# Hello, everyone



## Guest (Jan 15, 2006)

Uhm, hey.

I'm not really sure if I'm in the right place. This is also surprisingly difficult for me to talk about.

But - I recently started reading up on depersonalisation and derealisation, and it shocked me how closely the symptoms seem to match up with my own experiences. For as long as I can remember, I've felt like the world isn't quite real and I'm not quite a part of it. I find it hard to motivate myself to do anything that isn't *immediate*, everything from having a shower to revising for exams . . . because although I intellectually know I have to do something, it "feels" like it isn't real or doesn't matter.

I have a very hard time maintaining relationships with friends, because unless they're right there in front of me, again it's like they aren't quite real, or like I'm in my bubble here and they're off in there bubble somewhere else.

I don't recognise my face in the mirror, I never have. Photos of me don't "look like me".

I spend a lot of energy with TV, movies, etc because they can seem more real than real life - I get very absorbed, sometimes watching them it's almost like I'm there. Perhaps when all of life feels like it's on a screen, something that really is on a screen seems more truthful? I'm not sure.

It's worse in the morning, almost every day when I wake up I just lie there, have to really make a huge effort to even get out of bed. It's like work in an hour isn't really real; all that's real is thinking about things, and spending time in my head seems so much more important than being "out there" and living.

The only things that can really motivate me and make me feel like I'm alive are watching and playing hockey. Maybe because of the in-your-face *now*-ness of it, maybe because to play I need to be physically and mentally alert, I don't know. But it's almost like everything else is just drifting through fog, keeping sane by focussing on fiction, until I get to the rink.

I sometimes get strange visual disturbances . . . everything looks very big but very far away, like the TV screen or book I'm reading is literally hundreds of yards away and I'm a giant.

Like I said this is very hard to talk about, I'm not sure if I'm making sense and I'm not even sure what I'm leaving out. There's also some more, uhm, "weird" stuff I don't want to get into because, like I said, it's difficult for me to talk about.

Anyway, thought I should post an introduction. I'll now get through reading the other posts, to see if this place is right for me.

Thanks guys.


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## Guest_ (Sep 17, 2005)

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## Guest (Jan 16, 2006)

As far as I can work it, it started when I was very young. At the age of 3 I got a still unidentified illness - best guess doctors had was leukaemia, but tests came back negative.

Anyway - my first concrete memory is of being in the hospital back then, very tired, thinking I was going to die, but not really caring and being detached from it all. It was like I was watching my body from a distance.

At a guess, something went screwy in my brain when I was ill as a kid and it's been ever present since, just in varying degrees of intensity.

And no, no seizures, depression, or panic. It's hard to explain but it isn't something that bothers me. Some of the effects (eg finding it difficult to get motivated for "real world" things) bother me, but not the DP in itself.


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## Guest_ (Sep 17, 2005)

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