Yesterday I was late because I was going to be early and started doing something and lost track of time. The thing I do at work cannot be done by anyone else and when I arrived people were waiting for me. I apologised and said that I’d lost track of time. Everyone seemed okay with it, although I felt crappy about it.
I’ve struggled with time keeping and punctuality my whole life. I’ve tried a billion different strategies and I’ve tried examining myself in order to work out what’s going on.
Being diagnosed with complexPTSD seems to have clarified some of it. I really think my inability to get out of the house on time and the anxieties that erupt whenever I have to wait for anything is rooted in early, complex and ongoing trauma.
I did arrive at some methods and techniques that made me less late and more often on time but as OU said, there was an attendant cost to all that.
On reflection, I see that I’ve pretty much arranged my social life so that almost all my meet ups are in places where it doesn’t matter what time I arrive.
Mobile phones has made it a lot easier to give people updates. If I think I’m going to be late for something that we said a time for, I’ll check way ahead, up to an hour ahead, and say “I think I’m running late”. If it’s a table booking I just work extra time into the plan, pretend to myself that the booking is earlier, be late for that and turn up bang on time. But I’ll be super stressed for at least part of that process.
Being on time sometimes results in me arriving flustered, hyped up and full of kinetic energy from the running etc. That can be really disruptive to those who are already there. That feels rude too. I try to calm down and settle before I join them, sometimes that makes me a few minutes late even though I arrived on time. It’s ridiculous
More recent hellish events led to a huge and acute bout of the PTSD and an equivalent huge uptick in my chronic lateness.
Athos your approach would not only make me sad and anxious it would add further impact to the trauma (I’m a terrible person, I’m no good, Athos hates me, I’m a failure).
Currently it takes me about 40 minutes to get out of the house for a social event. I want to leave, I’m ready to leave, but some kind of fearful part of me never wants to leave the house at all. The battle between those parts is loud, messy, and often idiotic, and sometimes exhausting. I genuinely can’t help it.
But also, I don’t expect anyone else to have to do the housekeeping around my internal shit, so I don’t tell people about this, so they just think I’m rude, discourteous, entitled, out of order etc.
I have to plan plane trips like a military operation and write out timetables for myself.
When I worked somewhere where the timekeeping was ruled like a prison I was in a state of abject misery the entire time. Most of my workplaces have been more relaxed and they know I put the time in, the effort, diligence, responsibility etc) and I guess this is a contributing factor to why I’ve never had a proper grown up career. Also self employed, and once I’m at my desk I’ll work without a break for many hours.
Also, owls and larks. I’m definitely an owl. I think there’s a place (probably Denmark) where they recognise this difference and allow office workers to do the early start or the later start, and finish work early or late after putting in the full complement of hours.
