Hola! I’m Ixchel Lunar (they/them), an Indigenous-Time ecologist, ancestral medicine guide, and rhythm witch for creative rebels, decolonial dreamers, and neuroqueer visionaries. This Substack is dedicated to weaving business, body, and belonging into something no empire can replicate. Still punk as fuck. Still cozy in the chaos.
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Beautiful Wildling,
I feel like something is off with time. I keep noticing it, and then noticing myself noticing it, like I’m clocking whether I’m the only one.
I don’t mean Time. Not the big thing. Not the ancestral, rhythmic, relational kind. I mean the everyday time we’re supposed to live inside. The clock time. The schedule time. The kind that tells you you’re late, behind, falling short, even when nothing obvious is wrong.
I think most people feel it, even if they don’t talk about it this way. It shows up as disorientation more than panic. Days blur together. Planning feels strange, like it asks for a confidence people don’t actually have right now. The future feels thin. I keep coming back to that word. Thin. Not gone. Just hard to lean on.
I hear people say they feel late all the time. Late to what, they’re not sure. I think that part matters. Tired, even when they’ve rested. Anxious, but not about one clear thing. I feel like there’s this constant background hum of urgency, but no destination attached to it. Just pressure. Just pace.
The clock keeps moving. Of course it does. Meetings still happen. Calendars still fill up. Deadlines still exist. I’m not pretending we’re outside of that. But I think fewer people trust this version of time than they used to. Or maybe they never did, and they’re only starting to notice now.
I feel like something quietly broke in our relationship with Time, and we’ve been blaming ourselves for it.
I think that’s why so many people say things like, “I should be able to handle this,” or “Other people seem fine,” or “Maybe I’m just bad at managing my time.” I hear that a lot. And every time I do, I feel like what they’re actually pointing to isn’t a personal flaw. It’s a mismatch. A tempo problem.
I don’t think this is burnout the way we’re usually told it is. It’s older than that. Structural. Like we’re living inside a pace that stopped making sense, but we’re still being asked to obey it anyway.
And I think that kind of obedience does something to people, slowly.
I don’t think this is a personal failure. It isn’t. I feel protective of that truth.
I say that knowing how early so many of us were trained to feel behind.
I think about this a lot through my own body. I was a Gen X latchkey kid. Second grade. Getting myself to and from school. Watching the clock. Forgetting to watch the clock. Catching the bus. Running for it, actually. Always running for it. Late for the bus. Late to class. Late in that quiet, constant way where I never quite settle, but always feel rushed.
I feel like that did something to my nervous system early on. Trained it to scan. To hurry. To assume I was already behind before I even knew what I was supposed to be ahead of. And I don’t think I’m alone in that. I think a lot of us learned colonial time as pressure long before we learned it as “normal.”
That’s why I don’t buy the idea that what people are feeling now is just burnout, or poor time management, or individual overwhelm. I feel like those explanations miss how deep this goes. Something got set in motion long before any of us had a chance to opt out.
I keep coming back to modernity and how it taught us to experience time as a straight line instead of a living field. Vanessa Machado de Oliveira (Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures) names this so clearly. She talks about modernity as a project that fractures our relationship with time, land, ancestors, and continuity. A project that keeps people in a state of permanent insufficiency. Always behind. Always catching up. Always oriented toward a future that never quite arrives.
I feel that in my body when planning starts to feel impossible. When even imagining a few months ahead carries a subtle sense of failure, as if whatever I choose will already be wrong somehow. Too late somehow.
In that framework, colonial time stops being something you belong to. It becomes something you manage. Something you race. Something you lose.
That’s why, when the official story insists everything is stable while lived experience says otherwise, the rupture doesn’t show up first in data. It quietly shows up in your senses, registering as something else, in physical tension and sleep disturbance. Or that constant low-level alertness people carry. That split does real harm over time.
It erodes trust in the perception of what our bodies are experiencing. Frantz Fanon wrote about this under colonial rule. He traced how domination works by destabilizing perception, training people to doubt what they see, feel, and know. That doubt doesn’t stay external. It moves inward. People start second-guessing their own reality. Their own timing. Their own sense of what’s happening.
I feel like a lot of people are living inside that fracture right now. The training never ended. It scaled. It normalized. It got called resilience.
Now it’s metrics, indicators, and economic narratives instead of overseers. You’re told things are fine. Strong. Improving. And when your body doesn’t experience it that way, the assumption is that you need to adapt faster. Be more flexible. Manage yourself better.
I think a lot of people are living inside that gap right now. Between what they’re told and what they feel. Between the clock and their own sense of ancestral Timing.
And that gap does real damage over time.
I also think it matters who is feeling this for the first time, and who has been living inside it for generations.
I feel like some of the people I work with are encountering something in their bodies that Indigenous, Black, and colonized peoples have been naming for a long time. Not the same thing, in the same way. But an encounter with the logics of colonization lands somatically, as their old buffers of privilege thin.
I think this is part of what makes this moment so disorienting for a lot of white and otherwise privileged people. There’s a sense of shock. Of betrayal. Like the ground rules changed without warning. Like time stopped behaving the way it was supposed to. And I feel like what’s actually happening is that the protections that once made colonial time feel abstract are thinning.
Vanessa Machado de Oliveira talks about this as the loss of innocence that modernity depends on. The moment when the stories of progress, control, and inevitability stop working in the body. She’s clear that this is not shared suffering. It’s initiation without preparation. A reckoning with limits that other people were never allowed to forget.
I think that’s why the panic feels so loud in some spaces right now. Why people scramble for certainty, for solutions, for someone to tell them how to get back on track. I feel like they’re not just afraid of collapse.
They’re afraid of what it means to no longer be held outside of it.
For many Indigenous peoples, there was never a stable “before” to return to. Capitalism didn’t arrive as a sudden shock. It arrived as an ongoing disaster. Nick Estes keeps pointing this out, and I need that reminder. What feels like an ending for some has been the water others have been forced to swim in for generations. No promised future. No clean horizon. Just continuity under pressure.
That difference matters. It shapes who feels surprised by this moment and who recognizes it immediately.
And I feel like part of what’s happening now is that colonial time is failing even the people it once protected.
That doesn’t make this moment symmetrical. But it does reveal cracks.
It exposes how deeply time itself was used as a tool of separation. Who was allowed to plan? Who was forced to survive? Who got to imagine futures? Who was told to endure?
And now, as those separations break down, many people are feeling something they don’t yet have the language for. A loss of orientation. A loss of trust. A loss of coherence. A sense that obedience to the clock no longer guarantees safety.
I think this is where respons-ability begins.
I feel like it begins with staying present to what’s actually happening, without rushing to assign meaning or blame. Without turning the experience into performance or confession. Without making oneself the center of the story.
I feel a loss of coherence in conversations, in planning, and in how people talk about the future. Things don’t line up the way they used to. Stories don’t hold. Timelines feel unreliable. And instead of trying to force coherence back into place, our work right now is learning how to stay with that unraveling without hardening or numbing out. Living in Nepantla.
I think that kind of staying power requires listening. Not to the clock. Not to the metrics. But to Time itself, in a deeper sense. The kind of Time that isn’t broken, even when the systems built on top of it are. The kind of Time that has always known how to move without guarantees.
There are people and cultures who have been living in relationship with that kind of Time for as long as humans have had culture. People who were never promised stability, progress, or protection. People who learned how to orient by rhythm, by land, by kinship, by responsibility rather than certainty.
Listening to Time again means letting those ways of knowing and being rise.
Colonial time gets tighter. Louder. More insistent. It demands urgency even when urgency makes no sense. It tells people to hurry, to adapt, to optimize, to push through. It treats speed as virtue and pause as failure. And when the ground starts to shift, it doesn’t slow down. It accelerates.
Other timeways don’t move like that.
Indigenous Time doesn’t operate this way. Feminist Time doesn’t either. Queer and Crip Time definitely don’t. These ways of being in Time are built around relationship rather than dominance. They orient life through rhythm, season, reciprocity, pause, grief, repair. They measure what matters through continuity and responsibility, not output.
I feel like that contrast is becoming harder to ignore.
Right now, the United States keeps insisting the economy is strong while people struggle to afford food, housing, medical care, and rest. Job numbers circulate while jobs disappear. Inflation statistics flatten lived experience into something abstract and bloodless.
At the same time, other nations are dumping U.S. Treasury bonds, kneecapping the very structures that the empire meant to guarantee stability. The story tightens. The pressure builds. The pace intensifies.
I think this is how gaslighting works at scale, through colonial time.
I keep noticing how power shows up through pace. Through who gets rushed and who is made to wait. Through whose exhaustion is treated as acceptable, even necessary. Tempo becomes a way of sorting lives. Speed, delay, urgency, depletion. These aren’t neutral conditions. They’re governed. Achille Mbembe names this clearly when he writes about modern power as something that governs time as much as territory. Who waits? Who moves? Who burns out? Who becomes disposable?
And what makes this so hard to resist is how intimate it feels.
In what Byung-Chul Han calls the achievement society, exhaustion doesn’t look imposed. It looks self-generated. People experience depletion as personal failure rather than structural pressure. The demand to perform, optimize, and accelerate moves inside. The violence disappears behind motivation. Behind self-improvement. Behind the promise of becoming better, faster, and more capable.
Over time, people internalize the linear clock.
They blame themselves for feeling depleted. They assume they lack discipline or resilience. They treat exhaustion as a personal shortcoming instead of a signal. I feel like this is why so many people are confused right now. The tempo itself is violent, but it’s framed as opportunity. As ambition. As progress.
This isn’t new.
Indigenous, feminist, and Black thinkers have been naming this for a long time. Silvia Federici traces how capitalism required the theft of time just as much as the theft of land. Care, rest, reproductive labor, and cyclical rhythms were stripped of value and pushed out of view. Time was reorganized around extraction. Communal life was fractured. To control labor, people first had to be severed from rhythms that didn’t serve accumulation.
That severing didn’t end. It spread.
Estes keeps me honest about what “collapse” even means. An ongoing disaster. Continuity for some. Shock for others. That difference matters.
When denial intensifies, linear time tightens even more.
People are told to adapt faster. Innovate harder. Hustle smarter. The future gets framed as an individual responsibility rather than a shared horizon. And when people can’t keep up, they’re told they lack grit, vision, resilience.
Reality fractures. Authority insists nothing is wrong. The body carries the contradiction.
Collapse rarely arrives as spectacle.
More often it arrives as disbelief.
Disbelief in calendars, in futures, and in one’s own pacing.
Collapse is the moment certain stories no longer continue, as Bayo Akomolafe writes about in the “cracks.” One of those stories is obedient time. The belief that if we move faster, comply harder, and optimize better, stability will return.
It doesn’t.
What many people call burnout, anxiety, or loss of direction makes more sense to me as ancestral time injury, severance. An injury created by enforced tempos that override bodily knowing and sever relationship with land, ancestry, and future. Repair doesn’t come through better scheduling or mindset shifts. It comes through re-entering relationship.
That’s what this letter is circling.
This is the first in a short series on time injury and Time repair. Repair. Each letter names one fracture and offers one way of listening. Each one refuses urgency. This series doesn’t promise relief. It offers orientation and a way back to coherence.
Because right now, a lot of people don’t need fixing. They need help trusting what they’re already feeling.
The Practice
There’s a small practice I return to when time feels hostile. Not as control. As listening.
Once per day, I pause and notice how Time moved through me.
Where did I rush when my body asked for pause?
Where did I linger without justification?
Where did time feel hostile?
Where did it feel relational?
I don’t try to correct anything. I don’t optimize. I just notice.
Today I stood on the deck and watched the rain. I felt the portal of 13 Imox open. I felt how collective this moment is.
That noticing changes the relationship. It reframes Time as something I’m already in conversation with, rather than something I’m failing to manage. Over time, that kind of attention restores trust. It makes room for consent. It loosens obedience.
This work doesn’t require urgency.
The rest of this series will keep tracing how Time breaks under empire, how bodies register truth before institutions do, and how repair has always been a collective practice. These letters stand on their own. They’re also in quiet conversation with Wild Presence Year of Rhythm, where people practice Time repair together, over seasons, without acceleration.
There’s no rush. The clock is cracking anyway.
Stay wild, love fiercely. Your presence is golden.
With wild and rebellious love,
Maltiox! xo Ixchel
P.S. If you want a small taste of how to befriend Time without joining anything long-term, the Rhythm Reset session is a single, simple reset to help you find your pace again. You can book your session here.
P.P.S. Maltiox pronounced mall-tee-osh means with gratitude in K’iche Mayan.
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I was raised and bore children on the traditional, unceded, and stolen lands of the Coast and Central Valley Miwok (colonized as Petaluma, CA) and Nisenan (colonized as Sacramento and Fair Oaks, CA), past, present, and future. I also write, work, and live in the highland forest of the traditional, unceded and stolen lands of the Totonac, Nahua and Mexicah, past present and future, in what is known as Coatepec, Veracruz, Mexico.
P.P.S. I do not live or consent to the colonial impositions regarding the construct of Time. I also practice honoring rhythms of work, play, and rest so that I can serve you with embodied presence and with loving care. This means I may take several days to respond to your requests and questions. (h/t Eva Glamaris)
P.P.S. A mention is not necessarily an endorsement of someone. It’s an acknowledgment, a citation, of the origin of information in my process of understanding. (h/t Kelly Diels)
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Copyright © 2025, Cheyenne, WY and Veracruz, Mexico, All rights reserved. Sharing your lineage of knowledge is decolonial. When iterating, please cite me. Not citing is epistemicide.
