Moon Time: Neuroqueering Time Blindness

Time is weird.

We pretend it isn’t.

We hang numbers on walls, strap them to our wrists, put alarms in our pockets, divide days into little squares, and then collectively agree that all of this is simply time.

But it isn’t. It’s one way of organizing time and some of us have always been terrible at it.

Five minutes becomes twenty. Twenty minutes disappears completely. A thought wanders away and comes back carrying six other thoughts, a half-finished drawing, an unanswered text, and absolutely no idea where the keys went.

The clock says you are late.

Your brain says: Late for what? There was a forest.

This is usually called time blindness.

And the language makes sense. There is something genuinely difficult about not accurately sensing how much time has passed or how long something will take. It can make life harder. We miss appointments. We underestimate transitions. We accidentally begin a seventeen-step project twelve minutes before we need to leave the house.

External clocks, timers, other people all help. But I keep wondering about the word blindness. Personally, I don’t experience time phenomenologically as if I am blind to its presence. I just feel like I’m experiencing a different kind of time altogether.

I used to think that everyone experienced time the same way. Apparently, I was wrong. Although society continues to gaslight neuroqueer minds into believing there is one correct way of relating to our being in time (thank you, Heidegger), phenomenology has been telling us otherwise for a very long time: there is no human experience separate from the person doing the experiencing.

Which means, of course, that we may experience time differently too. So, to all the neuroqueer readers out there: apparently most people experience time more or less linearly. Or at least they organize their lives as if they do.

For me, and I suspect for many neuroqueer minds, time is experienced as concentric.

Concentric Time™ is a term I use to describe time experienced as circles of proximity around the present moment, with attention determining what feels near and what feels far.

In other words, time does not always feel like a straight line stretching from past to present to future. It feels more like circles radiating outward from whatever has my attention right now. The thing at the center feels immediate. Everything else exists at varying distances from that center—not necessarily according to how many minutes, days, or years away it actually is.

Something happening three months from now can feel essentially nonexistent until suddenly it enters the circle and becomes now. Something that happened ten years ago can move instantly to the center because a smell, a song, a place, or a feeling has brought it close again. Tomorrow can feel impossibly far away while an idea I had six years ago feels like I was thinking it this morning.

This is different from saying I don’t understand chronological time. I understand perfectly well that Tuesday comes after Monday and that 2:00 comes after 1:00. I can read a calendar. I can read a clock.

But knowing where something sits on a timeline is not necessarily the same thing as feeling its distance from me.

Linear time says: this happened five years ago.

Concentric Time says: this is close.

Linear time says: you have three weeks.

Concentric Time says: not yet, not yet, not yet—NOW.

Attention changes the geography. It changes my relationship to time itself. Whatever I am inside of can become enormous. The rest of the world moves toward the edges. This is why five minutes can become an hour without feeling like an hour has passed. I haven’t necessarily lost time. I have been somewhere in it.

Perhaps this is one reason the language of time blindness has never quite fit for me. Blindness suggests an absence of perception. But sometimes the experience feels almost like the opposite: time has texture, proximity, intensity, gravity. I am not failing to perceive it. I am perceiving it according to something other than the clock.

I call that Moon Time.

Moon Time stretches. It contracts. It follows attention instead of numbers.

Five minutes inside something fascinating is not the same five minutes as standing beside the door waiting to leave.

An hour with someone you love is not the same hour as an hour beneath fluorescent lights.

Bodies already know this.

Children definitely know this.

And neurodivergent people are constantly being informed that knowing it is a problem.

The strange thing is that clock time is the invention. Moon Time inspired the clock. Humans lived by light and dark, hunger and migration, tides and seasons, moons and bodies long before somebody divided the day into increasingly precise units and eventually put meeting invitations on Google Calendar.

The problem was never that humans tried to measure time. It’s that, by measuring it, our interpretation of what time could be became increasingly narrow. And somewhere along the way, we stopped asking questions and mistook the measurement for time itself.

Let’s be clear—clock time is extremely useful. I would prefer the person flying my airplane to acknowledge it. But somewhere along the way we stopped treating the clock as a tool and started treating obedience to it as virtue.

Being early means responsible.

Being late means disrespectful.

Moving quickly means productive.

Needing more transition time means difficult.

And a technology for coordinating human beings became another way of deciding whose bodies were doing humanity correctly.

That is the part I want to neuroqueer: Our relationship to the clock.

Maybe supporting someone with time does not always mean teaching them to become better at obeying it.

Maybe sometimes it means putting the clock outside the body and setting the timer, or sending the text. Maybe it’s waiting the seven minutes so someone can fiddle with the seams in their socks. Or making fewer transitions.

Maybe building lives where another person occasionally carries the clock for us is not failure. Executive functioning is not a measure of someone’s worth and it was never meant to be an individual sport anyway.

Perhaps the question: How do we make everyone live on clock time? should be,

How do we build a world where people living on different kinds of time can still find one another?

That’s Moon Time.

By Mandy Parida