# Just Diagnosed, Utterly Conufsed



## dreamofblue (Mar 31, 2011)

Well, I've been talking to psychologists and psychiatrists for while. I've already been diagnosed with major depression with psychotic features. Today my psychologist diagnosed me with depersonalization disorder. I hadn't heard of it until today. I'm not sure of anything.

Life for me, feels like a bizarre and inescapable dream. When I speak, it as as if I am not really speaking, and my voice is like a thought in my mind. I cannot comprehend that I exist, and it feels strange to me that I am myself. I feel like an observer, I am an alien inside of my own mind, watching me live. But I am not me, although I am saying this right now, this is certainly not me saying this, the person who is saying this is not the same being who is observing and thinking. I cannot comprehend what my life is. I do not know why, after I go to sleep, I continue to wake up into this world.

I try to tell people around me, my friends. But they are bored of it. They think I am monotonous and whiny. I tell them that I think I feel I am dreaming, and they either criticize me, tell me i always say that, or ask me to elaborate, and I try to but I'm not quite sure how. The way I see the world is normal, I believe. I believe I see the world the same way everyone else does, but perhaps I'm just a little confused. I don't know how people come to terms with existing and awareness. It is as if I cannot escape, I cannot escape the world of my mind, yet I am not there to begin with. As if over time my mind is realizing that I do not exist as an independent entity from the universe. I am fading away into white noise. There is no self, there is the energy and information of the objective world. I am only a fleeting illusion.

I've been describing a lot of these things to my psychologist for sometime now, and she told me I have depersonalization disorder. But I am not sure, of course. In writing it seems as if I have at least some of the symptoms, but my experience might be completely different than what others with the disorder are experiencing.

Also, what the hell should I do?


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## Visual (Oct 13, 2010)

dreamofblue said:


> Well, I've been talking to psychologists and psychiatrists for while. I've already been diagnosed with major depression with psychotic features. Today my psychologist diagnosed me with depersonalization disorder. I hadn't heard of it until today. I'm not sure of anything.
> 
> Life for me, feels like a bizarre and inescapable dream. When I speak, it as as if I am not really speaking, and my voice is like a thought in my mind. I cannot comprehend that I exist, and it feels strange to me that I am myself. I feel like an observer, I am an alien inside of my own mind, watching me live. But I am not me, although I am saying this right now, this is certainly not me saying this, the person who is saying this is not the same being who is observing and thinking. I cannot comprehend what my life is. I do not know why, after I go to sleep, I continue to wake up into this world.
> 
> ...


How long have you had DP? Do you know the cause of it yet?


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## Surfingisfun001 (Sep 25, 2007)

Welcome.


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## Guest (Apr 3, 2011)

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## dreamofblue (Mar 31, 2011)

It started around when i was 14, at the start of high school, I'm about to be 21. I don't remember very well, or maybe i do. When it started, i began recording everything i thought in a journal. I have hundreds and hundreds of pages written, and it quite conveniently documents by descent into "madness". I'm just being a little dramatic. It began when my parents divorced and my father left to Florida, leaving me with my mom in Ohio. At this time I also started highschool. In middle school, my friends were mostly just abusive bullies, it was horrible, but in high school I was just utterly alone. I didn't talk, I didn't make friends, and it was the most isolating experience. In the 9th grade, the strangeness of things overwhelmed me. I wanted to escape to my dreams, to another world. It was a strange paradox, I wanted to escape to my dreams, yet my life had become in inescapable nightmare. I wanted to be God, I wanted to revolt against reality. My psychologist then diagnosed me with major depression with psychotic features. After the first year of high school I decided that my life was a dream, and that my inability to be free within the context of life as a dream was torturing me. If I didn't become free, I would die. I tried desperately to use my own philosophies in order to disprove unhappiness, I analyzed myself, my surroundings endlessly. I began to quest to conquer the world of my dreams.

So the following years of highschool, I attempted to turn my mind inside out. I began to make jokes, I shared my absurdity with others around me. The result? I became popular. I was that spectacle of a person. I was the one who told teachers to fuck themselves. I was rebellious and having somewhat of a good time. All of my essays were ridiculous. The world around me was a facade, I had decided, and I had to break free. It was as if reality was broken at its seams and I was so close to destroying it entirely and escaping into the dream world.

It was so bizarre, to look into people's eyes. As if I were staring at the reality that my connection to the world outside of me was really nothing to worry about, and the opinions of the other people didn't matter either. We are all floating in space. I was so far away. This life is a dream, i would always tell myself.

Looking back on things now, it makes so much sense. Everything I ever did was sort of an attempt to explore the disconnection I felt. I once wrote a story about an alien made of foliage on a desert planet. I had no memory of its beginning, and no conception of a possible end, and it only walked aimlessly, without a foundation for reason. As it walked, it planted seeds of itself all over its world that grew into copies of itself, all linked by a single mind. And over time its awareness developed until the planet sent off its little aliens on balloons of sand. And I imagined the creature coming to earth, and it would burrow into the minds of people. When possessed by the alien, they'd basically go mad, They'd feel the presence of something else, but the only part of them that was conscious of an alien presence would be that alien presence. The story spiraled into nonsense, when the protagonist builds an army of robots in order to fight of the invading army of mind controlling plant monsters, only to find that he had been controlled by the alien all along, and the aliens goal was to create a massive war throughout the universe in order to destroy all sentient life. It was a war of consciousness against nothingness.

I created an idea that I called "the perpetually indifferent disposition" which was basically my analysis of my own relationship with my life. I decided that there were probably two main parts of my consciousness. One part was the normal part. The segment of consciousness that values the world around it, and wants to wake up, that needs to eat food and cares for responsibilities. This part of the "self" connects with others and functions, and most importantly, it believes in itself, it believes that its feelings and its desires are legitimate. This part of the self is the character in a story, and the second part of the self that i identified was the reader of that story. I called this part of the self the "perpetually indifferent disposition". This part of the self does not truly value "life", it values narrative. It wants to be entertained by the trials and pain and joy of the other part of the "self". To it, all pain and pleasure are simply stimulus. I couldn't tell for the life of me, if the consciousness that i lived was the character of the story or the reader of that story. I ended up feeling like the reader. I was indifferent, I was predisposed to disconnection from the living "self". And whenever I observed myself being free or happy, it became a dream, it was as if I was not there. And when I saw myself in misery, I was still not there. When I walk into my bedroom, and see it covered in filth, I am sinking with that filth to the bottom of existence, and when I walk into my bedroom, and see it so clean and dream like and wonderful--my life turns into a dream. And when my bedroom is moderately dirty--well, I don't remember what I think when I walk into it. The only times I don't feel depersonalized are the times when I am not thinking, and therefore not conscious of my existence. It doesn't make any sense, its a paradox. It is as if my sense of self were constantly dying, in each moment, I forget who I am, and in each moment I am reborn. I am reborn as I look at my surroundings once more, and ask hopelessly, what the hell is this world?


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## Surfingisfun001 (Sep 25, 2007)

dreamofblue said:


> It doesn't make any sense, its a paradox. It is as if my sense of self were constantly dying, in each moment, I forget who I am, and in each moment I am reborn. I am reborn as I look at my surroundings once more, and ask hopelessly, what the hell is this world?


Great description. That's exactly how I'm experiencing it too. It's like being born again each and every moment and with that everything I have learned throughout life dies. Like a computer whose hard drive has been erased. Someone else, I think it was "TheGame" described it as the feeling of all of a sudden turning into an infant who has just been born and left out on the sidewalk to fend for itself.


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