So the seed was sown, in Inception-like fashion – time is ending, make the most of it. Time became like water; it slipped through my fingers no matter how much I tried to savour every drop. I never wanted to make the mistake of taking the open-ended timeline ahead of me for granted.

Today, my relationship with time manifests itself in a sense of pressure. Pressure to get where I want to be in life, faster – to not gently plod from step to step, but leap bounds ahead as swiftly as possible. Every failure feels like a setback and time I can’t afford to lose. It means I often don’t start things – even projects I really want to come to fruition – as I don’t know if I will have the time to complete them. Or I worry that I’ll feel like I’ve just wasted more of my precious hours and minutes if a venture doesn’t work out the way I’d planned. In the past, this sense of time pressure has caused me to stay in unhealthy relationships too long or become impatient if my efforts in my career don’t lead where I want them to.

Part of this intense pressure (which is more of a hindrance than a help) comes down to the fact that I still, in some ways, feel as though I need to catch up; as though I lost out on years of fun, dating, travelling and growth when I was deep in the pits of my grief-fuelled depression. My head bobbed back up above the water around two years after my dad died, when I was 18 and at university. I had the distinct sensation that I was not only alive but living again, for the first time in a while. I danced until 3am, sobbed freely, laughed heavily – the kind of belly-shaking cackle that only happens with true friends.

It was during this period that I stumbled across a lesser-known gem by director Richard Curtis, the time-travelling romcom About Time. The Rachel McAdams and Domhnall Gleeson-led film features a cast like no other (Bill Nighy, Tom Hollander and Lindsay Duncan to name a few), and delves into the paradoxical sense of time that I’d grappled with since my dad’s death. It explores the joy of being alive and relishing time spent with people you love, alongside the sheer pain of it ending when someone you love dies.

“I feel pressured to make the most of my time after my dad died in his 40s”