"Feeling Like I'm in a Dream"

I start to feel very "odd" when I turned 17. I never really paid much attention to it at first and wrote it off as my depression and anxiety getting worse. I'd been severely depressed since I was 10-years-old; a family death combined with bullying and abuse triggered it at a young age so I'd been living with it for 7 years and I was starting to learn how to cope with it in my own way.

And then 17 hit and this was different. This was terrifying.

I started to notice a shift in my perspective of the world. Suddenly I was waking up and I still felt like I was dreaming. I'd look down at my hands or look at myself in the mirror and it wouldn't feel real. I wasn't real. The world around me wasn't real.

I knew I was awake, I knew I wasn't dreaming. There was something in the back of my head telling me, reminding me that I was awake and this was reality. But for some reason my brain just wouldn't accept it. My body was no longer mine own, I was in someone else's. Like my brain had been placed in someone else's years ago and I was finally realizing it. I wasn't awake. I wasn't alive or dead. I was a ghost of myself observing the world from afar, pretending to coexist with everyone. Trying to hide the fact that I wasn't who I said I was. I wasn't me. I was trapped inside my head, watching through the eyes of someone else. I wasn't me.

The scariest part was I knew something was off. I felt something was wrong. I was terrified I had brain cancer or an aneurysm or something. This couldn't be right, there was something wrong with me. There had to be something wrong.

This was just became another thing I had to cope with. I decided to learn how to deal with it and move on. I had no other choice, I'd done it before, I could do it again. Just learn to ignore it when it happens.

Two years later, it's every day instead of every once in a while. I'm feeling this way every second of the day and I'm starting to lose my mind. I'm starting to think I'm going insane or I have schizophrenia, the illness runs in my family. But I have no other symptoms, just this. Just this gnawing endless feeling of being in a dream and nothing is real. It just won't go away. I was alone. I couldn't explain how I felt to anyone. It was such an odd sensation that when I tried to explain it, it just went over their head. They just couldn't visualize or empathize how I felt. Some people said they dreamed to feel how I felt. So detach from reality they couldn't tell what was real. No matter how much I tried my voice fell on deaf ears. And I felt myself slipping away, heading towards that peek. I felt it coming. The only answer I had to make the feeling stop.

I did what I'd been fearing or putting off finally; I looked up on Google, "Feeling like I'm in a dream."

And a whole system of people popped up and they were all saying and feeling the same thing I was. All of them. I learned what it was and how to get help and how other people got help or are learning to cope. Different stories, different people. Hundreds of people like me, miles away feeling just as distant and insane as me. Hundreds of people with depersonalization feeling as alone as me.

It wasn't so much as knowing I wasn't alone, I knew my problem wasn't unique from the start, it was having other people put into words what I was feeling when I couldn't do it myself. Someone else I'd never spoken to describing in detail how I felt.

I really wasn't alone. There was really other people out there like me and they gave me a name to it. A name.

I've gotten better at dealing with it. There isn't much but distraction to cope with it. Although I still wake up feeling this way or catch myself saying, "It doesn't matter, it isn't real," I'm still learning to deal with it and getting better at it. Just knowing there are hundreds of other people dealing with it and struggling with it along side me gives me the strength to keep pushing through.

I don't want anyone to ever feel the way I did. I want people to know this is real, you're okay, and you'll be able to learn how to cope with it.

Henri Frédéric Amiel was the first man to coin the term "depersonalized," describing it as such; "I find myself regarding existence as though from beyond the tomb, from another world; all is strange to me; I am, as it were, outside my own body and individuality; I am depersonalized, detached, cut adrift. Is this madness?"

No, it isn't. But I know it sure as hell can feel like it.