[el06]

I'm a 16-year old girl and I am terrified.

I have had huge amount of anxiety during this past year caused by a bad relationship and a breakup, controlling and denying my emotions, changing school, huge fear of the future, problems with my body and eating, getting older etc. It has been awful, but under 2 months ago started the worst time of my life.

It was a day at school when a certain man came to talk to the students about how bad drugs are and stuff like that.

That didn't bother me, but there were two things that he said that caused the things that i mention in the title, first thing: he was talking about a girl who died due to drugs, "even tho she had dreams for the future". this sentence made me so anxious, because i started to feel like i have to know what i want to do in the future but the future doesnt intrest me at all, it actually scares the hell out of me. the second thing he said: "even tho some people make suicide by using drugs, most of the drug users want to continue their lives". for some reason this sentence suddenly brought up a question in my mind: "do i actually want to live?". i dont know why, since i had the will to live and i was excited about alot of things before this happened. i had had some suicidal thoughts in the past, but now they arised again and i got sooo scared of them (not because i thought that i was gonna do a suicide but because i didn't want to feel that feeling).

so, after these two sentences my life just fell apart. i lost the will to live: i just saw the whole humanity as pointless atoms and as that nothing matters, not even happiness because we are just humans and we are eventually gonna die, and nothing actually matters to the universe. i saw myself as an alien. i got so scared and depressed of that feeling.

followed by this overwhelming thing started dp + dr. I felt like I have no personality or feelings anymore, I am just a robot and doesn't exist. I also saw the world as complitely unreal, new and wrong. this also scares the hell out of me.

now it has been almost two months and i am afraid that i'm gonna be stuck here forever. i feel so unsafe. i have read that some people have been in this state for decades, and im scared that that will happen to me too. i just can't understand that what the hell is wrong with me and will i ever get through this? i have had some suicidal thoughts because of this but they have always passed. at some points life actually feels meaningful (for example the last day when we were in our school) but it always falls back to this. i have tried so many ways of thinking to get rid of this, but it just doesnt stop. i'm so scared.

 

[Chip1021]

Some of us have a tendency to be strong existential thinkers, which I think can be a strong risk factor for DPDR like experiences. You seem to be such a person, at least, based on what you said here.

I had a similar experience. During my final year of high school a classmate and acquaintance of mine died while acting drunk and stupid while on Spring Break. When I heard about it, it didn’t seem real, until his stepfather came to my work to get his guitar re-stringed for a prop for his funeral. He recognized me from our days when we were good friends playing football together as kids, and started trying to chat with me about him. After that, I could not function hardly at all for the next 2 or 3 months. Not so much because I was sad about my friend’s passing, but because I began to heavily look at my own existence as meaningless. I had always felt a little bit removed from life’s experience, now I really started questioning why I was doing any of this at all? It all made little sense to me. And then I also started looking at other people and wondering why don’t they seem to be struggling with this as much as I am? How can everybody else just move on from this so quickly? That generally made it all worse, of course.

I eventually got over it and returned to my more baseline life and thinking. I am a chronic sufferer, but that experience did not lead to my lifetime of suffering, so there’s a good reason to think you’ll get over this too, after some time has passed and you get back into the swing of things.

The best advice I can give you though is this: if you find yourself to be a more existential thinker, then listen to that drug counselor and don’t do drugs—including and especially marijuana. It ain’t worth the risk.