The Messy Room Theory

“Why I have no sense of time,” or, “Stop judging me for being late and forgetting stuff.” – A theory.

I was going to conduct a research in order to have a scientific basis for my claims, but I decided I had my own theory and that I was going to run with that, thankyouverymuch.

First, my (lack of) sense of time goes beyond not knowing what day it is. Often our stories start with, “Yesterday,..” or “Two days ago..” or “Last week..” to set a time frame for the anecdote. Why do we set time frames? Maybe you mention the date because you think its relevant or maybe you’re just used to starting stories with the date. Maybe because the timeliness of the story determines how interesting and exciting it is. We’re used to news and gossip being hot and fresh. No one likes day-old doughnuts.

This introduction is important because I’m easing you into my complicated and chaotic mind. Time frames play a very specific and deliberate role in my stories. They’re not there to illustrate freshness. They’re not relevant… at all! Mainly because, if I say ‘Two days ago..’ my story probably did NOT occur two days ago. It could have been as far as two weeks ago. How should I know? I have no sense of time! The only reason I set a time frame is because of continuity. I say ‘Two days ago’ because later in the story, I will need a “future”. I will need to use “the next day.” Sometimes I will start with ‘Two days ago’, end with ‘Two days later’, and still be talking about the past (when I should be talking about the present: -2 + 2 = 0.) I’m not REALLY talking about TIME, I guess it’s more about SPACE. (I have never needed to emphasize so many words in one article before.)

That takes care of the what. Now let’s move on to the why. Why does time not play such an important role in the way I see the world? Why are my time stamps so inaccurate? I asked myself that question and this is what I came up with. I call it ‘The Messy Room’ theory.

Picture a Messy Room. Now picture a Messy Person. This messy person is completely oblivious to the mess in the room. Messy person is completely functional in spite of the messy room. In fact, the mess does not exist to this messy person. Now picture Tidy Person in the Messy Room. The mess in the room plays a large (and stressful) role into how tidy person views the world around him. Tidy person is so aware of the mess and this awareness causes him to be in tune with the mess. Even unconsciously Tidy person could already be planning his near future around the Messy room. Tidy person is thinking, “I have to tidy this room. The clothes don’t belong on the floor, they belong in the cupboard, etc.” In other words, Tidy person is already mapping out the room, noticing where everything is and where it should be.

Now apply this theory on me. I am a person who is astonishingly unphased by deadlines and time limits. I don’t feel any pressure about being late. I am not intimidated by Time. I am never on time. I have never engaged in any kind of daily routine (because routines are usually embedded in time frames.) Just like Messy person, I don’t see time because I don’t care about time, and therefore, time doesn’t exist to me. Time is just a concept I use in conjunction to something else, usually as an illustrative tool. Time, to me, is not as continual or omnipresent as, say, planet rotations or oxygen. I mean, I know it is, (I see time in a larger sense because we age, for example), but in my day-to-day life, Time is just a language that I don’t speak.