DP/DR | living in an alternate reality

Content warning; descriptions of depersonalization/derealization and dissociation symptoms, and a brief description of a trauma response that involves panic attack symptoms.

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After speaking to my psychiatrist today, she finally brought up something I'd been trying to communicate with her for the past few years. However, I wasn't aware of the scope of the problem, which is likely why she finally caught it.

Since last year, I've not been able to accurately describe or find words for the moments I've experienced when nothing felt real. I don't mean a disconnect from reality like usual dissociation, which involves a feeling like astral projecting while awake, and everything grows muffled and far away. I mean moments when I'm mostly aware, but for some reason, I feel like this reality isn't entirely real and it's just a dream, and I'm really just dead and living out some kind of life in a last dream. When that happened, on days when it was particularly bad, I'd lose my appetite and find a peaceful calmness, and I'd lay in bed not wanting to do anything but exist. It was strange because I thought it would bring me anxiety. It didn't.

I often wonder, and write about, other realities and what this all means; existing as humans, our purpose, what's after this, all that. I've also written about my darker DP/DR — or depersonalization/derealization — states, and that usually happens when I am in them and the world looks different, like I'm in a bubble of time and nothing else exists outside of it. This usually results in poetry or short prose. I've also had feelings of not being in the right time, like I'm lost in time or I belong somewhere else in time, especially when age regression sets in and I start acting more like my childhood self. It's the 90s, Saturday morning cartoons are coming on, and I'm of a more childlike mind. I can't control this, but just ride it out.

After a recent traumatic experience where I thought I saw my abuser at a store for the first time since we were teenagers, I shut down, hyperventilated, broke out in a sweat, and started to repeat old patterns of paranoia. When I broke up with him, I watched every car that went by outside my parent's house, thinking one could be his white car and not some stranger's driving by. I double checked my locks. I worried he would look me up and find me. I started specific grooming habits I haven't done since. I self-harmed more.

The worst of it was that I lost a whole week and a half. It was just gone. When I told my psychiatrist this, she explained that she has other patients with DP/DR who feel they lose time or get lost in time, and I tripped over my words in an 'aha!' moment. That's exactly how I described it to everyone else, that I just simply lost a week. While my psychiatrist said it was concerning it was an entire week, she said that certainly sounded like the kind of dissociation that happens with DP/DR. Because it happens often enough to disrupt my life, I was diagnosed with the disorder.

I didn't even think of the possibility that I'd simply just dissociated an entire week away. I feared it was PTSD memory loss, and while dissociation-related memory loss/amnesia isn't any easier to accept, it at least means that my memory is probably functioning fine, I'm just not filing memories when I'm, metaphorically, not here.

I've written many things in a DP/DR state here on this blog, and some fall under the 'Dark Prose' heading. I won't get into it too much more in that sense, but I learned a bit more today and I realized I've spent a little over a year now in constant off and on DP/DR dissociative states. Just when I feel I've understood everything about how my mind works, and everything to do with my illnesses, I'm met with new information that blows my mind in unsettling ways.

©2022 Shane Blackheart