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Do you feel distanced from your own life? Do emotions no longer resonate with you like they should? Does your waking life seem oddly dream-like? Do your thoughts and surroundings seem unrecognizable?
Well, I’m sorry to say but you might be suffering from one of the most elusive and misunderstood disorders of our time: Depersonalization/Derealization.
You could go to the doctor and tell them what’s happening, but don’t expect much help. You might get antidepressants or anti-anxiety medication, but you might not be depressed, and your anxiety might stem directly from your depersonalization-derealization (DPDR) so they probably won’t help much. You might get a therapist or psychiatrist, and if you’re in the UK then they’ll focus on practicing CBT, but what’s the point of gaining a mastery over your feelings, thoughts, and behaviours when they don’t seem like your feelings, thoughts, and behaviours? Maybe you’ll get to partake in talking therapy; this might actually help because now you can go into detail about what you’re experiencing… I just hope articulation is your strong suit because you’ll be describing something that is both weirdly ethereal and rarely researched. You’ll find out pretty quickly that discussing DPDR is a little harder than discussing depression and anxiety because its lack of understanding and relative obscurity means that there is little representation in the media. Plus, its rarity means that you might have never had the chance to exchange ideas on it with a friend.
I suffer from DPDR. For several years I have felt distant from my body and from my own thoughts. Sometimes I think about the life I’ve fallen into and I struggle to understand why I call it my own. There will be times where I wake up and hope to god that I don’t have to interact with others; not because I wish to be alone, but because I’m scared that I’ll forget how to communicate with them. Sometimes the thought of speaking to another scares me because there’s nothing like being near people to remind yourself that you don’t feel like one.
It comes in waves for me. Some days I feel relatively human and present, then the feeling of isolation will creep up and up, until I’m sitting at my keyboard and watching myself type rather than actively typing.
