My Sense of Time is Colonial

Time never moved fast enough. Back when I walked the streets of Philadelphia, I hated absolute strangers for no reason. Or at least, I thought there was no reason until I realized that nine times out of ten, it was because the person in front of me was moving at the pace of a turtle made of molasses. Fuck those people for moving so slow, how dare they? Didn’t they fucking know that people (and by people, I meant me) had somewhere to be? Somewhere important? And that my destination was more important than theirs? 

It felt like hating slow people in any context – on the sidewalk, in public transit, at long lines, wherever – was a uniquely American experience. Everything must be optimized. If you weren’t moving at an optimal pace, then society hates you. It was as if society even applauded you for hating slow things. Yes, people became things – immovable obstacles for you to pass through, to be angry at as though it were a tall fence in a video game. 

Now…I’m in Bogotá.

First thing’s first: everyone here is late for everything. You, inevitably, will be late for something. You quickly realize that people aren’t late out of laziness or poor time management, but because of Transmilenio - in addition to the worst traffic you’ve ever experienced in your entire life. All you can do is throw your hands in the air and accept the fact that this is the way time moves, and that you cannot push a molasses tortoise to move across the quicksand traffic any faster.

Being late has never been so beautiful. And so, so healing. 

Even before I moved to Bogotá, I was obsessed with the way that Latin communities have experienced time. At first, it started as a desire to dismantle our ideas surrounding “professionalism”. I even wrote an essay about it for a publication. But I now realize that my examination of professionalism was about something far deeper: time, and how the twin-headed hydra of dominance and social Darwinism uses time against us. 

I’m going to talk about my mother, for reasons I’ll reveal if you’re patient enough. If you’re not patient, you can feel free to go read another think piece, because it’s going to take a while. My mother is a first-generation Colombian immigrant. She came to the United States not knowing any English, pursued a nursing degree anyways, managed to raise two sons on her own, and is now in a high-ranking position in the hospital that she works at. 

My mom hates being late more than anyone else I know. She hates when other people are late. Every morning, she would get angry at me because I was always the reason why she was late for work since she had to drive me to school first. If there was even the slightest concern we would be late for a doctor’s appointment, she would call in advance and apologize. To this very day, she insists that I must be at the airport two hours early. Sometimes I still fight with her about that last one.

And before I critique that behavior, it’s important for you, the reader, to understand where that comes from. In order for any immigrant to survive the wrath of the hydra, they must learn perfection. They must arrive earlier to meetings than their white colleagues. They must, with machine-like precision, accomplish tasks quicker than actual machines. They must learn to be Not Like The Others.

I am a product of that behavior. When I was in my early-to-mid 20s, I made it a habit to be thirty minutes early to everything. For the most part, I still am. I was always the first one to send the follow-up, to be waiting for people messier than me. What I regret most of all was that in many situations, I was more than happy to take on the most labor if it needed to be done.

But folks…I have to admit that I’m super fucking tired of being this machine. And I hate knowing that the machine was created by a societal pressure to be not just efficient, but culturally palatable for white people as well. And I hate knowing that even with all my complaints I still have to be this machine, because otherwise I turn into food, and the hydra will swallow me whole. Machines, of course, are inedible.

At a previous job, I snapped. I got into a fight with a co-worker about me being late for a carpool, and it became a huge scene that required conflict resolution with my boss. But to be perfectly honest, I am still to this day unrepentant about it. A few years ago, I would’ve felt terrible. God, I’m such a terrible person for being late. What’s wrong with me? How disrespectful.

Actually, let’s examine what that statement means. Why is being late perceived as disrespectful? For the longest time, I was never really sure why people felt this way. When other people were late, I felt very annoyed, but never disrespected. Disrespect implied something else entirely. People say that by showing up late you’re not respecting people’s time, but I think the reverse is true. By showing up late, you suggest that you respect yourself so little that you are implicitly saying that your presence doesn’t matter one way or the other. If you are late it doesn’t matter anyways because you might as well not be there at all.

Maybe I’m taking this too seriously. I will admit I have a tendency to get a little surly when people critique others for being late, even if I’m annoyed as well. But it’s not without reason: there are actual consequences for these attitudes, and they affect people of color the most. Hiring practices, reasons for termination, and micromanaging – all of these are related to a colonial perception of time.  The negativity surrounding CP time, in particular, is still harmful for many people of color trying to enter professional spaces, and it’s less a matter of correcting the behavior than it is a matter of correcting the culture. 

Yes, people in Colombia are frequently late for things. And yes, sometimes those people are annoyed when this happens. But I also know that some tardiness is to be expected, and rarely do I ever hear anyone apologize for it unless if it’s really bad.
“I was sitting here for an hour.”
“Qué pena, el trancón fue ridículo.”
Apologies here are warranted, unlike the United States where it seems like people love to apologize for even being five minutes late. These apologies come from a cultural place of wanting to be forgiven for something that’s almost treated as a crime.

I’ve spent so much time thinking about this that I want to create performance art about it. I want to force an audience to wait for something to happen in an empty theater, only for the show to start forty minutes late. I want to disrupt our sense of punctuality, and the convenience we’ve taken for granted here in the United States. Because as small as this may seem to you, it actually makes the biggest difference in some people’s lives. 

And for the record, this took a very long time to write. Sorry for being late.