I began analysis to sort out certain ideas I had about my parents and to address the sudden oppressive fear of dying that overtook me when I turned twenty-five years old. I was also a bit worried that once my novel was published, people I knew would read it and come away thinking I was a crazy person or a sexual deviant, or both. I explained all of this to my analyst during our early sessions, hoping we would go through my list of concerns in a straightforward and efficient way, not realizing that this wasn’t at all how the process would work. Instead of focusing on my stated motivations for beginning treatment, I spent a great deal of time in these conversations thinking about, and apologizing for, my chronic lateness.

There are various jokes that I can and have made about ‘African time’ and the lax attitude toward punctuality I inherited from my relatives: weddings that begin four hours after the advertised start, morning church services that kick off well into the afternoon, and so on. Ethnic humor aside, it’s feasible that my careless attitude toward time may be a manifestation of my easygoingness, a bohemian nonobservance of social norms. I told a friend that I had missed a flight to Europe (again) and she assured me that it was just my ‘queer relationship to temporality’. I did not really know what that meant, but I liked the sound of it.

As an undergraduate, I had difficulty finding a new professor’s office and arrived ten minutes after we were supposed to meet, playing up how sorry I was. I was a good student and figured she would accept my apology. I was in the middle of describing what a labyrinth the building was, how one stairwell had led me to another which led nowhere, when she interrupted me to say, ‘Stephanie, no.’ In other words, she did not buy my charm and contrition, the twinned strategies I had been using to get out of similar confrontations since I was a child. Few people have reacted to me as she did, and her stern response has stayed with me for the past decade. Sitting in her cramped basement office, which smelled of books and damp, hearing her say my name and reject my excuses, struck me in the chest like the command in the final line of a poem by Rilke: ‘You must change your life.’

I did not change my life. I carried on just as I had before, showing up whenever I wanted to, blaming public transportation or an earlier obligation running over. Like many wake-up calls, my professor’s admonition had little effect. One receives several rude awakenings, is shaken by the shoulders many times, punished many times, before even considering different choices. What was I resisting by turning up late?

I once ran late to a dinner organized by someone whose company I dreaded, where I knew I would be seated with people I barely knew. Still, I had agreed to go. I got dressed and got on the subway, still several stops away when our reservation began. Throughout the meal, I did my best to participate in the conversation, though I found it dull. I could not follow the gossip or keep track of its many characters whom I did not know or care about. All the while, I was feeling mounting anxiety about potential cross-contamination. I am allergic to shellfish, and it seemed every thirty seconds a large lobster or a shrimp cocktail was carried out to one of the neighboring tables. This was during the height of my anxieties about death. Why had I agreed to come? To make matters worse, the person to my right described themselves twice as ‘an historian’, using British pronunciation and littering her speech with Anglicisms, despite being American. Between that and the crustaceans, I felt ill at ease the entire meal.

Lateness, in that particular case, was an act of passive resistance. It was an expression of my disdain for the person who had asked me to come along. Rather than say no, I begrudged them, made sure I missed a good portion of the outing and hoped the insult would come across. I was aware of what I had done, and why, before even signing my check. But disdain alone did not explain my other, regular instances of unpunctuality. There was so much I did not know about my relationship to time. Was it calculated, apathetic, endearing, aggressive? It could not have always been an act of hostility since I once missed boarding a plane to visit a man I loved and was eager to see. My reasons for running behind remained contradictory and opaque to me. I was content not to think about them at all, until the next bout of tardiness came along.

If analysis gave me anything, it allowed me to view time as a fundamental and consequential dimension of reality that could not be bent by my will or desires. My resistance to honoring appointments could be called many things: rude, inherited, intrinsic to my personality, or reflective of untreated ADHD. I weighed all of these possible root causes and did not find any of them compelling. What I did find meaningful was that my lateness might be symptomatic of unconscious conflicts, and that those were just as worthy of interpretation as the conscious fears I had first arrived ready to discuss: having a serious allergic reaction to a prawn (and dying) or sharing my book with the public (and having my hidden sexual perversity exposed). The benefit of lateness was that it was a symptom I could not conceal. Over my analyst’s shoulder hung an analog clock, tethering us to the real and its constraints. The rigid duration of the analytic hour – fifty minutes, no more, no less – regardless of when I arrived, was perhaps what I was really paying for, whether or not I gained any other insights.

In good news, I have seen vast improvements on the showing-up-when-I’m-supposed-to front, but other areas of my psychic life still present some challenges.