Legs against the carpet, hair leaving wet patches against my shirt, phone in my hand, eyes unseeing in the mirror. I am not in my body. I am a walking dream. Floating.
The first time I recognized I was experiencing something called "depersonalization" was about a month ago. At first, I had no idea what was happening. And, let me tell you, that was more terrifying than the actual symptoms I was experiencing. The only way I can explain the sensation is relating it to the feeling you get right before you faint. It's like you lose control of your body, only barely aware of your presence in reality. To me, everything looks two-dimensional, unreal and bizarre. The good thing, if you wish to look at it that way, about depersonalization is that the sufferer knows that something is wrong. We know that something is happening and, thankfully, don't completely disassociate from reality. Although this can be helpful in getting us back to the present, it also makes it even more terrifying because we feel as if we have no control over anything.
The second time it happened, I was driving home late at night. I was driving along a route I had traveled hundreds of times yet I didn't recognize anything. I was aware I was in the car and my muscles knew what to do and where they needed to go but nothing around me looked familiar. I wasn't physically lost but my mind very much was. So I gripped onto the steering wheel until my knuckles turned a pale white, I rolled the windows down despite the below freezing temperature, and turned my music up as loud as it could possibly go. Eventually, I snapped back into my body and the stop sign I eventually rolled up to became the first thing I recognized in the past ten minutes.
While I don't think it's a good idea to self-diagnose, it was clear that something was happening to me, something I couldn't explain. And through research and a helping hand from my mom, depersonalization became the word I was looking for. I'm not sitting here diagnosing myself with Depersonalization Disorder but, rather, I'm recognizing depersonalization as a symptom of something larger. I've been vocal on here as well as throughout the course of my life about my struggle with various mental and physical illnesses (Sensory Processing Disorder, Social Phobia, Depression, Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, and Dysautonomia). Now that I think back on my life and try to figure out where this whole thing has stemmed from (since it's common for depersonalization to appear after some sort of stressful or traumatic incident, which for me there has been none), it's possible that this has been happening since I was a kid struggling with my Sensory Processing Disorder. As I think back to those times, I begin to recall a desire to go outside of myself when the world became too loud, too bright, too chaotic (which basically was all the time). Maybe I began depersonalizing back then, longing to make it stop somehow.
But where this has come from isn't the important part. Instead, the most crucial thing for me at this stage is to get it under control. Because, within the past month, it's been happening more and more. It's time I stand up to it. Whether that means increased therapy sessions, increased/different medication, or other forms of treatment, I'm okay with whatever has to happen. I recognize that this is something that cannot go away on its own no matter how much I try to ignore it. Putting a name to my symptoms is a way I've begun to take power over it and that's a good feeling.
