Queer and disabled time beat to a different rhythm; both are at once fluid and stagnant, finding space nestled in the still, the sacred, and the ordinary. Years stolen, only later to be given back in new ways.

I’ve been thinking about concepts of queer and crip time; the understanding in both queer and disabled studies and community as a kind of deviation from linear life paths and trajectories. When you exist outside the binary structures the world and systems are built on, you are left without traditional expectations and milestones.

My story, like many queer and disabled ones, is one undeniably gripped by a long grief. My upbringing was conservative, and it was centered on love, but also on religion. I had never seen a queer person in my community before; in fact, I vividly remember being out of town the very first time I saw a visibly queer couple, hand in hand. Something twisted in my gut, though I was yet to unravel what it was or meant. And all that aside, waiting for me, inevitably, was still the long labour of gathering the language, of articulating and naming what I felt and who I was.

Because my queerness went so long unnamed, something nestled within me that I ignored, and then tried to fight away with long prayers and bargains with god; holding my disability and my queerness together, as two wildly intersecting parts of myself, feels so tender, and so recent. A barely healed wound, the stitches only recently drawn out. But for me, writing from the wound is often what helps to heal it.

I had the rare experience for an AFAB person of being diagnosed autistic quite young. The privilege of my whiteness was absolutely a factor; BIPOC neurodivergent (and queer) folk are frequently silenced, oppressed, and pushed aside by the health and medical system. And while, like many AFAB autistic folk, I slipped under the radar in some ways, excelling at school, engrossed by the worlds in my books, life and people felt like a puzzle I could not quite solve. Masking my neurodivergence started to cost me my mental health.

Susan Sontag named metaphor as “giving the thing a name that belongs to something else”, and often, I think, before neurodivergence, queerness, and disability has a name, if it is to be given one, there’s a process thick with metaphors.

Before I knew I was autistic, I was called quirky, creative, and weird. I suppose I was all of those things, but I was also watching the same film every day after school, reciting every word, forgetting to eat, missing the queues of my body. I was hiding in the school bathrooms to escape the noise at lunch time. I was rehearsing conversations before I had them.

Before my physical disability was diagnosed, I was called oversensitive, traumatised, and reactionary. For years, I knew something was wrong with my body, but my disability was given other names. In some ways, the doctors were right. I was oversensitive because the artificial hospital lighting and unsynchronised beating of machines were an overstimulative nightmare. Traumatised, because of institutionalisation and distrust in medical systems, and because of a body ravaged by pain. All of this made me reactive. In pain and unheard, it becomes difficult to be much else.

Likewise, before I was able to articulate that I didn’t identify with my assigned gender, and before I could say or even identify that I was not broken, nor incapable of love, just wired for one different to the love I’d seen modelled, my experience was one thick with metaphor; with giving names to something I was yet to recognise.

The romantic kind of love I’d seen, both in real life and in media, was strictly between a cis man and woman, and it usually adhered to particular binaries and timelines: engagement, marriage, and children.

Before I knew there was another option, I only knew that no amount of prayer or pretending would make me straight. I curbed the loneliness and sadness that sat heavily in my gut with an attempt at metaphors.

There is no one trans or queer experience, but this was mine; my queer timeline starts gently, in the land of childhood, where I felt almost immortal. Before my body morphed into curves, before it mattered all that much to exist in the moulds of gender, a childhood marked largely by the outside world, and by books, my neurodivergence, largely embraced; time bent forward into a kind of forever.

We rented a little house in an orchard for a few years, and the trees that bent in the wind, the babbling brooks and streams that ran through the earth, served to construct a kind of home. I made up worlds in my head, I pored through books, and I explored every inch of the landscape. I was dubbed as being beyond my years, and yet I put little curiosity toward who I was.

That absence of curiosity and an insatiable desire to be only in the moment as it unfolds before you was, for me, at least, both the blessing and curse of a childhood.

By early adolescence, even with my autism diagnosis, time became warped in the discomfort, in the tenseness of feeling so out of place. The fibres of me strange and unnamed. Everything felt like the first day of school, over and over again, anxious and painful, the feeling of watching the clock tick by, counting the hours to be picked up.

What I mean is, I didn’t know I wasn’t a girl, or that transition was even really an option. So I would point to my changing body, with its curves, and pull at the rounded edges with my palms. I would flatten my chest between two bras that bruised my ribs. I would cry in fitting rooms and call my body wrong, wrong, wrong.

When puberty hit, and my body changed, when people were starting to fall in love for the first time, to identify the beginning of a form of themselves that would slip into the real world, the infinity of my childhood swung to an abrupt halt. Time split off from infinity. I felt like I was running out of it.

I felt utterly behind. Tugged from the timeline of my peers and from the infinity that felt promised in childhood. I went from being an active participant in both my life and the world to feeling almost stifled by my life, by my own existence.

Queer time, for me at least, is marked first by an absence. It was difficult to immerse myself in the world, to love life, to have hope for the future, when I knew something inexplicable was missing, but I could not say what.

Nothing about me was wrong, of course, though it would (and still does) take many years of unravelling and reckoning to understand that. I felt out of place and foreign because of how the world received me. Much like my autism, the more I tried to suppress it, the more empty, more sad, and more withdrawn I became.

Before the storm of finding the right language, I was at a kind of precipice. It drives a wedge between a before and an after. I am trying to straighten my curves and crush my ribs under the two sports bras I found that work to compress my breasts. I hide the queer books I get from the library in a wooden chest to read late at night. I am deleting my browser history of gay shows and coming-out videos. I am whispering quiet questions to the friend with pride flags on her wall.

Within the same year, I came out as queer and was finally listened to enough by a doctor to have what would be the beginning unravelling toward a diagnosis of my disability. I left the church I was raised in, I wrote earnest posts online. I lost people, I fell in love for the first time. I brushed the very beginning of understanding and accommodations for my disabilities. I watched my high school friends go to university, while I spent my disability allowance on a walking stick and heating pads. I started to unravel my trauma. I felt utterly behind in every way, from the timelines of my peers unfolding before me.

But the things I had given names for; the things that made me feel like an outsider, had names and language. There were communities and there were friends who listened- who sat in doctors' rooms and held my hand, and finally doctors who listened, too.

I was also, perhaps not yet the happiest, but the most myself I’d ever felt.

I’d finally have the language to say I was trans a few years later, and transitioning, a complete language and understanding for myself, would give me my life. It is true, transitioning is life-saving, but for me it has also been so, so life-giving.

Arriving in the future I never imagined, never saw as possible for myself, is a soft and tender rebellion. When I name my neurodivergence, my queerness, my disability, it is a retiring of the metaphors that no longer serve me. A laying to rest of the cruel names I gave to my identity, my queerness, and my disability, before I got to know them, and a world that would embrace them.

When I walk hand in hand with my partner down the street, I think of the little girl who lives within me, who has only ever seen one version of love. When I get my top surgery, when I care for my partners after his, it is marked by the realisation that we are not running out of time. It is stretched so tenderly before us, waiting for us to be ready for it. These moments are so sacred; I am not running out of time, I am stumbling, hobbling in pain, but in joy, to a future I could’ve never imagined for myself.

My journey with my disability, like my queerness, is a retiring of the expectations of timelines not built for me. It is foraging for community now I have found language, and holding those who are still searching. It is realising my limits, and learning to advocate for them. It is my loves, strangers, friends, gathered with face masks and mobility aids and a fierce love for life, despite our pain. Sometimes even because of it.

Queerness and disability have that in common, I think. When you experience absence of language, the heartache of not yet understanding, not yet being heard; once you find it you grasp it tight. You refuse to let it go.

In my trans, queer, disabled mind and body, I live with so much joy and equally so much grief, in the years given back to me. All of the years stolen by survival and fighting, now given back to me, now rich with language and with becoming.

There is resistance in tuning to our own frequencies; there is no such thing as running out of time.