So every time I get sick of the way I feel - kind of like I'm stuck in limbo - I end up Googling the way it feels and every time I come up on pages about dissociation.

I don't think I actually have a dissociative disorder, though, I just seem to have dissociative symptoms. The problem is, they just seem so complicated and so difficult to change, I'm giving up on hope that I'll ever be normal.

Here's how I feel:
- Internal Chaos Like there's constant chaos inside - not like barrelling emotions (although I've had that a couple of times before) - more of a 'searching' feeling, like my thoughts are everywhere
- Identity confusion Like my inner dialogue is constantly trying to create sense or structure or reaffirm who or what I am - a kind of obsessive sense of trying to figure out my own identity and come to some kind of satisfactory conclusion. But I don't have the identity diffusion I've read about BPDers experiencing where they don't have consistent goals/attitudes/values etc. - I've always known what I want to do with my life and that hasn't changed - I work towards goals, have always been driven that way - I know what my values and opinions are and can hold my own in a friendly debate (so I guess I feel sure of myself in that way). There are also quite a lot of personality/characteristics that are consistent. It's more like even if I think about all the characteristics I possess, I still feel like I haven't got to the bottom of who I am somehow. I get obsessed with psychological theories or theories of personality, trying to work out where I fit.
- Incoherent sense of history My life seems incoherent to me. It feels cut up into different blocks - eras/periods - which are marked by what diagnosis I had at the time, or something similar, and I often get the unsettling feeling that I was not the same person all the way through. When I look back on diary entries, however, I can read 'my voice' in it. I seem like the same person in the way that I write and the things I say/the things I care about. It's just like when I look back it doesn't seem like me, or I find it difficult to relate. It often feels like everything that has happened in my life has actually happened to another person, or that I keep on changing the person that I am - although there is no rational reason to believe this, as there is evidence of consistency. This makes me feel very groundless and like there's nothing to fall back on. I sort of feeling like I'm just freefalling through space all the time.
- Some 'true' dissociative experiences Apparently I don't remember things that have happened to me that might be described as mildly traumatic. People tell me they happened - and not at a young age, when I was a teenager - and I have no memory. Or sometimes I can remember the start of something significant but I can't remember what actually happened, I just know something significant happened and the memory has been completely erased and I can't seem to recover it. I just have no idea what happened. I used to have quite bad dissociative attacks as well - either suddenly feeling like both I and the world are not real and panicking - or suddenly falling down and going blank, and the world seeming unrelevant. When this happened, others used to think I was unconscious, but I wasn't. I could hear what was going on around me, I just had this feeling like none of it mattered and was so 'out of it' it didn't really occur to me to move or speak or show any signs of life. It was like what was happening around me was on TV or something.

What I could really do with is some hope. I want to know I can end this and feel differently. I don't feel really bad - there isn't a lot of pain or anything - I just feel hopeless and lost and disconnected.

Does anyone relate and can you provide some hope please that I can get to grips with this and change it?