# firstly i have to apologize (this is about my recovery)



## zedelghemkid (Feb 14, 2010)

For a while now i've felt bad for failing to do something I promised myself last year I would do. 
Like so many people before me (people who I learned about on this forum) I recovered greatly and got terrified of the idea of looking back at what happened to me; of the idea of returning to this forum and posting.

I said I'd post my recovery story as it developed but i guess life happened and overwhelmed me. To be more specific I had about a year of ups and downs. It was really random. I wasn't a very straight-forward line towards success. There was a lot of back-tracking and pits of the worst kind of despair that almost drove me to doing something very stupid. 
So when I say "life happened" what I mean is that, I had about a year of dp and then very very gradually all the minute and myriad symptoms started to leave. When that happened all I could think about was holding tight to each success and focusing on getting better. It's so weird and ironic that what saved me was this auto-pilot recovery instinct. That instinct saved me from the destructive misery that came from feeling like my life was on auto-pilot.

I cannot express just how much sympathy and hope I feel for so many of you. To be practical I guess I can explain to you what I feel helped me. Last year in the depths of real sadness I was planning a holiday with my friends to America. In fact actually my friends were mostly planning it, whilst I nodded and faked smiles and hoped with all my heart that by the time the holiday came I'd be fixed so that I could have this rebirth experience on holiday.

I kept my thoughts on reasons to stay alive and things in my life I would really look forward to doing when I got better. I'm a filmmaker and I have always had all these ideas that i've wanted to realise, so I held onto that dream. In addition there was the hope of being happy with friends and future lovers that I held onto.

When I got to San Francisco I was still really sick and I dragged myself through the experience, but (and this is a huge, monumental but) the change of scenery had an enormous impact on my mood. The fact that I didn't have to think about the fact that I dropped out of university and just being immersed in this brand new experience, it all just gave my mind room to breathe. Back home I felt like a prisoner in London, a prisoner in my neighbourhood, and most importantly a prisoner in my house. What slowly started to happen pretty much immediately in San francisco is that I stopped thinking about my symptoms as much and all I could think about was the epic journey from the west coast to the east coast. As the journey went on I actually, sincerely began smiling, laughing, having fun. My inner monologue instead of constantly regurgitating the same observations about how fake i felt, and how automatic my life felt, just started processing how much fun I was having. 
By the time I hit Chicago i was about 50 percent better. During my time in Chicago (I'll always remember this. Excuse my coming cheesy anecdote)I felt so much freer than before, I started indulging in music, film and my personal life more and more. I began to think about so much I was looking forward to when I got back home; specifically going back to art school and doing a film course i'd gotten into before I left. 
Then one night when I was coming back from a really mediocre night in wicker park where me and my friends failed to find any decent clubs, I was walking (MILES!) back home and I started humming arcade fire's song "The Suburbs" and it just stuck in my head. At that point it felt like a cloud had lifted over me; I suddenly realized that I owned my inner monologue again. The only observations my mind was making, were about how fine i felt and how (despite the mediocre night)great it felt to be alive and hell to just breathe.

From that point I just got better and better. Now I'm back in London its been half a year or so since I came back from new york and I'd say I'm about 80-90 percent better.

The Dp is still there but it's like a faint whisper that doesn't really intrude on my life or happiness. The only thing I think i notice it's just my voice at times sounds not like my own. it doesn't feel like I'm out of synch anymore.

I don't want to rubbish anyone's tips for recovery, as I'm sure some of the things that they did worked for them. What really did annoy me however is how those peoples' stories worsened my all-consuming obsession with wanting to fix myself, which probably didn't help things. What I'd like to tell those of you who aren't getting better on vitamin tablets and herbs etc is that those cures aren't a universal be all end all solution to the problem. Your issues aren't necessarily exactly the same as theirs. Trust me i used to comb through these pages searching for symptoms that matched mine in those recovery guides and I'd get all the vitamins, only to still feel like shit months later. 
I can't give any of you a be all-end all solution. I don't think anyone can, which is what sucks so much about DP. All we can do is be pragmatic; if our symptoms seem to be linked mostly to anxiety then we go down whatever route is necessary to deal with the underlying anxiety. If its depression we do the same etc 
What I tried to do was take every cure that I could get hold of, and in the end I can't honestly say 100 percent that 60 mg of Citalopram lessened the symptoms, neither can I say for sure that my holiday fixed me. 
All I can surmise from what's happened is that a combination of time, SSRIS, hope, exercise, my trip to America has dramatically lessened my symptoms. Right now I'm happy and hopeful most of the time. I've written two short films i'm very proud of which has made me passionate about my craft again, and I'm focusing on my long-term career and relationships. Before I thought it audacious to think about the future, as I literally didn't think I'd survive this long, but being patient worked out in the end.

Lastly please believe me when I say I haven't come back to this forum because I've relapsed and I'm deluding myself. The reason I say this is because when I was on this forum last year I noticed that scenario a few times and it depressed the hell out of me. The specific thing that brought me back to the forum (i think) was a small incident that regularly happens, but this time I couldn't ignore it. I was writing the character profiles for a new short film and I was looking in my documents for a folder and I saw my old folder called "Diary during dp crisis", and 'cause i was so happy in the moment I started to feel bad about not posting up this story earlier.

P.S I'm definitely going to incorporate DP into a character I'm writing for a feature film, as it felt like a really interesting and unexplored experience. Hardly anyone knows anything about it, which is depressing.

P.S.2 films I've watched which brought my spirits up when i was down are: Wristcutters a love story, Happy together (wong kar kai), Paris J'taime, anything by Kryztof Kieslowski, Freaks and Geeks (and the general modern judd apatow friendship movie thing), Before sunrise and its sequel Before sunset <-- watched these two films for the love of god









good luck everyone.x


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## Surfingisfun001 (Sep 25, 2007)

Great story - love the honesty. I've been thinking about doing a soul searching trip of some kind to see if that'd help with my case.


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