Afterwardness

From

I have an even more pressing sense that the next seven years of my life will look very different than the last seven. And that I won’t know the full weight of that difference until after the After.

This is an excellent example of the psychoanalytic concept of afterwardness (Nachträglichkeit in Freud’s German and aprés coup in Lacan’s French) — the retroactive construction and attribution of meaning.

Because we live our lives as if we are walking backward through time with the future at our backs. We can see and make sense of the past only after it happens and passes into our field of vision.