“It is not the years in your life but the life in your years that counts.”
– Abraham Lincoln
Time is one of the greatest illusions we’ve ever created. We slice it into neat little boxes—minutes, hours, days, years—convincing ourselves that we can measure life by its length. But what if that’s all wrong? What if time isn’t the ticking of a clock but the richness of the moments we’ve lived? What if a long life has nothing to do with years at all?
There was a time when survival felt like my only purpose. Life wasn’t something to be enjoyed or experienced—it was something to get through. Time became a cruel rhythm, marking the hours, days, and years I spent trapped in pain and fatigue. I wasn’t living; I was enduring.
At 17, I began to unravel. The exhaustion, the strange pains, the overwhelming fog in my mind—it all started to pile up. By 22, I was completely lost in it. I’d look at myself in the mirror, pale and empty, and think, I’m dying, and no one believes me. Not my family, not my friends, not even my doctors.
When your illness is invisible, so too is your suffering. People assume you’re fine because you look fine. They assume you’re lazy or dramatic because they can’t see the battle raging inside your body. And after years of being dismissed and doubted, you start to doubt yourself. Am I exaggerating? Is this just what life feels like for everyone?
And so you endure. You push through. You smile when you want to cry. You lie down on the floor of your bedroom because it’s the only place you can find comfort. You go to work, to school, to social events, and pretend you’re okay, when in reality, you’re barely holding on.
For years, this was my life: endless endurance, punctuated by moments of despair. I wasn’t living—I was just surviving in a world where every day felt miserable; a misery so consuming that it clouded the entire lens through which I looked at the world.
Each day felt the same: one of deep despair, sadness, sorrow, and pain. I felt like I was on one hand stuck in an eternal time loop of endless suffering and on the other I was anxious time was going too fast, missing out because I had to stay in bed, come home early or sleep all weekend. I’d look back on time and wonder where it was all going and feeling the loss of it.
But now, I realize something I couldn’t back then: time bends, warps, and stretches depending on how we experience it. It’s not fixed. And the more I reflect on it, the more I wonder if the length of a life is irrelevant—if what really matters is how deeply we live it.
Time Is a Human Construct
The funny thing about time is that it’s entirely made up. Humans created it to make sense of the chaos, to organize the rhythm of the sun and moon. But just because we measure it doesn’t mean it’s real—not in the way we think it is.
Time isn’t linear. It speeds up, slows down, and twists in ways that have nothing to do with the clock. Have you ever noticed how joy makes time fly, while grief stretches it endlessly?
When I was trapped in the cycle of illness, I didn’t see time this way. Back then, time felt like a relentless enemy. Every day stretched endlessly when I was in pain. Every year felt like a lifetime as I waited for answers, for relief, for something to change. And when I wasn’t waiting, I was mourning the time I felt I had already lost.
I think about this often. If you lived the same day, every day, for eighty years, would you really have lived a long life? Or would you have lived the same moment, on repeat, while time passed unnoticed around you? And if you packed eighty years of experiences into a single decade, would that decade feel like eternity?
The Illusion of a “Long Life”
When I was finally diagnosed with coeliac disease, I felt an overwhelming sense of relief. There was a name for what I was experiencing, a reason for the endless pain and exhaustion. It wasn’t all in my head. I wasn’t imagining it.
But the relief didn’t last long. My diagnosis was just the beginning of a new chapter of endurance. I went gluten-free, hopeful that this would be the cure I had been waiting for. And for a while, it helped. The fog began to lift, and the constant ache in my body started to fade. But the damage had already been done. Years of undiagnosed coeliac disease had left my body broken in ways that couldn’t be fixed overnight—or maybe ever.
Living with chronic illness changes your relationship with time. Days stretch endlessly when you’re in pain, each hour a test of endurance. But on the rare good days, time slips away too quickly, leaving you dreading the moment it ends. It’s a cruel paradox: time moves both too slowly and too fast, and you’re always fighting against it.
For most of my life, I felt trapped in this cycle. Time wasn’t something to enjoy; it was something to survive. I counted the days not because I was looking forward to anything, but because I was trying to get through them. And when you live like that—when every moment is defined by pain or exhaustion—you start to lose the meaning of time altogether.
I realized something profound during those years: a long life means nothing if you’re not truly living it. You can have decades ahead of you, but if you’re spending them in survival mode, they might as well not exist. Time, I’ve learned, isn’t measured in years or hours. It’s measured in memories, in moments, in the richness of the life you live within it.
Living Beyond Time
When I finally started to heal, I began to see time differently. Recovery wasn’t a straight line—it was slow and messy and frustrating. But it forced me to reevaluate what it means to live fully. I began to notice the moments that stretched time, the ones that made me feel truly alive.
The first time I ate a gluten-free meal at a restaurant without getting sick. The quiet joy of finding a vintage treasure hidden in a market stall. The freedom of walking through a new city, unburdened by pain. These moments weren’t extraordinary in the traditional sense, but they were extraordinary to me. They expanded time in a way that years of survival never could.
I realized that time isn’t linear or fixed. It bends and stretches depending on how we live it. A single, meaningful moment can hold more weight than an entire year of going through the motions. Life isn’t about how much time we have—it’s about how deeply we live within it.
When I think about those years of endurance, I realize that time itself was never the problem. The problem was how I was forced to live within it. But now, I see time as a concept—one that can dissolve entirely when we focus on what really matters. When we stop counting the minutes and start living the moments, time itself begins to fade.
The Paradox of a Timeless Life
When you stop obsessing over how much time you have, time becomes irrelevant. Life isn’t about quantity but about quality. A short life filled with richness can feel infinite, while a long life without meaning can feel painfully short.
This is the paradox I’ve come to embrace: to live a timeless life, we must stop measuring time at all. Instead, we measure life in memories, in the richness of experiences, and in the moments that make us feel truly alive.
A Life Worth Remembering
So what does it mean to live a long life? I don’t think it’s about the years at all. It’s about the stories we tell, the connections we make, and the moments we’ll carry with us forever. It’s about the depth of our experiences, the richness of our memories, and the way we choose to fill the time we have.
For me, this is what freedom looks like: letting go of the need to measure life and instead choosing to live fully in each moment. Because when we live this way, time itself begins to fade—and all that’s left is a life well lived.
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