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When I am ruler of planet Earth and the extended galaxies, every being will be able to subscribe to the measurement of time that feels right for them. Crip time will be on the menu and anyone who lives within its expansive paradigm will be included, respected and revered.
Rudely, this is not yet the case and we’re stuck with linear time. You know, the clock and the calendar and straight lines and no fun curly lines or splashes or flourishes. Ugh. Don’t even get me started on the ridiculous task of tax returns being due at a certain time even though they are very boring.
I was blown away when I learned about time as a spiral from the written work of First Nations scholar Tyson Yunkaporta.
Anyone who sits still for more than two minutes in my presence is at risk of me banging on about this. It just makes so much more sense than what we’ve been fed as The Rules.
Crip time means this precious resource - our time as members of humanity - is elastic instead of rigid. It brings a compassionate understanding of possibility, capacity, rest and desire. I liken it to not being expected to get a perfect score on my eyeball test if my head has fallen off. If I was being less dramatic, which is not my preference but I’ll have a crack, I’d describe it as first listening to what my body needs and then seeing what’s on the to do list. Less extreme, but the same principle prevails: when you can’t, you don’t.
There’s no pressure to exceed your own capacity to fit in with other people, systems and measurements of time. When you can, you do. There’s balance and incorporation of factors other than external demand.
I’m a late diagnosed AuDHD guy and let me tell you, the clock has never been my friend.
Sometimes it feels like a ticking time bomb in my brain, urging me to push myself into being extremely unwell.
When fatigue, migraines, pain and brain fog hit, there’s a startling absence of care from the sources of external demand. We take them into account to our detriment, when we seldom see them responding in kind.
Managing a combination of crip time and linear time in life as a creative sole trader is a daily challenge. I am beholden to corporate and capitalist expectations because I live in a house, have a family to feed and I am a contributing member of my communities.
I have obligations that are made up by people who won’t reassure me that I’m not a failure or a bad person when the pace of life makes me sick - when I need to bow out and regain capacity. My human experience often feels at odds with these rigid, immovable systems.
Attempts to juggle my humanness with the contrasting realities of life is an ongoing task of remembering. Forgetting what I know happens every day when facing external pressures. They’re just so loud while they insist this is the only thing you need to consider. Turning down the volume on that noise allows my own wisdom and understanding to surface. My body and mind remembers how to communicate what’s real. What I need, how much I can feasibly give.
It helps me to come back to the notion that everything is made up. And I mean everything. Words, time, bricks, dog food, promises, emotions, Yahtzee, soup, Tupperware. It’s all a thing that someone decided would mean a specific set of letters or ripples in time and space. Following this logic, I can make up my own truth and set of rules. Nobody will stop me!
The late, great disabled oracle Alice Wong often spoke of rebuilding a more equitable and inclusive world. In her memoir Year of the Tiger: an Activists Life, Wong outlined so many ways to embody and become the master of your own time and space. She included this quote from Dr Ruha Benjamin, a sociologist and author of Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code: “Remember to imagine and craft the worlds you cannot live without, just as you dismantle the ones you cannot live within.”
As Wong understood and embodied with every action, an essential part of reclaiming your own bodily autonomy as a disabled person through crip time, is knowing that our marginalised experience is connected to the experiences of all marginalised people. When one of us is oppressed, all of us are oppressed. We must listen to each other’s wisdom and support each other’s bids for freedom. When we do, everyone benefits.
It can feel so small sometimes, the tug away from our own rhythms toward the arbitrary. So insignificant, something we tell ourselves doesn’t really matter.
But it’s the sustained expectation that we turn from our own needs that does the most damage.
Crip time means assessing my capacity at timeframes that make sense to me. My goal is to add flexibility in contrast. I don’t assign myself specific work tasks on days or times unless other people are involved. Booking in appointments happens with a clock and a calendar, but everything around that can be fluid and compassionate. It can be enjoyable and even silly.
A4 paper isn’t big enough, I use A3 paper to download all the things bouncing around in my brain. Dividing them into categories and order of importance, I crip my time by assigning tasks to the next available window that works with my life, body and energy. I use fancy pens and luxuriate in spending time with all these items. I give them personalities and make friends with them, because we’ll be spending a lot of time together.
I always have paper and pen next to me as I work, because focus always arrives with seductive suggestions in my mind to briefly attend to something else. When my thoughts start with “I’ll just..” I know it’s something that can wait its turn.
I crip my time by not being dictated to by fear of forgetting, of not doing or being enough.
I reassure the I’ll Justs and pop them on another list, ensuring I don’t leave them all alone to cry while a singular raincloud hovers above them.
School ends at the same time every day, and that’s not flexible, but I do crip my time around it by making sure I have a 90 minute block of rest before it’s time to pick up my children. The laundry, emails and everything else can wait. My kiddos then have a much more present and capable parent for the rest of the day.
I crip my time. I take the time I take. I give myself, my loved ones and colleagues the respect of including time and space to remember what’s true and live like I mean it.