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Ever hear a girl say that? that she MUST lose a noticeable amount of weight in the shortest time possible, to fit into a dress?
And while that goal may be attainable, she would only really be losing water weight and she would gain it back twofold right after the prom.
Patience seems to be a skill one has to have to enter adulthood.
We dpers are rather impatient.
I MUST FIND THE ANSWER! LIFE IS GOING TO PASS ME BY! I NEED TO BE NON-DPD BEFORE MY BOYFRIEND GETS TIRED OF ME AND BREAKS UP WITH ME! (which, if you haven't noticed, maybe that relationship and your manipulative efforts to hold on to it are part of what caused the dp- holding on to something you can't attain from that person, who is using you or otherwise troubled in their own way anyway)
But...if you do something that you think will get you un-dp'd by, say, february...it might work! you could really psych yourself into it! find some hard drugs, have a lot of sex with random people, do ANYTHING to feel by then!
But since this isn't the real cure (just like a diet isn't), the dp will come back ten fold because it never actually left and because you have the added baggage of your frantic fixes and how you really view them.
Let go of it.
There is no way.
Like our poor prom princess, we may realize that our actual problems were very minimal to begin with but yet our teenage-angsted minds (yes, you can be 40 and still living in a teenage-drama fantasy world...teenager is just a label for a phenomenon of angst, fear, repression, trying to please and fit in and cope with the world and trying to stay on top...still happens in adulthood!), we blow them out of proportion, consciously or subconsciously. The WAY we blow them out of proportion is part of the problem. The extremes we think in:
My life is over.
this will never get better.
If i'm not better by friday i'll shoot myself.
he said something mean. i think i will shoot myself to make him pay.
i'll get into a mental hospital to make him feel sorry for me.
now i'm not going to be able to pursue my dreams
(without the skill of patience, would you have pursued them anyway? and why must you pursue them now and have it all done right now? to impress someone? it usually is that way. if you are wanting to BE something for the sake of pleasing others, it will show in your impatience. You may think that's your dream in life but not in the way you handle it, and it wouldn't happen like that anyway. i thought i was going to be a famous fashion designer right after i got done with FIT...i would just be a mentor under someone like donna karan did and with my sheer talent make it to the top. Under dp i blamed myself over and over again and was CONVINCED that if it weren't for stupid dp i could have done it easily. Dp replied back: "you don't even LIKE the fashion industry. Duh!" Dp was right. I had no real interest in fashion, just fame. Just to let the people back home who rejected me know that now i was in control. still a dream sometimes, but just a teenage dream. That's why there are so many written accounts of it. But since you think you're the only one who has this aspiration and you think it will work, and you are absolutely convinced and dead serious of it...well...welcome to dpselfhelp.com. You're not going to be rich and famous most likely. And you will have to write 300 page papers to get into the decent paying jobs. I didn't want to do that. I was going to fashion school and going to become famous and couldn't fathom that anyone else had that same idea in their head...LITERALLY couldn't fathom it...I thought I was special! I thought they were all idiots who were actually in it for the love of fashion and wanted to have miniscule jobs. Well, they were. I was the idiot though.)
But yeah.
That tim mcgraw song, "Live like you were dying", describes a man whose life screeched to a halt when diagnosed with cancer. What was he going to do now? Everything was in shambles.
And yes it's probably just as bad out there for non-dp people who get something like cancer as it is for us having a nervous breakdown. It's all perspective. (credit to an ex boyf for that last sentence, even though at the time it annoyed me, he WAS right on many counts.)
I've heard other people say the same. They are busy doing so many things, how could they be stopped in their tracks?
When a friend of mine was diagnosed with a non-lethal cancer, he literally asked god what bad he had done to deserve this. (to which I thought, imagine dp you fucking wimp! beside the point)
And another friend of mine was standing outside of my house, thinking about the issue and as he flicked a cigarette into the bushes blurted out to the air in his harsh Oklahoma accent: "Well John I think it's happening to show that you're not God!"
and, religious or not, Jason (the friend that said that), had just spelled out the whole damn point of depersonalization.
Like people whose stress levels get so high that they have to stop and take a rest out in the country because they have six months to live, and in that rest they find themselves and what they really want and eventually their physical ailments are also cured.
You are not doing what you really want to do.
this dp is your cancer. Non-lethal and totally curable. But you have to recognize this as a hint from your mind, a time to get things back together. ONLY in that way is it a "gift"...it is NOT a gift of enlightenment but a gift in the sense that now you have no CHOICE but to slow down and really think about who you are and what you want.
It's your life summoning you back to where it needs to be, and it makes no sense now. It didn't to me when I lost it on a street corner in Soho.
But now it makes sense. I never really wanted New York. I wanted home, here, and these people in my life but I couldn't bear to face my flaws that distanced me from them when I felt too ashamed and exposed. So I would escape to New York, 2,000 miles away from anyone who could know the real me.
Brain said not so.
Sure you are doing all these big important things in your life. You have a kid and a school and all that.
And you've been holding on to it all too tightly, controlling it and trying to shape the future (which has been described as a neurotic trait-- obsessively trying to plan out and control the future, at low levels it's productive, at high levels it's total control masked as productivity)
And, in the song...he went sky diving, rocky mountain climbing...he did everything he could because he thought his life would be over soon. I invite you to do that, the things you were afraid of. But more importantly he gave forgiveness he'd been denying (something I have a problem with, blush)...and one of hte best lines: "and suddenly going fishin'..wasn't such an imposition...and i went three times that year I lost my dad.") He took time for the things that, when presented while he was hunched over his desk, he would snap "Not now! I'm busy!"
The metaphor to me is that we snap Not Now to our friends and family, because we're hunched over the desk of our secret fantasies, of our dreams, of our plans to make it big or be important or to at least map out who is going to be sorry when they have to be at our funeral. (I even had an idea for a nice statue of me playing guitar, located on riverside drive. I didn't play that well, but...fantasies are sure fun! what can i say?)
Later, we tell reality. Later, when we're done obsessing with the people who wronged us (who are long gone anyhow, and whose wrongdoings were in the past and whose forgiveness wouldn't mean much to us anyway as we seek revenge.) Later, when we're done obsessing with that lost love (sc) or our bodies (me) or something else. Later, when we've mapped out the future in when said lover would apologize and love us like they did before (the supremes)...later. We couldn't go fishing now. We were busy. Later, reality.
But reality, like our little brother who wants to go fishing NOW, is a very impatient creature. Eventually it takes all the papers off your desk and THROWS them into the fire, and kicks the desk over and gets in your face. DP is even MORE impatient than you are! It MUST make itself known, like We must make OURSELVES known! (dp and you are quite alike, it is often we hate those who reflect our bad qualities...we don't want to see them in ourselves so we project them more onto others...well, you don't like dp because it reflects the very worst in you because it's an impatient self-absorbed exhibitionist JUST LIKE YOU! But no...you're not like that. Oh, of course it scares you too. Just like your sworn enemy, who is SUCH a [insert your NUMBER ONE most hated trait here, for me it was fat and flesh because i was starving myself, and also weakness and softness and malleability and vulnerability to manipulation which flesh represented], scares you, because you know deep down you're just like her but it would TERRIFY you to get close enough to see that! The DP terrifies you too, because you don't want to get close enough to see that you're just like him, you're just like that disease, you're just as tricky and erratic and irrational as the DP itself and you could NEVER imagine yourself so, but instead of being able to project those qualities onto other people now you're only able to project it to a part of your mind, the part where you HIDE those qualities away from, and if it could be represented as a being it would be the DP. Yes, you are simply hiding from the parts of you you DONT want to see, and that is SCARING you. Maybe the DP is scared too. After all, it is in the mind of someone merely human.)
And when that desk is knocked over you will rage and scream "YOUVE RUINED MY PLANS GODDAMN YOU!" but Reality and DP are just showing you that those plans are nothing what they seem, they are only symbols of the jealous and angry and vengeful mind, and that all you really have are those emotions and nothing else, and that those papers burning in the fire are the fantasies that must slip away because they have absolutely nothing to do with reality.
You dig them out of the fire. You must have them. Reality made you angry. You will show Reality that you can keep your fantasies no matter what ITs dumb ass thinks. "i've had enough. just get out of my house."
Reality responds with "fine. i'll leave."
Reality is the generous parent who, when his child throws a big enough tantrum, will cave in to his demands. Reality will never tell you 'no'. Reality, will let you walk all over him. Reality won't hold you down and say "you listen goddamnit i'm not going anywhere."
no.
Reality is actually kind of afraid of your incredible rage, so it pampers you.
It pampers you so much that when you tell it to leave, it will.
It doesn't do what's best for you, it does exactly what you want it to do. If you want to stay with your delusions and fantasies and illusions, reality will not stop you.
But...reality WILL leave.
And when it's gone you will see that you should have listened.
(what you may not be aware of is that reality is actually kind of like the nosy neighbor that won't go away...he is actually right outside your door! But you must give up the parts of you that won't let him in. You must give up on making the fantasy world a priority, you must give up on your extremist thinking, you must give up on your black and white views, you must give up on your perfectionism, you must give up on blocking out your negative emotions and qualities and pain and rejection (it's certainly not lethal!), you must give up on your vengence, you must give up on the hope that you will get back the person that never really loved you, and you must give up on stopping those who DO love you from coming into your house. Reality knows better than to mess with you while you still have all these other things going on. It knows you're busy. Your son knows you're busy. But he wants to know that you will give him (reality) your full attention before he will come back into the house. As much as you mistrust reality, reality seems to mistrust YOU more for your frequent abandonment of him! It's like you ditrust reality so much (you distrust that he will always be there for you and love you) that you will abandon him first and frequently...and then it's a self fulfilling prophecy! you abandon reality beause you feel that reality will hurt you! you have broken poor reality's trust! you abandon reality because you feel he cannot help you and he does not know what is best for you. you abandon reality because he's boring, not interesting enough, tedious. you abandon reality because he makes a mess. would you do this to your own child? then why do you do it to reality? why do you do it to your own brain? why do you reject reality because it has so many human flaws? why do you reject reality in order to persue a perfect person that has no flaws yet is incapable of loving you as much as reality does because that perfect person is in fact not even human, he is just an illusion! why do we trust in what we DONT see and we have no trust in what is all around us? why do we not trust reality? yes it will let us down and hurt us at times but that doesn't mean he's gone away. you can't expect people to never let you down! you raise your expectations too high if you believe that! reality is just the same. just as you must learn to TRULY love other people and TRULY have relationships despite the flaws, you must do so with reality. Because the alternative doesn't exist. The alternative will only make you feel like YOU don't exist either.)
and when you say i'm sorry to reality and realize you have made a grave mistake, its intuition is good...it won't come back until you've really changed your ways.
(Another funny anecdote: My friend Twist was working with a man, they were trying to pull fiber optic cables through a pipe. This was somewhat difficult...the guy finally finished and shouts out "I'M the MAN!" triumphantly...two seconds later all the cables fall out of the pipe he was working on. Twist replied jokingly "That's God telling you that he's the man.")
And while that goal may be attainable, she would only really be losing water weight and she would gain it back twofold right after the prom.
Patience seems to be a skill one has to have to enter adulthood.
We dpers are rather impatient.
I MUST FIND THE ANSWER! LIFE IS GOING TO PASS ME BY! I NEED TO BE NON-DPD BEFORE MY BOYFRIEND GETS TIRED OF ME AND BREAKS UP WITH ME! (which, if you haven't noticed, maybe that relationship and your manipulative efforts to hold on to it are part of what caused the dp- holding on to something you can't attain from that person, who is using you or otherwise troubled in their own way anyway)
But...if you do something that you think will get you un-dp'd by, say, february...it might work! you could really psych yourself into it! find some hard drugs, have a lot of sex with random people, do ANYTHING to feel by then!
But since this isn't the real cure (just like a diet isn't), the dp will come back ten fold because it never actually left and because you have the added baggage of your frantic fixes and how you really view them.
Let go of it.
There is no way.
Like our poor prom princess, we may realize that our actual problems were very minimal to begin with but yet our teenage-angsted minds (yes, you can be 40 and still living in a teenage-drama fantasy world...teenager is just a label for a phenomenon of angst, fear, repression, trying to please and fit in and cope with the world and trying to stay on top...still happens in adulthood!), we blow them out of proportion, consciously or subconsciously. The WAY we blow them out of proportion is part of the problem. The extremes we think in:
My life is over.
this will never get better.
If i'm not better by friday i'll shoot myself.
he said something mean. i think i will shoot myself to make him pay.
i'll get into a mental hospital to make him feel sorry for me.
now i'm not going to be able to pursue my dreams
(without the skill of patience, would you have pursued them anyway? and why must you pursue them now and have it all done right now? to impress someone? it usually is that way. if you are wanting to BE something for the sake of pleasing others, it will show in your impatience. You may think that's your dream in life but not in the way you handle it, and it wouldn't happen like that anyway. i thought i was going to be a famous fashion designer right after i got done with FIT...i would just be a mentor under someone like donna karan did and with my sheer talent make it to the top. Under dp i blamed myself over and over again and was CONVINCED that if it weren't for stupid dp i could have done it easily. Dp replied back: "you don't even LIKE the fashion industry. Duh!" Dp was right. I had no real interest in fashion, just fame. Just to let the people back home who rejected me know that now i was in control. still a dream sometimes, but just a teenage dream. That's why there are so many written accounts of it. But since you think you're the only one who has this aspiration and you think it will work, and you are absolutely convinced and dead serious of it...well...welcome to dpselfhelp.com. You're not going to be rich and famous most likely. And you will have to write 300 page papers to get into the decent paying jobs. I didn't want to do that. I was going to fashion school and going to become famous and couldn't fathom that anyone else had that same idea in their head...LITERALLY couldn't fathom it...I thought I was special! I thought they were all idiots who were actually in it for the love of fashion and wanted to have miniscule jobs. Well, they were. I was the idiot though.)
But yeah.
That tim mcgraw song, "Live like you were dying", describes a man whose life screeched to a halt when diagnosed with cancer. What was he going to do now? Everything was in shambles.
And yes it's probably just as bad out there for non-dp people who get something like cancer as it is for us having a nervous breakdown. It's all perspective. (credit to an ex boyf for that last sentence, even though at the time it annoyed me, he WAS right on many counts.)
I've heard other people say the same. They are busy doing so many things, how could they be stopped in their tracks?
When a friend of mine was diagnosed with a non-lethal cancer, he literally asked god what bad he had done to deserve this. (to which I thought, imagine dp you fucking wimp! beside the point)
And another friend of mine was standing outside of my house, thinking about the issue and as he flicked a cigarette into the bushes blurted out to the air in his harsh Oklahoma accent: "Well John I think it's happening to show that you're not God!"
and, religious or not, Jason (the friend that said that), had just spelled out the whole damn point of depersonalization.
Like people whose stress levels get so high that they have to stop and take a rest out in the country because they have six months to live, and in that rest they find themselves and what they really want and eventually their physical ailments are also cured.
You are not doing what you really want to do.
this dp is your cancer. Non-lethal and totally curable. But you have to recognize this as a hint from your mind, a time to get things back together. ONLY in that way is it a "gift"...it is NOT a gift of enlightenment but a gift in the sense that now you have no CHOICE but to slow down and really think about who you are and what you want.
It's your life summoning you back to where it needs to be, and it makes no sense now. It didn't to me when I lost it on a street corner in Soho.
But now it makes sense. I never really wanted New York. I wanted home, here, and these people in my life but I couldn't bear to face my flaws that distanced me from them when I felt too ashamed and exposed. So I would escape to New York, 2,000 miles away from anyone who could know the real me.
Brain said not so.
Sure you are doing all these big important things in your life. You have a kid and a school and all that.
And you've been holding on to it all too tightly, controlling it and trying to shape the future (which has been described as a neurotic trait-- obsessively trying to plan out and control the future, at low levels it's productive, at high levels it's total control masked as productivity)
And, in the song...he went sky diving, rocky mountain climbing...he did everything he could because he thought his life would be over soon. I invite you to do that, the things you were afraid of. But more importantly he gave forgiveness he'd been denying (something I have a problem with, blush)...and one of hte best lines: "and suddenly going fishin'..wasn't such an imposition...and i went three times that year I lost my dad.") He took time for the things that, when presented while he was hunched over his desk, he would snap "Not now! I'm busy!"
The metaphor to me is that we snap Not Now to our friends and family, because we're hunched over the desk of our secret fantasies, of our dreams, of our plans to make it big or be important or to at least map out who is going to be sorry when they have to be at our funeral. (I even had an idea for a nice statue of me playing guitar, located on riverside drive. I didn't play that well, but...fantasies are sure fun! what can i say?)
Later, we tell reality. Later, when we're done obsessing with the people who wronged us (who are long gone anyhow, and whose wrongdoings were in the past and whose forgiveness wouldn't mean much to us anyway as we seek revenge.) Later, when we're done obsessing with that lost love (sc) or our bodies (me) or something else. Later, when we've mapped out the future in when said lover would apologize and love us like they did before (the supremes)...later. We couldn't go fishing now. We were busy. Later, reality.
But reality, like our little brother who wants to go fishing NOW, is a very impatient creature. Eventually it takes all the papers off your desk and THROWS them into the fire, and kicks the desk over and gets in your face. DP is even MORE impatient than you are! It MUST make itself known, like We must make OURSELVES known! (dp and you are quite alike, it is often we hate those who reflect our bad qualities...we don't want to see them in ourselves so we project them more onto others...well, you don't like dp because it reflects the very worst in you because it's an impatient self-absorbed exhibitionist JUST LIKE YOU! But no...you're not like that. Oh, of course it scares you too. Just like your sworn enemy, who is SUCH a [insert your NUMBER ONE most hated trait here, for me it was fat and flesh because i was starving myself, and also weakness and softness and malleability and vulnerability to manipulation which flesh represented], scares you, because you know deep down you're just like her but it would TERRIFY you to get close enough to see that! The DP terrifies you too, because you don't want to get close enough to see that you're just like him, you're just like that disease, you're just as tricky and erratic and irrational as the DP itself and you could NEVER imagine yourself so, but instead of being able to project those qualities onto other people now you're only able to project it to a part of your mind, the part where you HIDE those qualities away from, and if it could be represented as a being it would be the DP. Yes, you are simply hiding from the parts of you you DONT want to see, and that is SCARING you. Maybe the DP is scared too. After all, it is in the mind of someone merely human.)
And when that desk is knocked over you will rage and scream "YOUVE RUINED MY PLANS GODDAMN YOU!" but Reality and DP are just showing you that those plans are nothing what they seem, they are only symbols of the jealous and angry and vengeful mind, and that all you really have are those emotions and nothing else, and that those papers burning in the fire are the fantasies that must slip away because they have absolutely nothing to do with reality.
You dig them out of the fire. You must have them. Reality made you angry. You will show Reality that you can keep your fantasies no matter what ITs dumb ass thinks. "i've had enough. just get out of my house."
Reality responds with "fine. i'll leave."
Reality is the generous parent who, when his child throws a big enough tantrum, will cave in to his demands. Reality will never tell you 'no'. Reality, will let you walk all over him. Reality won't hold you down and say "you listen goddamnit i'm not going anywhere."
no.
Reality is actually kind of afraid of your incredible rage, so it pampers you.
It pampers you so much that when you tell it to leave, it will.
It doesn't do what's best for you, it does exactly what you want it to do. If you want to stay with your delusions and fantasies and illusions, reality will not stop you.
But...reality WILL leave.
And when it's gone you will see that you should have listened.
(what you may not be aware of is that reality is actually kind of like the nosy neighbor that won't go away...he is actually right outside your door! But you must give up the parts of you that won't let him in. You must give up on making the fantasy world a priority, you must give up on your extremist thinking, you must give up on your black and white views, you must give up on your perfectionism, you must give up on blocking out your negative emotions and qualities and pain and rejection (it's certainly not lethal!), you must give up on your vengence, you must give up on the hope that you will get back the person that never really loved you, and you must give up on stopping those who DO love you from coming into your house. Reality knows better than to mess with you while you still have all these other things going on. It knows you're busy. Your son knows you're busy. But he wants to know that you will give him (reality) your full attention before he will come back into the house. As much as you mistrust reality, reality seems to mistrust YOU more for your frequent abandonment of him! It's like you ditrust reality so much (you distrust that he will always be there for you and love you) that you will abandon him first and frequently...and then it's a self fulfilling prophecy! you abandon reality beause you feel that reality will hurt you! you have broken poor reality's trust! you abandon reality because you feel he cannot help you and he does not know what is best for you. you abandon reality because he's boring, not interesting enough, tedious. you abandon reality because he makes a mess. would you do this to your own child? then why do you do it to reality? why do you do it to your own brain? why do you reject reality because it has so many human flaws? why do you reject reality in order to persue a perfect person that has no flaws yet is incapable of loving you as much as reality does because that perfect person is in fact not even human, he is just an illusion! why do we trust in what we DONT see and we have no trust in what is all around us? why do we not trust reality? yes it will let us down and hurt us at times but that doesn't mean he's gone away. you can't expect people to never let you down! you raise your expectations too high if you believe that! reality is just the same. just as you must learn to TRULY love other people and TRULY have relationships despite the flaws, you must do so with reality. Because the alternative doesn't exist. The alternative will only make you feel like YOU don't exist either.)
and when you say i'm sorry to reality and realize you have made a grave mistake, its intuition is good...it won't come back until you've really changed your ways.
(Another funny anecdote: My friend Twist was working with a man, they were trying to pull fiber optic cables through a pipe. This was somewhat difficult...the guy finally finished and shouts out "I'M the MAN!" triumphantly...two seconds later all the cables fall out of the pipe he was working on. Twist replied jokingly "That's God telling you that he's the man.")
