G
Guest
·My Pathetic Little Life
My sense of "self", even when not depersonalised, is of a very diminished sort. Most of the time I don,t feel depersonalised, but more of a sense of not quite adding up to being an autonymous sort of person with a distinct sense of identity with which to confront the varied challenges and pleasures life sets before me.
For me it is not so much that either I am DPed or not DPed, it is more like I am DPed to a greater or lesser degree.
I had my "nervous breakdown" many years ago and had myself voluntarily committed to the state mental hospital when my DP was the very worst. I was DPed almost to the point of Catatonia and would lay in bed terrified that i had actually become non existent. To move my body was excruciatingly painful and i felt as though my heart was being ripped out of my chest. And there was the almost constant feeling as though I was falling though space, or loosing my balance. Being still increased this frightening feeling of falling, but moving my body caused me to try and grab hold of a self an identity under whose "will" my body moved, and as i was so DPed I found no center from which to orient myself in a spatial sense and I would feel what is referred to as "ego dislocation" that is I would sort of "trance out" and forget that I even existed and become completely focussed upon another person or a thing or even a group of external textures like the various shadows that played along the edge of the wall where it met the floor, then I would feel this incredible tension in my chest like a rubber band stretched almost to the breaking point and I would feel as though and my sense of ego location would snap back inside my chest and I would feel an electrical pain a sort of burning or tearing as for a brief moment I realised I was an embodied being. Then i would find myself outside of my body again and again this electrical pain as I relocated back inside my chest. This went on continuously for several weeks. Finally i discovered that if i moved my body I had a greater sense of presence within my body so i began pacing the hallway day in and day out. Like many of you probably experience I struggled with feeling as though I or the environment were becoming microscopic or enlarging to incredible immense proportions. i had semi delusions of only existing as words on the page of a book someone was reading and feeling a sense of horror about what would happen to me when the reader turned the page. this wasn't just a bizarre thought but it was accompanied by a feeling of profound fear. Reality testing was compromised in a sort of hit and miss manner during this period as i would dip in and out of what i assume was psychosis.
This was the outer extreme of my personal DP spectrum one from which I feel I have never fully recovered as i still have re occurences with this intensity minus the horror I once felt. The difference between now and then being that familarity with that state of mind (almost forty years)has lost much of the fear associated with it as i have learned to emotionally ride with the ebb and flow of the DP sensations and it no longer carries the terror it once did for me. DP is a constant in my life still, but it is not so all consuming. To a certain extent I have been able to construct whispy sense of a continuous self, fragile as it may be, from the various pieces of experience I have passed through during my life.
I have kept my sights low, I am an isolated solitary person today. I suppose some might say I am chronically depressed but i don't feel particularly sad. Only the meaninglessness of my life seems to get to me at times. My parents are nearing the end of their lifes, and i don't really have any friends, I doubt I even have much capacity for friendship, but I fear growing older all on my own. Today there is no longer even a mental hospital wherein which to seek sanctuary. I have never really even held a job. I have been recieving disability for thirty years. I live in the country in the middle of nowhere in a one room shack i can barely keep clean.
O sometimes wonder if the only reason I have been able to hold onto a sense of self al all is due to the impoverishment of my life in general. There have been periods during these years where it seemed I was actually in touch with a sense of "reality" in my being, but even then it felt like play acting. maybe thats all life is i.e. a type of pretending.
I have been feeling a little down recently. It has much to do with growing old. So many youthful dreams have quietly slipped away, out of grasp now forever.
As the saying goes; it is not so much the things I have done that i have come to regret but those things which i never did.
Regards
John
My sense of "self", even when not depersonalised, is of a very diminished sort. Most of the time I don,t feel depersonalised, but more of a sense of not quite adding up to being an autonymous sort of person with a distinct sense of identity with which to confront the varied challenges and pleasures life sets before me.
For me it is not so much that either I am DPed or not DPed, it is more like I am DPed to a greater or lesser degree.
I had my "nervous breakdown" many years ago and had myself voluntarily committed to the state mental hospital when my DP was the very worst. I was DPed almost to the point of Catatonia and would lay in bed terrified that i had actually become non existent. To move my body was excruciatingly painful and i felt as though my heart was being ripped out of my chest. And there was the almost constant feeling as though I was falling though space, or loosing my balance. Being still increased this frightening feeling of falling, but moving my body caused me to try and grab hold of a self an identity under whose "will" my body moved, and as i was so DPed I found no center from which to orient myself in a spatial sense and I would feel what is referred to as "ego dislocation" that is I would sort of "trance out" and forget that I even existed and become completely focussed upon another person or a thing or even a group of external textures like the various shadows that played along the edge of the wall where it met the floor, then I would feel this incredible tension in my chest like a rubber band stretched almost to the breaking point and I would feel as though and my sense of ego location would snap back inside my chest and I would feel an electrical pain a sort of burning or tearing as for a brief moment I realised I was an embodied being. Then i would find myself outside of my body again and again this electrical pain as I relocated back inside my chest. This went on continuously for several weeks. Finally i discovered that if i moved my body I had a greater sense of presence within my body so i began pacing the hallway day in and day out. Like many of you probably experience I struggled with feeling as though I or the environment were becoming microscopic or enlarging to incredible immense proportions. i had semi delusions of only existing as words on the page of a book someone was reading and feeling a sense of horror about what would happen to me when the reader turned the page. this wasn't just a bizarre thought but it was accompanied by a feeling of profound fear. Reality testing was compromised in a sort of hit and miss manner during this period as i would dip in and out of what i assume was psychosis.
This was the outer extreme of my personal DP spectrum one from which I feel I have never fully recovered as i still have re occurences with this intensity minus the horror I once felt. The difference between now and then being that familarity with that state of mind (almost forty years)has lost much of the fear associated with it as i have learned to emotionally ride with the ebb and flow of the DP sensations and it no longer carries the terror it once did for me. DP is a constant in my life still, but it is not so all consuming. To a certain extent I have been able to construct whispy sense of a continuous self, fragile as it may be, from the various pieces of experience I have passed through during my life.
I have kept my sights low, I am an isolated solitary person today. I suppose some might say I am chronically depressed but i don't feel particularly sad. Only the meaninglessness of my life seems to get to me at times. My parents are nearing the end of their lifes, and i don't really have any friends, I doubt I even have much capacity for friendship, but I fear growing older all on my own. Today there is no longer even a mental hospital wherein which to seek sanctuary. I have never really even held a job. I have been recieving disability for thirty years. I live in the country in the middle of nowhere in a one room shack i can barely keep clean.
O sometimes wonder if the only reason I have been able to hold onto a sense of self al all is due to the impoverishment of my life in general. There have been periods during these years where it seemed I was actually in touch with a sense of "reality" in my being, but even then it felt like play acting. maybe thats all life is i.e. a type of pretending.
I have been feeling a little down recently. It has much to do with growing old. So many youthful dreams have quietly slipped away, out of grasp now forever.
As the saying goes; it is not so much the things I have done that i have come to regret but those things which i never did.
Regards
John
