ADHD and Anxiety Plus Derealisation and Depersonalisation

Hey, it's me, I'm back, and today's article is going to be a little different from other articles I've written in the past. This article is going to be based on how my ADHD affects other parts of my mental health, specifically anxiety.

Now before I was diagnosed with ADHD when I was 17, I was diagnosed with anxiety. I was diagnosed with anxiety when I was around 12 years old along with something else that is for another article.

For years, anxiety completely ruled my life, starting off with separation anxiety. And later on, disassociation and depersonalisation really fucked me up. So for the purpose of this article, I am going to split these topics into three and write like that starting off with... drumroll, please...

1. Separation Anxiety

When I was younger, separation anxiety completely took over all of my senses and dictated pretty much everything I did until I was about 11-12.

My separation anxiety was something that just came from nowhere and it was just me being extremely obsessed with my mum and dad and what they were doing and if they were safe.

With my mum, I always had a weird fear that she was going to somehow run away and leave me, my sister, and my dad. And with having ADHD comes an extremely overactive imagination. Because of this, whenever my mum sent me to sleep I'd wait for her to sleep first because for whatever reason I believed that she would somehow find a robot look-alike version of herself and use it as a replacement for when she would want to sneak away at night.

Apart from my strange robot theory I also was paralyzed with the fear of her death. I thought that if I wasn't with her, she would die. For example, next to our gym, there is a massive 15 foot hole which I was scared that my mum was going to drive into and fall to her death. Now obviously at the age of 8, I was not thinking, 'oh it's only 6 feet deep, like nothing could possibly go wrong even if she did somehow manage to drive into this heavily fenced hole'. I was thinking, 'holy shit my mum's gonna die on her way to Zumba'.

Another thing with my mum is that she is an extremely beautiful woman and was a teen mum, so another fear I had was that she was going to be kidnapped by another man, get Stockholm syndrome and leave the family. Or that she was going to pick up my sister Carla (I don't know why they gave her the White name, either) from nursery and run away with her and my dad and leave me alone to be adopted by my aunties.

Safe to say that I was not a rational thinker.

With my dad, all I knew was that he worked with knives. This terrified me. For whatever reason I was never scared of my dad abandoning my mum, however, I was scared that one of his employees would make a shish kebab out of him. Because of this, I would call his kebab shop every night before I went to sleep to check that he had not been turned into a lamb dinner.

Nevertheless my separation anxiety got particularly bad in the middle of primary school when I'd just cry at the thought of anything happening to my parents and have to have someone call them to make sure that they were okay.

Now onto...

2. Derealisation

Now, I started to feel like the world wasn't real when I was 13. I'd walk through the park, look at the sky and doubt whether anything was real and if anything I did actually meant anything. This made me slip into what I at the time thought was a very rebellious phase. Basically, I turned into a teenage monster who had more mood swings than an actual swing. I didn't listen to my parents, wore a lot more black and tried to completely distance myself from my cultural and racial identity.

Now I'm brown. Like homemade caramel. But I was one of very few POC in my school and being fairly racially ambiguous (or so I thought) I convinced myself that blue eyeshadow and the no.7 concealer stick in the colour 'fair' would not only make me white, but also make people in my school like me. It didn't. I looked mental. Moral of this story is that people prefer the little brown Kurdish me.

Now onto...

3. Depersonalisation

I started feeling like I wasn't real at the same time that I started feeling like the world wasn't real; however, it got particularly bad a few months ago when I first started uni. Now, at nearly every educational milestone I've had, someone very close to me has died. When I started secondary school my nan passed away and when I started uni my uncle passed away. I kinda started to feel like Phoebe from Friends when she refused to go to the dentist because every time she did, someone would die. Anyway, this lead me into a sense of depersonalisation that I had never felt before. I felt like I was in a limbo. Everyone I saw looked like a hologram. Like ghosts. And it only got worse. I felt like a dead man walking. Or sometimes I just felt like I was mourning the loss of my loved ones who were not dead yet. I couldn't look at any pictures of my family without wanting to throw up because it just felt like they were dead. I thought that forcing myself to spend extra time with my family would help, and for the most part, I think it did, but at the time it just made me feel worse. I had no control over my emotions. I couldn't sleep either, which had never been a problem for me; I mean, I had a shit sleeping pattern anyway, but I literally had one hour of sleep a night for two months. I felt like the only thing I had control of was my eating. So for two months I barely ate anything. I was living off of Lipton ice tea and a twenty pack of blue Rothmans. In two months I went from being 83kg to 71kg. After feeling like I just couldn't do anything anymore I started going to EFT therapy. My therapist told me that a lot of women with ADHD also suffer from OCD and SAD. So, I bought a SAD lamp and honestly I think it was one of the best decisions I've ever made. The lamp along with a higher dosage of medication and therapy started to get me back on the right track. Now don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that they were miracle cures but they helped a lot. I'm still recovering and it's a long and slow process but it's worth it.

If you've had similar experiences to me and would like to share your story DM me on insta @pinar.bozyigit or email me at [email protected].

This article is dedicated to,

Uncle Ozkan,

Babanne,

(May your souls rest in peace.)

Mum, Dad, Carla, All my aunties and uncles, All my cousins, Bridget, Niamh, Candy, Kim, Monique, Ola, Jordan, Ed, and so many more.

I love you all so much.

Sorry, I'm a pain in the batty,

Love you lots,

It'll all be okay,

Byeee xxx

Lots of love, Pinar