[Egbert123]

howdy all! first time posting here but have been lurking for the last few months.
I’ve been experiencing DP/DR to varying degrees since 2020 - sometimes for a few weeks, sometimes for months at a time.
lately there’s been a sort of a spectrum in terms of the condition - there’s sometimes I feel completely detached from myself, sometimes just my surroundings, and sometimes a bit in between. I know I don’t have to mention how distressing it is, but the lack of stability is quite annoying (I’d rather be fully disassociated than the constant coming-and-going).

right now, I don’t feel disassociated. Don’t have any of the ‘unfamiliar’ surroundings, the ‘first person POV’, brain fog, panic. but I’m being plagued by the same existential thoughts that DP does sometimes bring. and it’s killing me. I’ve got this fixation that my ‘consciousness is broken’ or ‘my brain is wrong’; lately I’ve been asking my friends and family ‘do you feel like you perform or act like yourself?’ I see people react dynamically to information, whereas for me it feels like a more deliberate, conscious effort, and it triggers me.

It’s an obsessive rumination at this point that I’m constantly googling and on reddit about. and between this and the general anxiety and depression of life I feel like I’m driving myself crazy. again, maybe this is part of my depersonalisation, but the other symptoms aren’t nearly as present and it’s just driving me bonkers at this point. can anyone sympathise?

 

[Chip1021]

Yes, I do. Nowadays I’m completely detached from my sense of self and the world, “stuck in disembodied thought” as I often gauchely describe it. Your situation reminds me a lot of my self when I was younger though. I didn’t have any words to describe what I was feeling back then, but it always felt like I just lacked a sense of spontaneous engagement with life; everything felt like some huge performance. I would sometimes ask my parents or teachers or doctors if this was normal. “Everybody feels that way” I was told, but I found that difficult to believe.

i sometimes wonder if my focus on that issue just resulted in me spiraling down to where I am at today. And I still wonder if there is perhaps some underlying organic issue that is at the root of all of this. I’ll probably never know.