I learnt to read clocks when I was young. That did not mean I knew how to live in time.
I could measure an interval, follow a timetable and remember that an event had happened. Yet the past could remain disconnected from the person I was, and the future could be either a fixed sequence or an incomputable unknown. Even when I could estimate what might happen, I did not necessarily experience my life as one story within a much larger world of other lives.
I distinguish five experiences: now-time, frozen time, equal time, dynamic time and relational time. These describe changes in my own inner experience, not stages that every autistic person must pass through.
I now experience relational time. The earlier limitations below are historical, understood through the comparison that became possible after they changed.
Now-time: everything has to happen now
In now-time, events and sensations happened, but they did not form a continuous personal history. There was what I was seeing, hearing or doing. There was not a dependable experience of “I was there before, I am here now, and I will be somewhere else later.”
Time seemed to flow only when I did something. If I stopped, time stopped too. A clock could continue moving, but that was not the same as feeling my own life continue through time.
Meanwhile, instructions kept arriving. Bring the book. Do the homework. Remember to buy food for the fish. Remember what the teacher said. Each thought could demand attention as though it were equally important. I had difficulty relating tasks to their purpose, their consequences or their place in time.
Doing something immediately offered an obvious defence against forgetting it. Unfortunately, that could become an enormous inner itch to finish everything right away.
In Exiled from Paradise, I described the future as hidden by darkness and the past as a blurry mirage. Everything had to happen now, while the people around me were also demanding that things happen now. There were never enough hands, enough speed or enough computing power.
A timetable offered relief. It held a sequence outside the confusion and told me what to do next. That was why I called it a bridge of time. It was not merely an accessory for someone who liked being organised.
Frozen time: only one future is possible
Frozen time gave me something that now-time lacked: a sequence stretching beyond the immediate moment. But only one possibility was available to me as the future. The sequence was not one option among alternatives. It was what would happen.
Future = past. The past was fixed because it had happened. The imagined future could feel similarly fixed because I had planned it. I had not experienced it yet, but it was already settled. A plan supplied the sequence that was supposed to occur, rather than an estimate that might need revision.
“Possible Future = Fixed Past” captures how it felt. I could construct an imagined future from perfect, overly simplified plans while facing the actual future as though walking through an unfamiliar place blindfolded and wearing earplugs.
Being able to imagine a future did not mean I could judge its plausibility, what it would cost, or how to adapt when events departed from it. The detail in a plan could conceal how little contact it had with what was actually likely to happen.
Nor does frozen time mean I could never accept a timetable change; I could accept changes to the school timetable. The deeper difficulty was the kind of future I could experience, not a refusal of every change to a schedule.
The bridge could become a trap. Once I relied on a fixed sequence to make the future navigable, an unexpected event could remove the very thing that let me proceed. I was not merely disappointed that I had failed to get my preferred outcome. The route through time had broken.
Equal time: every possibility is possible
In equal time, the single possible future gave way to all the possibilities I could imagine. But I could not automatically filter them. Recognising that the future was uncertain did not give me a usable sense of what was more or less likely.
In Secondary 3, I began distinguishing past, present and future, but I still lacked an automatic sense of which possibilities were likely. A rainy day, a runny nose, an alien invasion or a tiger escaping from the zoo could all demand preparation. I was not assigning each event a carefully calculated equal probability. I lacked the automatic filtering and ranking of possibilities so that ordinary expectations could take precedence over remote threats.
I could still work out that some futures were more likely by consciously reasoning about probabilities. Instructions from other people or information in books could help me do that. The judgement did not simply arrive by itself.
I feared spy agencies, time travellers, natural disasters and hostile space aliens. I read about disasters and emergencies to prepare myself. Anxious thoughts could keep me awake for hours.
Frozen time allowed one possibility. Equal time allowed all possibilities without an automatic way to filter them. They created different problems. In one, the expected sequence had to hold. In the other, deciding which possibilities deserved my attention could require deliberate reasoning.
As a teenager, I fantasised about taking my books, tools and plans into a secret room and freezing the rest of the world. Then I could finally catch up. I also imagined cloning myself so that several of me could do everything that needed doing.
These were fantasies about escaping the demands of time. They did not solve the problem of living within it.
Dynamic time: the future can be estimated
In dynamic time, the past and future became different kinds of things. The past was frozen in the sense that it had already happened. The future had not happened. It was unknown, but I could estimate it rather than either declare it certain or leave every imaginable possibility unfiltered.
An estimate could change when the situation changed. A plan could be revised rather than treated as something the world was obliged to reproduce. This made a changing future more workable.
But estimating a changing future was not the same as experiencing my life in relation to the lives around me. I could follow events, anticipate developments and respond without that wider relational experience.
Time eventually felt like a river that continued to flow whether I acted or stopped. Yet I could still watch my life in that river from far away, without fully experiencing my emotional responses or what events meant to me. Recognising the flow of time was not the end of the journey.
Dynamic time made an unfolding sequence responsive to reality. By itself, it did not supply the felt relationships through which my past, present and future belonged within a larger world of lives.
This is different from the viewpoint of a recalled scene. My memories began shifting from third-person to first-person perspective before secondary school and became more embodied over time. Seeing a memory from my own position did not by itself give me the relational experience of time I describe here.
Relational time: my life among other lives
After my 2018 breakthrough in Relational Meaning, I experienced my own story as part of a much larger world of lives. This was different from the recognition of choice in Secondary 3 and the deeper understanding of individuality while writing in 2005.
Being the only character in a world where only I existed was different from being the protagonist of one story among billions of people, many more animals and potentially other sentient life. The earlier experience is expressed in my Zong poster, “Everything”: “I am everything.” In the relational experience, I was not the World. I was a small part of a much larger World.
“What happened?” became connected with “What has this made of my life?” “What might happen?” became connected with “What future am I building, and what will my choices mean for me and the people in my life?”
This was not simply attaching my name to a timeline. My earlier choices had created the circumstances I was now living in. My present choices would leave another life for my future self to inherit. Possibilities became personal: opportunities I could pursue, responsibilities I had neglected and losses that I could not simply calculate away.
The future self whose image helped me give my 2003 talk was like a one-dimensional character from a novel. The future self I sensed after 2018 was the real me extrapolated into the future: the person who would live with what I was choosing now.
This extended across the different possible timelines I could conceive of. Relational Meaning supplied a native understanding of the relationship between choices and consequences within the big picture of my life, not simply a chain of deductions about them. I explain that experience more fully in Seeing the big picture of my Life.
I had encountered biographical studies at a Waldorf workshop in November 2017. That gave me a way to consider stages and cycles beyond the usual sequence of education, work and retirement, including the possibility of birth and death within an eternal cycle. Encountering that perspective was different from the fuller lived personal narrative that opened in 2018. My IPMT experience in July 2018 deepened this understanding: the events belonged to someone living through them, not merely to a timeline an observer could describe.
I could now recognise for myself the career potential I had in IT. It was no longer only a collection of things I knew or could do. I could see how those abilities might become a career I needed to develop, with the skills, qualifications and connections that would make it workable.
I also saw that learning foreign languages to make friends was not the same as learning a skill to earn money. Both involved learning, but they served different parts of my life. Progress towards friendship did not automatically mean progress towards an income. The distinction mattered because it was my life that needed both, not an abstract collection of accomplishments. The practical question of what deserves continued investment is developed in Hobbies and Special Interests.
Other neglected parts became visible too: caring for my body, sustaining relationships, building a career, acquiring everyday skills and allowing myself enjoyment. The Relational Meaning account explores these consequences in more detail. Here, the important change is that they no longer stood as unrelated tasks. They belonged to one life, and I was the person who would live with their consequences.
Seeing my choices did not give me advance knowledge of the world
I decided to give autism work one last try before giving it up for good. I could see the choice in relation to my own life. That did not mean I could foresee everything that would happen while I pursued it.
Looking back, I worry that this may have been my last real opportunity to secure the IT career I could have built before what I now think of as the AI jobpocalypse. I did not know that when I made the decision.
The insight did not freeze the outside world while I caught up. I could finally recognise an opportunity as mine, yet still misunderstand how long it would remain available. Relational time gave me a personal stake in the future, not advance knowledge of it.
A timetable cannot supply every missing connection
These differences cannot be captured by saying that I needed better time management. A timetable could give me the next instruction without giving me a lived future. A detailed plan could preserve one expected sequence without making alternatives available. Recognising alternatives did not automatically give me an intuitive way to filter them, although conscious reasoning could help. Estimating the future did not automatically give my life its wider relational significance.
These distinctions matter to inclusion. It would miss the difficulty to offer only another schedule when what I lacked was a way to weigh possibilities. It would also miss it to assume that competent short-term planning meant I could already connect my choices with a career, relationships and a future self. The question is not only whether I can perform the next task, but how that task exists for me within a life.
There were also islands of breakthrough: a particular connection became real without generalising beyond its subject matter. Different capabilities opened at different times. The total transformation of Relational Meaning in 2018 was distinct from those earlier, specifically focused realisations.
I needed more than a clock that told me the time. I needed a future that was neither already written nor an unfiltered collection of everything I could imagine. Beyond that, I needed to experience the life I was building, and the future self who would inherit it, within a World of other lives.