to loss?
The only solace I have is I’m not alone. We all lose time in varying degrees. We are strangers staring at one another, feeling seen. Seeing the stories form like inedible ink on our bodies, on our lined faces, in our greying hair. Knowing we have to make the most of our hours, days, months, and years, before time runs out.
What a great, universal headline. Only when you have occupied the time, can you say anything about it. When young, you think about what it might be like, in an older place. That's all abstract. When older, you know for sure, exactly what happened in that younger place. That's real. Did we lose time? Probably not because time is an equal opportunity concept--24 hours hours exactly for everyone who gets to live another day. You're wise to obsess on "next" because that's where the moments, relationships, emotions, and regeneration happen.
Felicia -- whether the time indeed was "lost" depends upon your perspective (i.e., where you're standing 🤔). For example, I spent all of 2017 and much of 2018 in intensive outpatient treatment for long-term alcohol-abuse disorder; and during that nearly two-year period accomplished nothing professionally, and little else other than working on myself. However, I emerged from that hiatus no longer physically/emotionally/psychologically dependent upon alcohol ... some (me included) would regard that period of my life as "time well spent".
OTOH, I spent a period of approximately 20 years prior as a driven, high-functioning techie (also a high-functioning alcoholic), who accomplished much in my professional life, but burned bridges, destroyed relationships, and (in general) screwed a lot of things up ☹️. From the perspective of years, the professional accomplishments don't really mean so much; and the time spent as an alcohol-dependent addict (albeit high-functioning) is the period that really looks like it might have been "lost".