We studied the concepts of temporality and care in class this month. I was very opposed to engaging with temporality because I thought of it as theoretical wankery and irrelevant to our material struggles. However, engaging with the assigned texts and attending lectures and discussions made me do a complete 180 on these subjects. This piece grapples with some of these concepts in the context of living with chronic mental health conditions. Something I want to note and will re-iterate throughout this post is that this is based solely on my experiences. I have had consistent access to mental healthcare, medication and therapy since my diagnoses. I am privileged in many aspects of my life and that makes it possible for me to even approach healing and recovery.

I have struggled with anxiety, depression and BPD for a long time now. In this period, I have made friends and lost a few, been lonely, been supported, made mistakes, made more mistakes, learned from some of these, repeated others, moved forward, felt stuck, moved back… which is to say that I have evolved in many ways. But what has been consistent throughout is existing with myself. While I don’t plan to delve into the ontology of the self, I have experienced this journey as a dialogue between me and myself.

For the longest time, this dialogue was geared towards returning to being a functional member of society. I desperately wanted to be productive. My sense of self-worth was deeply tied to the idea of productivity. Even in leisure, I wanted to be productive. I rested because without rest, I wouldn’t be efficient at being, you guessed it, productive. I hoped that my recovery would be a linear graph with a constant, positive slope and eventually I would be “normal”. Boy was I wrong!

Even if we were to stick to the analogy of a line, I was still very wrong in my expectations. This line was neither straight nor did it have a constant slope. In fact it was a scribble. Eventually I came to terms with this irrationality of recovery, and for some time I was at peace with the idea that I will have periods where I make progress, periods where I am stuck and periods where I make complete u-turns. But this analogy stopped serving me after a point, and I couldn’t understand why.

I was struggling shame and disappointment in myself. I would see my friends, especially those who had progressed much faster than me (I have a lot of depressed friends lol), and feel like I was falling behind. I would observe people hustling and feel like a waste of resources because my bandwidth to hustle was greatly reduced. It was not until I went through the two weeks on care and temporality in class did I finally grasp what was wrong.

In Making Time for Soil: Technoscientific Futurity and the Pace of Care (2015), Bellacasa delves into our relationship with soil, which is largely shaped by the intention to extract value. This is informed by the temporal paradigm that “associates the future with progress, with an ethico-political imperative to ‘advance’ that remains solidly the orientation of linear, ‘progressivist’, timelines - while the past acts as a discriminatory signifier of development delay” (693). Instead of viewing soil as a living ecosystem, and us as part of this living soil, it is reduced to its capacity to produce for industrialised agriculture. Efforts of caring for soil driven by these logics are focused on improving its efficiency to be able to produce. Soil is formed from a combination of processes on varying timescales (eg: geological), but this paradigm leaves no room for these temporalities.

It might be obvious where I am going with this but my expectations, ambitions and hopes for my healing were all calibrated to this dominant timescape. There was the obvious desire to become efficient and productive. But there was also a linear envisioning of healing and the idea of making progress, as if my past selves were somehow lesser versions of me. It also flattened the multiple ways I was changing (or not). In some areas, I was very different, and in some others, not so much, but this was all reduced to one metric ~ productivity. Most importantly, I was denying myself or my brain to follow its own temporal rhythm – to take its own time to heal. Now, I do not hold any resentment towards my past selves for being so single-mindedly focused on productivity because within this society, it is close to impossible to work outside the hegemonic tempo. Sometimes people are just trying to survive and that means being functional enough to make ends meet.

I went back to the drawing board and tried to come up with a different vocabulary and analogy to visualise and articulate the dx/dt of my mental health. It’s day 3 of me doing a big think, but I could only come up with the idea of a Pokémon evolution. Basically I cannot think of this change outside of terms of progressivism and productivity.

Regardless, this has altered the meaning of self-care for me. When I was trying to progress-maxx my mental health, I often settled for quick fixes and bandaids. The examples are too personal for me to reveal, but suffice it to say that I was not patient AT ALL. But now I am trying to be okay with taking time. Bellacasa (2015, 701) speaks of “maintaining, continuing and repairing” in the context of taking care of soil. This is how I apply these to my mental health:

  1. Maintaining - Inculcating practices and doing them consistently, gently and patiently.
  2. Repairing - Forgiving myself for lapses and trying again and again
  3. Continuing - Sitting through the discomfort of internalising new ways of existing

I won’t say that the experience of existing with pain and discomfort has changed radically, but my approach to life and healing has, and that makes a lot of difference. It is less stressful to accept the pace of your mind instead of racing against time to become the best version of yourself! However, my external conditions are also fertile for this change to occur. For many, they aren’t. There are so many factors outside our immediate loci of control – systems of oppression, financial and time poverty, other forms of chronic illness, lack of social welfare, I could go on and on.

Which brings me to my final point: self-care and attempts to reorient ourselves within the current capitalist-colonial-imperial system will only take us so far. At some point, external conditions such as the ones mentioned earlier begin to shape our lives far more powerfully than our individual efforts ever could. Personal healing cannot outrun structural constraint. Thus, it is necessary to dismantle the current world order.

And the society we create from its ashes needs to centre disability, mental health and care in our visions of the future, not the least because the world is growing increasingly disabling due to climate change. “[T]he future orients practices” (Bellacasa 2015, 693). If that is true, then the futures we imagine must make space for different temporal rhythms and ways of existing, materially and infrastructurally, as Dengler et al. (2025) suggest. They must allow for slowness, fluctuation, dependence and care, not treat them as obstacles to overcome.

In collective liberation lies our break from oppressive timescapes!

Dengler, Corinna, Hanna Völkle, and Sarah Ware. 2025. ‘Time and Space for Social-Ecological Transformation: Care-Full Commoning in and beyond the Ecofeminist City’. Environmental Politics 34 (5): 861–81. https://doi.org/10.1080/09644016.2024.2411934.

Puig De La Bellacasa, Maria. 2015. ‘Making Time for Soil: Technoscientific Futurity and the Pace of Care’. Social Studies of Science 45 (5): 691–716. https://doi.org/10.1177/0306312715599851.