# Is this all I'll ever know?



## wendigo (Jan 20, 2021)

I've been this way as long as I can remember. My childhood was decently traumatic but so much happened and it made my memory so foggy it's hard to pinpoint what did me in. One of my earliest memories is in the car with my dad, I don't know how old I was but I was still in my little booster seat, looking out the window at the mountains, and my dad kept telling me about them, about the kinds of plants and animals up there and how beautiful they were, telling me he wanted to take me picnicking up there. It kept upsetting me and I didn't understand why, I felt really scared and I kept telling him over and over that they were made of cardboard and they weren't really there, and I believed it too. It felt like he was lying to me, like when I first learned Santa wasn't real. As far as I know he probably just thought it was kid jargon. But there were lots of things like that. I never stayed at any school longer than a year, so I learned pretty quickly that friends were replaceable, they weren't really genuine or real like they were on tv. You had fun with them and then you moved or they moved or drifted or died, it didn't make a difference, I was never able to miss them or make them mean anything. I always felt this numbness and disconnection that felt wrong, and I was never sure if it was something wrong with me or something wrong with other people. When things got bad at home I shut down and checked out. It happened a lot when my mom would scream and hurt me. I think my first taste of really heavy episodes was the first time I ran away from home when I was about 9 and came back and my dad made my life hell afterwards. He was furious that I would sit there unmoving, unable to speak, lost in thought loops that I couldn't say this because x would happen but if I said y he would think this and I would get punished or hurt, and it would spiral until I froze and suddenly found the conversation wasn't even really happening, I physically couldn't speak even if I wanted to, things looked and sounded distorted and it was like I was just watching myself in a body that wasn't really a body and my dad wasn't a person anymore, he was made of clay, I couldn't even understand language anymore. After that it kept happening and it kept getting worse. I memorized the sound of my mom's footfalls and every time I heard them coming down the stairs I'd start leaving my body.

I feel so cheated. I never got to find that first initial connection to reality. People think solipsistic thought is silly, like some pseudo-intellectual thought experiment that you're supposed to think about for 5 minutes, go huh, that'd be pretty crazy, and then move on with your life, because you know and feel that it's real and it's backed by sound reasoning and logic and how could the complexities of the world be false? The problem is, everything that is "known", is based on some prior knowledge. I know that the sky is blue because I know what the color blue is, and I know when I see blue when I look at the sky. But what if my vision is distorted? What if everyone around me communicates to me that the sky is blue but I see it as yellow? It's silly but what if things like that keep happening? What if you're young and you grow up with 'objective observations' conflicting with your observations? How are you supposed to trust anything else they say if they tell you the yellow sky is blue? Or maybe you don't understand what blue is or what the sky is because all they can ever be is abstract concepts. But someone else tells you that everyone knows x because the sky is blue and because we know x, we know y must be true and a, b, and c, can be known because y is true and so on and so forth until you have an entire reality built on circular logic that you can never connect with. I grew up in a situation so full of abuse and gaslighting that not only was I never able to form trust in other people, but I couldn't even form trust in the basis of reality.

I feel so alone. No one can understand or help me. They aren't even there. I have so many 'delusions' and layers of thoughts I don't know how to form an identity or morals or ethics or direction, I don't know why I'm here or how to proceed from here. On one channel of thought, I'm mentally ill and this is a trauma response, and everything is real, the sky is blue, I'm just sick. But that's almost as horrifying as nothing around me being real. It's a disease no one has a cure for and in a certain sense, in order for everyone else to exist, I literally can not. Existence is hard to define, but I think of it in my head as an experience and nothing more. I can't know the nature of it, whether it's some silly dream or 'simulation' or if everything is as I perceive it to be or if it's like microscopic cells on an infinitely larger and unknowable organism, but I do know at the very least that it is information being produced and processed. But I'm not experiencing what 'other people' are experiencing. I leave my body, I remember events differently, things don't look or sound right, things break down into concepts I will never know how to humanely express. I am literally not processing the information that other people are processing, or at least am faultily perceiving it in a way that means I am not existing like other people are existing. I'm being convoluted and aren't making sense, even to myself, but basically, as long as I'm like this, I'll never live in the world that other people live in. I'll live with a debilitating mental disease no one knows how to understand or help me with and I'll never be able to fucking enjoy anything or function properly. I'm so tired. There's so much noise and things happening and I just want it to stop. I don't want to exist, I don't want to process anything at all. I went to my fourth attempt at therapy yesterday. She couldn't even remember anything I said without looking through her notes at least a dozen times, didn't understand what I was talking about. I live in a fairly rural conservative state, there's only a handful of therapists out here who specialize or even have experience working with dpdr, and certainly none of them take medicaid, which is all I've got. Every therapist I've ever tried has either treated me like a pity case or a god damned zoo animal. The first is annoying, the latter irritates me to no end. Even the therapists specializing in trauma out here haven't worked with dpdr so it's ridiculous how many of them treat it like some kind of casual intellectual exercise or interest to them. I can't tell you how many times I've told someone about the symptoms I experience only for them to respond with 'that's so fascinating' or 'so interesting', etc. It's not interesting I'm not here for your entertainment, I'm suffering and I need help. I'm really not trying to insult or discourage therapy I'm just really at my wit's end and every failed attempt just makes me feel more and more like I'm debilitating from some unknown disease. What am I supposed to do? 4 therapists and literally dozens of calls to others. I even got my blood drawn a week back because my therapist told me I might have some hormonal imbalance of the thyroid relating to the thalamus and causing physical symptoms of things like sensory distortions and especially distortion of time, which I have really bad. Nothing. Painfully in the normal, healthy range by all metrics. God. I'm just fucking crazy. That's it. Nothing can help me.

On the other channel of thought, things aren't real. I have delusions, like that I need to escape. I don't enjoy this world, real or not, and dpdr just eliminates any kind of investment that might otherwise help me overcome negative experiences. I really truly don't understand why I'm alive. It conflicts with all of my thoughts, feelings, and desires, but I feel like some kind of robotic or alien force is propelling my body, making me go through the motions and behave as if everything is real and go to work and go to school and don't do this there are social consequences, etc, etc. It doesn't make any sense and it creates even more internal frustration and the suppressed desire to just get the hell out of here.

I hate the myth of Sisyphus. With a burning passion. But I thought maybe living like Sisyphus is the only way I could ever hope to live, applying meaning to a meaningless life, even though it really just feels like ignorance, denial, a phat existential band aid. I wouldn't mind living in a false reality if it was at the very least enjoyable. I don't understand why I'm here and while it very much frustrates me, I had accepted that I need to commit all my energy and efforts to making this life as enjoyable as I physically can. But this horrible fucking sickness is holding me back from moving forward and further improving the conditions of my life. And even when I succeed it doesn't matter. I've done so much to try and die a little better than I was born, I got out of my toxic home, I got a really good job, I'm going to college, I'm in an amazing relationship, and the worst part is none of it's real, none of it means a thing, and none of it has changed anything. I've become so aware that no matter what I do, I'm going to be constantly dissociated and miserable. During the 'best of times', I'm out of my body and just wanting it all to stop. All I'll ever know is- wake up, go to work, come home, study, lay in bed for hours unable to sleep, shaking and crying and feeling like the most alone person in the entire world even when I have someone sleeping right next to me, wake up and fucking do it again. Or alternatively, come home and get high as hell so at the very least I can get some sleep. I know weed isn't recommended for dpdr, but I started this past year, and it's the only thing I've found that effectively shuts the thoughts down or at least puts me in a state where I can better explore things not feeling real, and it lets me get more than 3 hours of sleep. Haven't had a bad trip or at least not yet, but knowing my luck, this will probably stop being a solution at some point down the road and just screw me over even worse. Even when nothings wrong at all, I feel wrong, it's eerie and uneasy and I just feel in my core that I'm not supposed to be here. I'm only 19 but I feel like an old man, so alone and weary of it all, just ready to sleep. I'm not sure why I'm writing a self-pitying essay. I'm so lost and I don't know what to do and I just need to know that at least one person out there understands this.


----------



## Chip1021 (Mar 24, 2018)

I haven't been terribly active on this forum lately, but i just wanted to respond to what you have written here, in terms that are much more clear than I can truly express. I can say that I understand how you feel and your experiences to a great extent. Perhaps not fully (for example, I can't identify much trauma or instability from my childhood, at least not without equivocating terribly on the words "trauma" and "stability"), but I very much relate. I don't think I've ever known "normal", and as such it's very difficult to describe to doctors or therapists in what respect I feel unwell, seeing as I have no "well" to compare this to (although I do have experience with "better", if that makes any sense). I am twice your age now, and am no closer to understanding what I am going through.

I wish I could give you advice, but seeing as I haven't found any way to cope or get out of this other than constant distraction, I feel that would be unwise. I will add one remark about your continued weed usage. It's typically recommended to avoid it on this forum because it's frequently a trigger and can often make the issue worse for many. That doesn't seem to be the case with you, at least not yet, and you appear to be deriving some benefits from it, at least for now. I don't consider the weed prohibition to be an absolute one, and not everyone will get worse from it, so if it is helping you at the moment, I don't see why that's a bad thing.


----------

