“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”

— Annie Dillard, The Writing Life

Twice a week, I change an estradiol patch. It sounds like a small thing. A square of medication, peeled and pressed somewhere discreet, but it has become one of the most reliable ways I mark time. Not Wednesday and Saturday. Not the calendar. The patch. My body, divided into multi-day increments, whether I’m ready or not.

I’ve been thinking about time lately. About how differently it moves depending on what I’m inside of.

When I write, time disappears. Not in the drifting way. In the way of total absorption. I look up, and an hour is gone, and I didn’t feel it leave. It went somewhere real. Writing is the only place where I’m both completely in myself and completely unaware of the clock, and I’ve come to understand that’s not a coincidence. It’s what full presence actually feels like.

I’ve found it before in my classical performances. I find it in the running miles: in the clearing that happens when the body is working and the mind can stop producing. I call that Mental Laundry. But writing is the one place where the absorption is also the work itself.

Time with family does something different. It slows, and I want it to. There’s something comforting about an evening with people I love where the hours feel thick and full, where I’m not half-somewhere-else. It’s slow the way a good meal is slow. I don’t rush it. I stay at the table.

Then there’s the other kind of slow.

Exhausted at work, wanting to go home, the day already wrung out. That’s when time refuses to move. The clock seems to stop on purpose. Every minute is a small negotiation. This slowness isn’t rest. It’s the sensation of being trapped inside a moment that won’t be spent.

Same speed. Completely different experience. That’s the thing I keep coming back to.

I could name the pattern long before I could explain it.

What I’ve had to learn about myself, and it took longer than it should have, is that I am, at my core, an Enneagram 7. The Enthusiast. The one whose deepest drive is toward more. More experience, more possibility, more open doors, more more more. And the 7’s particular sin isn’t greed in the material sense. It’s gluttony in the existential one. Gluttony of options. Gluttony of futures. My head nods in agreement as I write the words ‘more’ and ‘gluttony’ over and over again. Each time further affirming my core wiring.

The 7 mind is a yes machine. Not from people-pleasing but from genuine excitement, from the inability to experience scarcity while planning, because in imagination, everything is very much possible. When I’m looking at a calendar and saying yes to this and yes to that, and yes, absolutely, I can also do that, I truly believe it. In that moment, I have no awareness of what any of it will actually cost. Not in hours and certainly not in bandwidth.

Bandwidth is the word I’m trying to learn. Time and bandwidth are not the same thing. Time is the hours. Bandwidth is what I actually have to give inside those hours, on that day, with that body, carrying what I’m already carrying. I am almost never accurate about bandwidth. I say yes as if I will arrive at each commitment fresh and whole, as if nothing before it will have already taken something from me.

This is the mechanism of a demon I personally named, the Obligation Harpy.

I wrote about her once. The inner demon of never having enough time, of never being fully present, of the perpetual sense of being behind. I used to experience her as something that happened to me. An external pressure, the world demanding too much.

But the Harpy isn’t external. She’s the collector. She shows up at the end of a day that’s too full, and she’s not stealing anything. She’s arriving for what I already promised, enthusiastically, without doing the math. It’s my fault (that’s the part that hurts as I acknowledge it).

The estradiol patch keeps me honest in a way my mind often won’t.

So does marathon training. So does the concert production calendar, which forces a kind of reality onto time that my natural enthusiasm resists. Rehearsal schedules, venue contracts, and the immovable fact of a Carnegie Hall performance date. These structures aren’t constraints I chafe against. I’ve come to understand they’re doing something my 7 mind refuses to do for itself: they make limitation real, tangible. They close doors on purpose. They say: this is what you’re doing, this is what it takes, this is the shape of the next several months.

I need external things to impose scarcity because I won’t impose it on myself.

What I’m still working out is why family time slows the way it does.

The 7 is not, famously, a natural-born presider. We move. We generate. We’re already thinking about the next thing. And yet. Something about that particular slow, wanted, thick time with the people I love most actually lands me. Fully.

Maybe that’s the answer embedded in the question. Maybe the things that slow time in the good way are the things I’ve decided, somewhere below conscious thought, that I’m not willing to miss. The writing. The people. The felt sense of a life I actually chose.

The gluttony, the overcommitment, the Harpy collecting her debts. That’s the noise around that signal.

The patch reminds me every few days: you are a body. You are here. The clock is running.

The question is what I’m doing with it.

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This essay originally appeared in Camera Dark Notes on June 28, 2026. Read the original on Substack →