[eina]

It really is long. It's ok if you don't read it. I just needed to know it was out there.

I have chronic derealization, depression, anxiety and some amalgamation of social phobia and severe trust issues that makes it impossible for me to connect to other people. It's like my brain kind of sinks back into shadow and I have a shallow, friendly persona that turns on like autopilot when I have to interact with other people. People like talking to me because I read body language and emotion very well and say what they want to hear. I feel like a ghost. I am very lonely.

I think I have been not okay for most of my life. I remember being real before, before I even started school. I have a handful of memories of living in our old house and being young and wild. But after we moved I don't remember anything really, like it's been filtered out. I know my father and sister were emotionally abusive and our family felt scattered and cold. I don't know if anything else bad happened. I probably never will.

I remember bits of the gradual disconnect that happened throughout first grade, like my insides were dissolving into static. My strongest memory of this time is of sitting at the kitchen table with my family and looking around and thinking, someone is missing, this isn't my family. They're going to know I don't belong, they're going to know what I am. And I just disappeared. No one noticed, I had an autopilot back then too. I hazily remember coming back to myself when I hit middle school but I felt so unnatural and mismatched, like I had been stuffed into someone else's body without knowing anything about their life. I felt like everyone else was speaking another language and I was lost. I didn't even understand then that something outside my control was actually wrong with me, it just felt like I was stupid and slow and strange and tired. I lost it a few years later and just straight up developed severe phobias of everything, starting with school. I dropped out and enrolled in online school, spiraled into very severe depression and anxiety and shut down for a few more years, which were spent mostly halfway paralyzed in my bed. People noticed that time but I guess they were paralyzed too because they didn't do much to help.

I was 18 when I came back again. I felt more myself when I came back this time but it was like someone had carved parts of me out and what was left of my brain had shattered. I was in thousands of tiny pieces and I was so lost all the time. I felt too light and fragile, like my body was made of dust and all that was holding me together was sheer force of will. I couldn't think, somehow I couldn't even see right. The world looked small and abstract and wrong, like a hazy dream I couldn't wake up from. Sometimes I was afraid I was going crazy and nothing was real at all.

That was six years ago. I'm 24 now and I am still in the same place. Every year I tell myself, “this is your year. You're going to be human this year,” but no matter how much effort I put in (a hell of a lot for the record) I can't make anything change. I've been in therapy for ten years. I've taken all the pills they've thrown at me. I've been diagnosed and then undiagnosed with too many things to list, everyone always ends up back at "anxiety and depression, clearly, and...hm." I've read all the books on how to be happy. Every time I fall down I start over, I set up schedules and regimens and push myself so far I think I'll break but it never works for long. I try so incredibly hard but it's impossible to build a life when you're in a constant dissociative state and repeatedly relapsing into multiple chronic health issues and depressive shutdowns. It just doesn't work.

I tried college several times but kept having to drop out. I have never been able to work. I have no money, no savings. I haven't had friends in a decade. I only just got my driver's license last year but I go through periods where I can't drive because my derealization or brain fog get too intense. I am still very risk-averse and afraid of authority figures. I don't go many places or do many things. I am almost always on a computer or tv, just to kill time until I can go back to bed and not sleep some more. I still live at that house with my parents but it doesn't feel like home. It's toxic and I think it will be harder to get better while I live there, but I don't have the means to leave or the means to get the means to leave. I feel like I am suffocating with my family. They all only know 'the mask', the protective version of myself that I have projected my whole life and I don't know how to break out of that or if I even want to because I don't trust them with whatever is underneath.

I want to leave. All I want is to pack up my things and leave the state, leave the entire country and make my own life somewhere else where I can put this version of myself to rest and become someone real. But even if I was physically healthy and had money I wouldn't be able to take care of myself. I can't cope with anything at all, I have such a loose grasp on the world right now that it's like any subtle change sends me cowering to my closet. Seemingly random images and scenarios trigger devastating anxiety that takes days to get past. It took me months to pull out of the depression that followed getting my license. I was a mess for days when I got a different computer because it felt so different I started questioning if the world was even real anymore. I am a disaster.

My health deteriorates every year and every time I finally get one thing figured out and dealt with three new conditions spring up. I am extremely limited in what I can physically do and that I am constantly having to be aware of and avoid triggers. No one knows exactly what's wrong with me physically either. Every time I find a new hobby or interest my body finds a creative way to shut it down. I'm not allowed to be happy.

I think am in mourning for what I have lost. I have missed entire stages of life and I will never get that back. Looking at pictures of myself as a child makes me cry, like what happened to you? Look how full and real and 3 dimensional you used to be! I could have done so many things. I wanted to be an adventurer. I was going to climb mountains, and swim in every ocean. I wanted to see the stars at night over the desert and stare at them until I was dizzy. I was going to backpack through a national park and I didn't even care which one, I just wanted quiet weeks of stars and sweat and sprawling wildness.

But I don't just want big things anymore. I want weird things, I want normal things, I want terrible things. I want to read a vapid book on a beach with a drink that's so sweet it's a little gross. I want to get drunk and play complicated board games until it's so late everyone has to crash on the floor. I want to take up kickboxing and be the kind of person that takes their aggression out on a punching bag instead of on themselves. I want to share a mutual obsession with someone and spend too many hours discussing it. I want to get a flat on the side of the road and bruise my fingers learning to change a tire in the miserable freezing rain. I want to have fights that almost come to blows because emotion is running so high we feel out of control. I want to go on road trips and stop at crappy diners and cheap motels where everyone's cranky because they're tired and the sheets smell bad and the radio's broken and only plays show tunes and no one's had phone coverage for hours. I want to have meaningless sex and meaningful sex and date girls and boys and maybe someday fall in love for real. I want to go to boring university classes and endless shifts waitressing while my feet ache and horrible customers make me mourn the state of humanity. I want to stress about bills and forget to buy groceries and have to call the landlord because the shower's leaking and the whole bathroom is starting to flood. I want to make friends and lose friends and have deep conversations and make connections and have my heart broken and flowers sent to me on my birthday. I want people who can see through the mask and won't let me disappear.

I am so sick of limbo. I want to feel things. I want to be real, I want to be human. Just for a little while, just to see.

[Lost_in_the_woods]

Me too.