Multiple Sclerosis is an incurable disease. The typical treatment is “disability slowing,” meaning we attempt to reduce the rate of decline caused by the disease. I’ve opted for this treatment and that means I get an infusion twice a year.
Right before my most recent one, I was suddenly very afraid and nervous. I’ve done many of these infusions over many years, so I know the gist of what it’s like, what recovery looks like, and yet for some reason I was really scared. I leaned on every healthy coping technique I’ve learned from therapy. I comforted my mind with my pre-infusion checklist of getting my bag ready and drinking tons of water before 7 a.m. so that my veins would cooperate with the IV needle. The last thing I had at my disposal to help was a time-traveling technique I had developed as a kid.
If I can just skip past this infusion into the future, then I can be free of this fear and be ok again, I thought.
I first discovered time-travel through dreading an event in the opposite way: not wanting something to end, rather than trying to hurry through it. I noticed that the more I did not want something to end, there were certain behaviors and mental checkpoints I set up that would actually speed up the event, much to my dismay. The trick, then, was to recognize these factors and avoid them or deploy them intentionally, depending on whether I wanted a moment to last longer or to go more quickly. Obviously, this is not magical—it’s psychological—but it works quite effectively.
Looking for repeatable moments or visual cues is a huge part of zooming forward in time. Prior to my infusion, I imagined the three stages that were typical of the day ahead in great detail, choosing specific predictable moments that would act as checkpoints. First, I would feel the cold seat in the car on my way to the clinic. I would put on my mask and smell that familiar stale yet papery environment covering my nose and mouth. I would see that dark blue, tree-covered, silhouetted street just as I cross the threshold from neighborhood to city.
The next phase would be sitting in the big blue chair against the wall, my bag pressed up against my side, the paper-covered pillow under my left arm and the IV tube resting alongside my forearm. I would see the fluorescent-lit, tan walls around me with quilts and quotes about cancer adorning them. The various nurses' desks would be interspersed around the rest of the chairs that filled the room, many people coming in and out for cancer treatment all day (with only a few people like me getting treatments for different medical conditions).
Finally, I imagined with extra emphasis, I would be home in my room under a fluffy blanket. My biggest hoodie would make me feel warm and safe as the TV played whichever Lord of the Rings Extended Edition movie I hadn’t finished from the last infusion. I would feel the dark room with the black-out curtains keeping me both cool and comforted. The taste of chocolate chips melting in my mouth would help distract from the tingling sensation in my limbs that I often get after infusions. I would be extremely tired—I may even close my eyes for a bit, despite my disdain for naps…
Going through that exercise of intense detail for the big events of the day makes it, at least for me, feel like time is speeding up, because when I actually get to those environments or moments, I then reinforce the imagined “checkpoints” by going through them again. Saying to myself something like:
“See? I’m already in the big blue chair with the IV in. It’s going by so fast.”
By constantly commenting on how fast things are going by, I don’t think about how much longer I have to go. I’m focused almost entirely backward on a timeline and it tricks my perception of time into a speed-mode. It’s important that I reinforce my checkpoints all the way through to the end. Thinking specific words and phrases like “already,” and “I can’t believe it’s time for…” make my ever-present mental narration further cement my self-deception.
The only problem with the method is that it only really works one way: forward into the future.
The Magic Thread
There was an animated TV series I loved as a kid called, Adventures from the Book of Virtues, which is based on William Bennet's anthology, The Book of Virtues and was co-produced by the author. There is one story portrayed in both works called The Magic Thread which may be of French origin that helped inspire my time-travel technique, but it also terrified me.
In the story, the main character, Peter, is constantly wishing time would go faster. Always expressing conditional wishes for happiness: I’ll be happy when I’m older and can do XYZ.
One day he finds himself face to face with a witch who gives him a magic ball of thread. If he pulls on the exposed strand of thread at the end of the ball, Peter would speed through whatever moment he wanted to skip. The gentler the pull, the smaller the moment of time that would be skipped. The greater the pull, the longer amount of time that would be lost.
I have used my own psychological “ball of thread” to speed through the school day as a teenager or, like I do now, to get through unpleasant medical procedures. However, thanks to the story that inspired my experimentation with “time travel,” I have a heavy dose of worry that accompanies this trick.
Being sensitive to how time affects me and how I affect it has burdened me with feelings of loss, but it also taught me, ironically, how powerful the present is. It’s very difficult to stay in the present, whether because of hopes and dreams for the future, sadness and regret from the past, or the devices of preoccupation (work, phones, content consumption, etc.) that siphon the present away from individual focus to social, organizational, or corporate control.
In the Magic Thread story, Peter ends up pulling the string so much that he skips through most of his life, ending up as an old man looking at the grave of his wife. Fortunately for him, he’s given the chance to go back to the point before using the thread and is determined to live life more patiently and purposefully.
For us, we don’t have a restore point or a back-up. Time cannot be reversed. We can only affect our use of the present and our experience with the time that we have. This haunting concept inspired my woodblock print piece (see above). I imagined myself as being composed of the magic thread. I could pull out my time-traveling trick when I wanted, but what were the consequences of doing so? Will I miss something important? Will I lose meaning in my life? Will I find too quickly that I’ve run out of thread?
Our Weird Relationship with Time
Noah Hawley, writer of the impressive 2025 TV series, Alien Earth, made an observation in a podcast interview about the show, that movies can manipulate our sense of time. When we watch programs (movies, TV shows, and I’d add any other kind of engaging content), those stories can and often do affect our experience of time, whether speeding it up or slowing it down. Intense moments in a horror scene may seem to last forever, while a funny situation may propel us more quickly through time.
This may seem obvious now that we have portable boredom-busting devices and a widespread name for the phenomenon of “doom scrolling,” but I don’t think I hear much discussion about our experience with time. So, I’ll turn it to George Lakoff and Mark Johnson for a quick intro to some of the major concepts about how we understand time from their book, Philosophy In The Flesh:
"...we have no fully flushed-out concept of time-in-itself. All of our understandings of time are relative to other concepts such as motion, space, and events."
"This does not mean that we do not have an experience of time. Quite the reverse. What it means is that our real experience of time is always relative to our real experience of events. It also means that our experience of time is dependent on our embodied conceptualization of time in terms of events. This is a major point: Experience does not always come prior to conceptualization, because conceptualization is itself embodied. Further, it means that our experience of time is grounded in other experiences, the experiences of events."
When I found this, I was astonished at how well that mapped to my time-travel trick. I wasn’t manipulating time itself, rather my perception of its passing. The checkpoints that I used to abstract my journey are not much different than how we measure “real” time: by comparing events in relation to each other—measuring the interval between those events. A pendulum, to take an example from the book, helps us measure time because of the regular and repeated motions. The moment in-between the maximum stretch of the pendulum is some amount of time. Not all pendulums take the same amount of time to move from one end to the other since it depends on the size, materials, and weight. So, too, can we affect our perception of time by looking for the events that we want to compare.
Cyborg
I think this is actually really important to consider in our media- and technology-rich environment. We have 24/7 access to addictive magic thread devices. I obviously use those devices and my own techniques to get through uncomfortable or distressing or dull experiences just like everyone else. The important piece is using intention and wisdom when we do use these time-altering things.
It's hard to balance the fears that lead us to choose "time-travel," because the cost of avoiding the present situation is having other fears manifest. After using my technique to great effect in high school, I also found myself mourning the time that I had lost and fearing that perhaps time wouldn't stop speeding up over the years.
That's why investing attention to the present moment when you are able is exceptionally valuable—not just for mental and emotional health, but also to help you find yourself again in the whirlwind of time. Being present helps slow time down again. It can feel boring and we may be tempted to get back to entertainment or noise so that we jump back into the rushing flow of time-altering options, but finding spaces for slow moments can be a gift.
We're inclined to notice and seek novelty—that's why content feeds are such effective traps—and that's how slowness helps to break the sense of losing time. If our sense of time and our measurement of time depends largely upon regular, repeated events, then inserting irregular events or moments interrupts the routine. Being bored, doing something different, choosing to really feel your emotions, are all ways that can insert irregularity into the day, slow down time, and help you reconnect with yourself.
Pain is an unavoidable experience and I think we would do well to approach it purposefully: sometimes dulling or skipping through it, and sometimes dealing or engaging with it. When our coping mechanisms threaten to become addictions, that’s when we need to take a deep look at ourselves.
We may find that skipping or scrolling through life has dire consequences to our ability to experience life fully, to connect with other people, and to become who we want to be. Technology can help us blur our perception of time, and now you also know the analog trick to time travel, so use it cautiously.