It’s been years since I’ve tried to publish anything on this blog, a few pieces always sat in my drafts, forever unpublished. I suppose this marks yet another attempt to publish something. A part of the reason I think other pieces sat as drafts is because I either couldn’t articulate what I was feeling in writing, or I just didn’t need the blog anymore. Maybe I need this blog again, during these horrid times.
For months there’s been a sort of spectre haunting me, one I thought I cast off long ago, chronic dissociation. I never really kicked dissociation away entirely, but for quite a while it was usually exclusively episodic, something I could deal and cope with much easier, but now it has regressed. I feel symptoms of both derealization, and to an extent, depersonalization, which I will define below:
Depersonalization symptoms
- Feelings that you’re an outside observer of your thoughts, feelings, your body or parts of your body — for example, as if you were floating in air above yourself
- Feeling like a robot or that you’re not in control of your speech or movements
- The sense that your body, legs or arms appear distorted, enlarged or shrunken, or that your head is wrapped in cotton
- Emotional or physical numbness of your senses or responses to the world around you A sense that your memories lack emotion, and that they may or may not be your own memories
Derealization symptoms
- Feelings of being alienated from or unfamiliar with your surroundings — for example, like you’re living in a movie or a dream Feeling emotionally disconnected from people you care about, as if you were separated by a glass wall
- Surroundings that appear distorted, blurry, colorless, two-dimensional or artificial, or a heightened awareness and clarity of your surroundings
- Distortions in perception of time, such as recent events feeling like distant past
- Distortions of distance and the size and shape of objects
During this lengthy, seemingly unending isolation my mind has gone through a lot of stages, filled with many emotions. From slight worry, with optimism in my back pocket, to growing concern, eventually turning into frustration and defeat. I watched the ups and downs of the COVID-19 new case graph on google, sometimes optimistic, sometimes disheartened. Vaccine availability for a time gave me a second wind of sorts, managing to even get vaccinated myself, but my hopes were eventually dashed away again.
The emotional rollercoaster my brain has gone through in the year and change was too much for it to handle, so my defenses went into override. Chronic dissociation is a pain I had been used to for a majority of my life, it had become so normalized I had really forgotten any other way of living. For a few years my dissociation has mostly been episodic. I was living the way most people do, with some hiccups along the way. Those few years were enough that chronic dissociation felt somehow somewhat familiar, alien, and horribly unpleasant simultaneously.
For a while I didn’t notice it, but as time went on I just ignored it, or denied it being there in the background of my life, but now I can’t ignore it. Emotionally my life is on pause, I am rarely in moments, instead I am couped up in my head in what I call “dissociative superposition”. I am just present enough to perceive reality around me and what is going on, but also so isolated and distant from it that I struggle to meaningfully participate in it. An action as simple as someone talking to me and expecting an answer can feel like an burden not worth doing. Even when I am more present and in the moment, I may still be robbed of the emotional value that engagement should otherwise give me. Cut off from those around me, and finding a painful comfort in isolation, I only wish for others to perhaps find comfort in the fact that if they feel like this, they aren’t alone, and there are probably a lot more people feeling this way than ever before.
In my personal experience, talking with those with and without dissociative disorders, they seemingly tend to not get the same attention that other mental illnesses like depression do. This leads to psychological professionals sometimes hearing about dissociative disorders for the first time from an anxious patient who thinks they may have one. If anything I hope the pandemic and the collective psychological scar it leaves on soceity increases research and awareness about dissociative disorders.