# Tightrope Walking to a Cure



## Oli_Lewis (Feb 17, 2015)

Four years ago I opened a new diary and put my hand on the page, I traced around it in pen and then I cut my fingers with a razor and smeared the blood inside the outline. Beside it I wrote, "This diary contains words written by this hand, fuelled by this blood and powered by me, Oliver Lewis." What prompted me to do this? Depersonalisation. I was so removed from myself that I needed to assert my selfhood, to mark my diary as the work of a real, bleeding, thinking human being. Whenever I spoke I watched myself speak, I watched myself think in endlessly frustrating circles and I felt terrified, utterly terrified, as if day by day I was slowly disintegrating and that the world around me, which previously I'd taken for granted, might suddenly collapse.

But if you're reading this I want you to know that it didn't and it won't for you either, unless you let it. You're not mad, sanity, depersonalisation taught me, is a socially determined act which most people forget they're acting. I lost count of the number of times counsellors and psychologists told me to fake it till I made it and at the time I thought it was shitty advice, mostly because I couldn't conceptualise what 'I' might be and also because I felt like I was permanently acting, faking being a 20 year old with a condition called depersonalisation as they extolled the benefits of faking. Life was confusing, it was painful and I was very frightened. Nothingness haunted me and I thought of myself as a blank, like I was gradually losing touch with everything that made me me: my memories, my passion, my intelligence, my vocabulary and my future.

So I read, a lot. I turned to philosophers and novelists and I used their ideas like maps to try and navigate my experience, and along the way I found some solace. Learning that other people had experienced what I was struggling with gave me a lot of courage and it also provided me with fresh perspectives to reframe what depersonalisation meant. When I first became aware of cracks appearing in my reality, cracks that led me to question everything, including myself, I felt overwhelmed. I dropped out of university, I went on the dole and I became increasingly withdrawn, spending longer and longer periods at my parents' house rather than at my flat. Essentially, I felt I was going insane and the accompanying anxiety and

depression that arose from this interpretation only compounded things, badly.

And then, slowly, the fog began to lift and I started living again. Instead of incessantly examining my thoughts I began focusing more on the outside world and on people beyond myself. I played a lot of music, I externalised my thoughts in diaries and poems and I started doing things that I hadn't allowed myself to do out of fear for my mental stability. In short, I got out of my head and started focusing on life again. It wasn't like I made a full, miraculous recovery, I still take SSRIs for generalised anxiety and I'm prone to deconstructing everything, myself included, but as soon as I stopped obsessing over depersonalisation I began to make progress. It's like the saying about the tightrope walker who only falls when he becomes aware of his feet, being overly self-conscious, to the point where you dissect every thought and every experience is a massive inhibition to living spontaneously and with feeling. So, stop. Make a point of focusing on things outside of yourself and don't enforce your depersonalisation by constantly thinking about it (which includes browsing the forums). You have the freedom to interpret your experience however you like, to quote Shakespere, "there is neither good or bad but thinking makes it so." So own your story and don't let depersonalisation stop you doing the things you want to do, in fact, focus on them relentlessly, on anything other than depersonalisation and I promise you you'll start making progress.

If you have any questions or you just want to talk then email me at [email protected]. Also, I want to be absolutely clear on this, reframing how you think about depersonalisation isn't the only solution, antidepressants and counselling, for example, helped me a lot and I highly recommend them. Also, I want to thank everyone who wrote about their own recoveries and what helped them, you offered an extraordinary amount of hope to me during a time when, for the most part, I felt pretty hopeless. So thanks a lot.

And here's a link to a really useful resource on this site: http://www.dpselfhelp.com/forum/index.php?/topic/20892-the-holy-grail-of-curing-dpdr/


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