Writing Against the Clock

I have spent most of my life running.

Not away from anything in particular, just forward, toward the next day, the next city, the next version of myself I hoped would finally feel caught up. Time has never felt like something I moved through naturally. It has always felt like something I was chasing.

(Dyslexia Is a Writer's Superpower.)

Growing up dyslexic meant learning early that the world moves fast and rarely waits. Reading took longer. Writing took longer. Processing took longer. In classrooms built on speed, fluency, and right answers delivered on demand, hesitation felt like failure. I learned how to rush before I learned how to reflect. I learned how to keep moving before I learned how to stay.

That urgency followed me everywhere.

By the time I hit 23 years old, I had moved more than 16 times. I had lived across the country, from California to South Carolina, and everywhere in between. I had traveled through five other countries, met extraordinary people, seen landscapes I once only imagined from screens. From the outside, my life looked full, busy, even adventurous. But motion is not the same thing as presence. And I rarely stopped long enough to feel where I was.

I was always headed somewhere else.

There’s a line in my novel The Enemy of Time that reads: “You don’t have to die to be a ghost.” When I wrote it, I didn’t yet realize how autobiographical it was. What I meant was simple: If you are constantly rushing, toward success, survival, validation, or relief, you can disappear from your own life. You can move through experiences without inhabiting them. You can be physically present and emotionally elsewhere.

You can haunt yourself.

The story that eventually became The Enemy of Time began as a short piece I wrote in college. It lingered long after the assignment ended, not because of plot, but because of feeling. I couldn’t stop thinking about time, how quickly it moves, how unevenly it’s experienced, and how it shapes love, memory, and regret.

Dyslexia taught me how easy it is to equate speed with worth. To believe that if I just moved faster, learned quicker, adapted sooner, achieved more, I would arrive at a place where time loosened its grip. But the finish line kept moving. Even when you reach the future you’ve been chasing, it immediately turns into the present, and then the past. There is always something else ahead.

That realization is what pulled me deeper into writing about time.

The Enemy of Time became a way to interrogate that pressure. I wasn’t interested in chronology or neat resolutions. I was interested in how memory interrupts the present, how first love lingers, how regret reshapes meaning long after events are over. I structured the novel to move between past and present because that’s how time actually behaves, layered, overlapping, constantly intruding.

Writing the book forced me to slow down in ways I hadn’t before. With dyslexia, my instinct had always been to over-explain, to prove I understood before anyone questioned me. But this story demanded restraint. It asked me to trust silence, to let moments sit without rushing them to clarity. I learned that presence on the page mirrors presence in life. If you don’t linger, nothing lands.

For the first time, I began paying attention not just to where I was going, but to where I had been.

What I realized is that reflection isn’t indulgent. It’s grounding. Every version of myself, the one racing through classrooms, the one packing boxes again and again, the one boarding planes without fully unpacking her own thoughts, built the ground I’m standing on now. The past isn’t something we outgrow. It’s something we carry, whether we acknowledge it or not.

I used to believe that being behind meant failing. Now I understand that constantly rushing can be its own kind of erasure. You don’t have to stop moving entirely. But you do have to choose presence. You have to let moments register before they slip through your fingers, like sand from a broken hourglass.

Time will keep moving; that much is inevitable. Writing The Enemy of Time taught me that time itself was never the enemy, the danger was how often I disappeared inside it, mistaking speed for survival. Every version of myself, from the one rushing through classrooms to the one moving endlessly from place to place, built the ground I’m standing on now. What I do with this present moment is already becoming memory, already shaping what comes next. And this time, I’m choosing to experience every second, every minute, and every day, remembering that the present is a gift we so often forget to open.

Bookshop | Amazon

(WD uses affiliate links)