It takes as long as it takes—and that’s ok.

A meditation on autistic temporality, slow becoming, and narrative sovereignty.

Autistic time isn’t a deficit—it’s a different way of being. Research affirms this. Recursive, relational, and sovereign, this is a meditation on slow becoming, seasonal rhythms, and the right to move off the clock.

Opening Gesture – Refusal of the Clock

I was always late—not in arriving, but in becoming. Or so I was told. Late to speak, late to play, late to ‘mature.’ These judgements trailed me from childhood, whispered with concern by professionals, scribbled in margins of progress notes, echoed in well-meaning parental worry. There were charts I didn’t follow, benchmarks I quietly resisted, timelines that never felt like mine. But what if I wasn’t late at all? What if the framework itself was mistimed—designed for a different kind of rhythm, a different kind of child?

From the beginning, autistic people are positioned through the lens of delay: “missed” milestones, “lagging” development, “critical intervention windows” rapidly closing. These are not neutral descriptors; they are temporal verdicts, authored by a system that demands compliance to a singular arc of becoming. But perhaps the system itself is premature in its expectations. Autistic temporality often doesn’t conform to linear progression—and need not be made to. Studies suggest that whilst differences in time perception exist across sensory modalities, there is no universal ‘deficit’ among autistic adults in core timing tasks, even where self-reported difficulties remain high (Poole et al., 2022). The issue, then, may not lie within us, but within the narrowness of the developmental gaze itself.

Still, the narrative persists. We are late. We are always late. Not just in speech or socialisation, but in transition, in “readiness,” in “independence.” But behind what, exactly? Whose clock ticks loudest in the background of these evaluations? Whose calendar of life stages are we being measured against?

These questions are not rhetorical—they are structural. To ask them is to confront the authority of developmentalism, to name its temporal hegemony. The timelines it enforces—by age two, by kindergarten, by eighteen—are not laws of nature. They are artefacts of policy, culture, and control. Timetables mistaken for truths. When we reject the narrative that we are “behind,” we are not denying difference. We are refusing to be governed by someone else’s tempo. What they call delay may, in truth, be divergence. What they call falling behind may, in truth, be a rhythm that moves through spiral rather than line, that pauses where others press forward, that blooms not on schedule, but in season.

Fractured Timelines – The Imposed Linearities

The age of majority. The age of consent. The school year. The quarterly review. The five-year plan. These are not just markers of time—they are architectures of control, designed to regulate the shape and speed of human life. In the world of education, medicine, and public policy, time becomes a disciplinary force. For autistic people, whose rhythms often diverge from these institutional scripts, the consequences of misalignment are not minor. We are not simply out of step—we are marked, managed, and medicalised for it.

From infancy, our development is measured against age-based benchmarks. Sit by six months. Speak by eighteen. Make eye contact. Transition out of services by twenty-two. These milestones are treated as neutral signposts, but they function as tools of compliance. The Power Threat Meaning Framework (PTMF) helps to illuminate this dynamic: what appears to be mere categorisation is often, in practice, a threat narrative—one that positions difference as risk, and delay as danger. When autistic people do not conform to these expectations, it is not our timing that is questioned, but our worth.

Empirical studies support the idea that autistic time is qualitatively different—not universally impaired, but often divergent in complex, context-sensitive ways. Differences in higher-order time perception, such as estimating long durations or sequencing events, have been consistently observed (Casassus et al., 2018). These variations may explain why imposed timelines—particularly those requiring precision and synchronisation with external demands—can feel so profoundly dissonant. But the problem is not that we are out of time. It is that the world refuses to make space for multiple temporalities.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the structures meant to support us. Individualised Education Programmes (IEPs) and transition plans are frequently mapped not around our actual needs or lived rhythms, but around institutional timelines. A student must “transition” by a certain age not because they are ready, but because the funding ends. Goals are written in quarterly intervals, progress measured by calendar dates, not relational or emotional development. The result is a kind of temporal gaslighting: we are urged to hurry up whilst being told we’re too slow, pushed to move forward on tracks that were never built with us in mind. These are not supports. They are schedules. Train timetables masquerading as life paths. And if we derail, it is we who are blamed—not the map, not the rails, not the system that never saw us coming.

Recursive Temporality – The Autistic Alternative

When I re-live a moment years later and finally understand it, I am not behind. I am returning as the story’s rightful teller. For many autistic people—especially gestalt processors—time does not move in straight lines. It spirals, echoes, loops back on itself. Understanding comes not in the moment, but in the return. A gesture once overlooked suddenly becomes a revelation. A phrase heard in childhood resurfaces with new meaning decades later. This is not delay. This is nonlinear coherence—sense-making through time as re-entry, not departure.

Autistic temporality is often recursive in nature. Our processing may be slow by external standards, but it is richly textured and layered. Research supports this in part: whilst autistic individuals can show difficulty with conventional time estimation, many display strengths in reproducing durations with notable accuracy, likely connected to heightened perceptual detail or visual memory (Wallace & Happé, 2008). These findings complicate the dominant view of autistic time as flawed or deficient. Instead, they suggest an alternative logic at work—one attuned to pattern, depth, and delayed precision.

This recursive temporality is not simply a quirk of cognition; it is a form of epistemology. It tells us something about how we know, not just what we know. And it demands that we reconsider narrative itself—not as a straight arrow from beginning to end, but as a field we move through again and again. For autistic people, narrative sovereignty begins not in chronology, but in reclamation. The right to revisit. To reframe. To name the meaning that was not visible the first time through.

To live this way is to refuse the tyranny of closure. It is to honour the long gestation of insight. To know that stories don’t always yield their truth on schedule. And to believe, fiercely, that arriving late is sometimes the only way to arrive at all.

The Ethics of Slowness – Sovereignty as Refusal

Autistic time is not a failure of pace. It is an ethics of attention. In a world that idolises speed, to be slow is to be suspect—lazy, resistant, broken. But slowness, for many autistic people, is not the mark of dysfunction. It is the shape of care. Slowness in speech, in processing, in change. Slowness in making decisions because all the variables matter. Slowness in forming relationships because honesty cannot be rushed. To be slow in this way is not to be delayed. It is to be deliberate. To move with the world, not through it.

This temporal slowness often intertwines with sensory and emotional depth. We do not merely mark time—we feel it. Research shows that autistic individuals frequently misestimate time intervals when emotional stimuli are involved (Nazari & Yaghooti, 2016). This suggests that time, for us, is porous—inflected by affect, disrupted by sensory load, stretched or collapsed by what matters. What others call distraction, we might call depth. What others dismiss as lag, we might recognise as attunement.

And it is precisely this attunement that makes us incompatible with the temporal machinery of modern life. The clock on the wall. The bell between lessons. The rigid schedule of meetings, assessments, deadlines. These instruments do not account for the soft data we are tracking: the tremor in a voice, the flicker of a thought not yet spoken, the silence that carries meaning. Our refusal is not only of speed, but of what speed excludes.

To live according to autistic time is to inhabit what some call crip time—time as flexible, responsive, alive. Or what might be called mythic time—the time of seasons, rituals, nonlinear unfoldings. It is unschooling time. Garden time. Spiral time. It is a rhythm that honours the moment not for what it produces, but for what it reveals. To embrace this is to enact sovereignty—not only over one’s schedule, but over one’s very way of being. A refusal, not of engagement, but of extraction. A declaration that presence matters more than pace. That emergence is more faithful than efficiency. And that not all who move slowly are lost—some are simply paying better attention.

Practical / Structural Hooks – Disruption as Pattern

There were years that felt like nothing, and minutes that rewrote everything. This is the rhythm of many autistic lives—not a smooth arc, but a pattern of rupture and return. We pause. We shut down. We vanish from classrooms, jobs, friendships, conversations. We are labelled inconsistent, unreliable, unwell. But what if this movement is not malfunction, but method? What if these disappearances are not absences, but necessary reconfigurations—gestures of refusal, intervals of becoming?

Autistic time is often discontinuous. It flickers. It retreats. It surges. Studies show wide variability in how autistic people estimate and reproduce time, particularly under emotional or sensory load (Jones et al., 2014). We may overestimate or underestimate duration depending on how we feel, how overwhelmed we are, how intensely we are processing. Multisensory integration is likewise altered—our windows for synchronising sound and sight are narrower than those of non-autistic peers (Stevenson et al., 2016), meaning our perception of what is “happening now” may differ entirely. We do not always inhabit a shared present. The world demands simultaneity. We offer synchronicity of a different kind.

In institutional contexts—school timetables, performance evaluations, therapeutic goals—this temporal divergence is treated as disorder. We are told to regulate, to push through, to maintain continuity. But many of us learn in cycles. We drop out of systems that demand too much, only to resurface later with new insight, language, understanding. We appear to stall, only to bloom later—differently, unexpectedly, and often without warning.

These so-called interruptions are not failures. They are compost. Fallows. Underground germinations. To leave the room, to go silent, to abandon a project half-finished is sometimes the most necessary act we can make. We are not avoiding life. We are living it on a timescale that does not map cleanly onto external expectations.

In my own life, the moments when I seemed to be doing “nothing” were often the most formative. When I left school. When I stopped writing. When I could no longer force myself to function in the ways I was told I must. These periods weren’t collapses. They were intervals of quiet metabolisation. This piece of writing is no exception. It is not linear. It is recursive. It took years to begin, and even longer to realise it had already started.

The Time It Takes
(for those who write in seasons, not schedules)

This piece of writing
did not begin when I sat down.
It began
in the hush of a room
I left a decade ago—
an unfinished sentence
woven into the grain of the floorboards.

It began
on the hill where the wind changed names,
where I forgot what I was seeking
but the land remembered.

There were years
that looked like stillness—
but they were compost.
Roottime.
Unseen work beneath the frostline.
What they called “stuck”
was a turning inward
toward soil.

Some lines
arrived on time.
Others returned
from places I hadn’t yet been—
gestalt driftwood
washed ashore
from the future past.

I did not write this in order.
I wrote it
like the land remembers:
layered, recursive, porous.
The present
brushing against the knees of the dead.
The past
still warm in the stones.

Time does not move forward.
It lingers,
it circles,
it waits in the corners of fields
and the margins of forms
I never signed.

I do not write in chronos.
I write in kairos.
In the pause before the knowing.
In the seam between breath and speech.
In the opening that appears
only when the ground is ready.

This is how I write:
not when it is time,
but when time itself
leans in
and listens.

Closing: A Ritual of Time-Reclamation

I no longer chase their clocks. I name my own seasons.

Let this not be a conclusion, but a soft shift in gravity. Not the end of the story, but a widening of its field. Autistic time was never about punctuality, or progression, or fitting cleanly into the slots allotted by institutions. We are not late. We are not early. We are not stuck. We are sovereign in our time.

The stories we tell, the learning we do, the care we offer—none of it conforms to the neat pulses of the working day or the school year. None of it fits the factory schedule, the quarterly review, the project timeline. It moves instead through sensation and significance, not sequence. Not the polished, synthetic flow of time as imagined by corporate planning or the Time Variance Authority in Disney’s Loki, where divergence is danger and pruning awaits the deviant. Our time is not that kind of line. It is not something to be patrolled.

If anything, our experience of time is closer to the one imagined in Synchronic—time as place-bound, affective, embodied. Not a matter of seconds ticking forward, but of meaning anchoring itself to terrain. Events recur not because they are scheduled, but because something draws us back. A gesture. A grief. A knowing that arrives only when the body says it is safe enough to know.

This is autistic temporality—not chronos, but something more teleological. Not measured in deadlines, but in thresholds. We arrive when we are ready, when the world around us begins to match the world within. We return not to repeat, but to repair, to retrieve, to retell. Kairos, not as mystical interruption, but as the ordinary miracle of timing that feels right in the bones.

Chronos was never ours. It was always someone else’s ruler—rigid, linear, measuring worth by speed and sequence. Even kairos, though more generous, is not of our soil. These are foreign clocks, inherited metaphors, imported frames. In older traditions—those of my own people—time was not a line, nor even a break in the line. Time was a landscape. Layered. Lived-in. Echoing with the footsteps of those who came before. The past was not behind but beneath, folded into the stones and the soil. That is closer to how I move.

I do not follow schedules; I attune to openings. I do not obey calendars; I wait for the ground to soften. We do not need to be on time to belong. We belong because we live in time differently—because we sense, in our own unspoken ways, when the moment is right to act, to speak, to return, to begin. Not as a path to a fixed outcome, but as a rhythm that reveals itself only in relationship. What I claim is not chronos. Not even kairos. What I claim is a right to dwell in my own unfolding. To move through time not as commodity, but as kin.