Language2

It took a while, but communication was finally at a point where it was more meaningful that just a exchange of simple ideas. It was as though everything you thought was in focus suddenly shifted out, went wide angle and made a much better picture. It took some getting used to the idea that people you thought you knew almost as well as yourself was an illusion. What people had was a vague collection of ideas that happened to match what was visible enough to believe it. What it ignored, was that the internal workings were almost entirely unlike what one imagined. People were much more varied and complex than had been previously thought. It was the difference between stumbling around in twilight looking at stick figures and seeing an engineering drawing under bright light.

It was hard to say if people had more insight into the turn of a phrase, subtle facial reactions, and the like, or if something more extraordinary was happening. It would be a fair amount of time till that it was decided to be a bit of both. What was clear was that it would have been awkward and confusing had it happened sooner.

Context

It is astonishing how much context and infrastructure most people need. Without being surrounded by the people and things that they normally are, a majority of individuals flounder. That is probably the main reason why time travel isn't practical for so many. Their lives are built around and are entirely dependent on a more or less static environment. Any quirky fluctuation, like a famous franchise suddenly having a different name, would drive them over the edge.

Any sufficiently grounded time cadet would be relying on very few fixtures. “Food and shelter, maybe gravity” is the kind of rail they require. In the more active time currents, things change – or rather shift – on an almost daily basis. The disorienting thing is that it's not change for the people they interact with, but an almost seamless shift to a new set of similar people with different memories. Again something fundamentally devastating to someone not ready for it. To someone accustom to it, the opposite is more jarring. Life is a flat plain with no edges, a homogeneous soup without landmarks.

Stuck

His brain felt like it was a piece of clay being fired. Thoughts piled up like silt, leaving him feeling muffled and buried. A thousand scenarios and a hundred identities flew through his consciousness, to the point where they didn't even register any more. His thoughts lacked structure. Nothing amounted to much. No feeling was stirred, no conclusion reached, seemingly no progress toward anything. It felt like a catch 22, to have his thoughts get traction required a new foundation, which required thoughts making a difference in the first place.

At the center of his mind there was a black hole. An event horizon of stress and pressure that exerted a pain like joints being pulled. It was as if some part of him wanted to escape, but settled for pulling itself apart.

Can't Unlearn

There are very few things in life that you can't unlearn, or at least safely ignore to the point where you don't let them affect you. Time travel is one of those things. Once you've been opened to the idea that anything in the past, large or small, can be fluid, rather than immutable, your world goes upside down.

In the end though, your idea of you is from a huge mountain of events and thoughts, and while some individual moments may be important, very rarely are they as life-defining as most people assume that they are. Often a good habit is to internalize whatever crossroad decisions one has made and render them less likely to change based on potentially vulnerable binary actions. If one's personality and history is seen as sandbar in a river, rather than a rock – which is either whole or broken, one is a lot more resilient.

Past as a lattice

It was impossible to Time Travel in the classic sense. No 'body' could be in two times at the same time. There was, however, a way around it. A reflection of a person could be sent back – it wasn't a whole person, or even anything tangible, but the act of reflecting could influence the past. It was as if a part of a person was there to see or influence an event, but not actually there. It was as if the past was simply a latticework that everyone agreed on, without being a tangible thing.

The result was the fact that you could project anything, see what the effect was, and just as easily neutralize it.