Whole weeks I don’t remember
As a boy, I was the one who left his bag somewhere. Who missed the bus home. Who sat on the school bus with a song going round in his head, somewhere else entirely. Adults called it dreamy, or careless, or away with the fairies. I didn’t have a word for it. It was just how being alive felt.
What I didn’t expect was to grow up and find the same thing waiting for me, at full scale.
Time did a strange double thing in those years. The days felt slow — long, heavy, something to get through. And the weeks vanished. Days at a time, gone. I’d surface in the middle of a month with only a vague sense of how I’d got there.
I was there for all of it, technically. The work got done. The emails got answered, the calls got handled, the meals got eaten. My life ran fine. But if you’d asked me on a Friday what Tuesday was like, I’d have had to piece it together from my own diary and my own sent folder. Evidence of a life I’d apparently been living.
People thought I was laid-back. Unflappable, even. The truth is I was somewhere else — up in my head, going through the motions while the actual moments went by unattended.
Here’s what I eventually understood: you don’t remember time you weren’t present for. The weeks weren’t disappearing because my life was empty — plenty was happening. They were disappearing because nobody was home to take them in.
And here’s the kinder part, the part that took me much longer to see. I didn’t live in my head because I was lazy or scattered or wired wrong. I lived in my head because, somewhere along the way, it had become more comfortable than being where I was. Nobody decides that. It’s a habit that forms quietly, for reasons that made sense at the time — and then it just keeps running, long after anyone checks whether it’s still needed.
So if your weeks blur — if you’ve ever looked up and wondered where a month went, if you’ve been “there” for things you can barely recall — I want to offer you what nobody offered me: it isn’t carelessness, it isn’t a bad memory, and it certainly isn’t a character flaw. Going through the motions is what a person does when they’re carrying more than they know. You never chose it, and nobody showed you another way.
Coming back was slow, in my case. It wasn’t about concentrating harder — concentration was never the problem. It was about comfort. As being here got easier, I was here more often. Small things helped, and still do: actually tasting the first mouthful. Feeling my feet on the ground for one breath. Letting a moment finish before starting the next one.
I still catch myself drifting off. That may never fully stop — the habit is old. The difference is that now I notice, and I come back, and the coming back takes seconds instead of months.
And the weeks feel long now — in the best way. Full, slow, real. I can tell you what Tuesday was like. That sounds like nothing, until you’ve lived years where you couldn’t.
Your life is happening now, in ordinary rooms, on unremarkable afternoons. It’s not too late to start being there for it. It never was.
— Adam