Disordered
What if you woke up one morning and leaned over the sink to brush your teeth and upon glancing up casually, saw someone looking back at you where you thought the mirror was. Someone you didn't recognize. Someone who seemed annoyingly familiar and yet you couldn't put your finger on where you'd seen them before.
Half seconds pass.
Half heartbeats race.
You squint a little to get a distorted view of this person and in the blurry distortion you finally realize that you're looking at yourself.
How would you feel?
Would you feel safe? Would you feel amused? How would you explain that to yourself afterwards? How would you explain it to others?
Self is an inalienable point of reference. No matter what crazy shit we experience out in the world, we can always turn inward to our protective sense of self and reorder our emotions. We can check what we know in ourselves against what we see in the world. We can consult "self" against "others" for perspective. Most of us learn to trust our sense of self, to rely on it, and to hang onto it when everything else feels unsteady.
What happens when your inalienable point of reference shimmers in and out of your grasp like slips of fading light? What happens when you turn inward to gather up a needed fist of courage from your "self" and there is no self inside? Close your eyes and imagine how you would feel if the only thing you could ever count on in your life had evaporated, something no one ever told you could happen to your sense of self.
People speak of losing themselves in other people. Or losing themselves to passion, or to God, or to death, but very few people talk about having simply lost themselves.
Not recognizing myself in the mirror is one of the strangest things I've ever experienced in my life. It happened often between the time that I was fifteen and seventeen. The first time it happened I felt an animal fear, a fluttering of panic, and confusion. The more often it happened the less fearful I got. A blurry detachment settled in. It seemed as though the real me must be the person I saw in the mirror and I was just watching myself from a great distance. I'm not sure I could feel my body at all during those seconds.
Then, as the moment passed it would feel as though a slight shift in the air would brush through me and the stranger in the mirror would be transposed with my own image again.
Then I would have to go to high school classes with a million noises, confusions, distractions and through it all carrying in my chest the uncertainty that I would be able to find myself when I needed me most. I would walk the halls and look at all the chattering magpies and people connected to people, and I wanted desperately to ask them if they could recognize themselves every time they looked in a mirror. Sometimes I did. I don't remember if anyone ever said they didn't recognize themselves, but what I do remember, like a brain tattoo, is the look on the faces of those who had no idea what I was talking about: as though I was a chimera.
You never forget that look once you've received it. It feels like a stinging that echoes throughout every cell in your body and leaves you feeling dirty.
Self and body are tied together in this mortal coil with tight sailor's knots. When your sense of self evaporates, feeling in your body also goes. Sensations register as though inches away from your body. Nothing really touches you because you have only the memory of a body.
I took steak knives to my skin and I would saw at my arm with these dull restaurant knives until I had made a groove in my skin, until I had laboriously opened up all my layers of flesh down to the part that still lived, that was solid. It was a relief to see the blood come because in simple terms it made me believe I wasn't a walking corpse. It made me believe that in spite of my fading awareness of self, I was still there, still flesh, still living. But to say that I did it just to see the blood or to garner relief is to oversimplify a complicated relationship with self harm.
It's important to understand that I didn't feel the knife in my skin. It's important to understand that I felt no pain. No physical pain.
I have never enjoyed pain in any way and if I could have felt all the various sharp objects I used to break my skin I never would have been able to give myself so many scars with them. I am squeamish about pain. Just ask my doctor how well I handled getting my cervix scraped with a wire brush.
It's also important to know that at the time there were only two people who knew about the complicated relationship with self harm that I was cultivating. I didn't do it in a cry for help. I won't deny that a part of me desperately wished to be carted off to a mental facility. I'm sure I joked with my friends about it all the time. I wanted to be anchored down to the world. But at the same time I was ashamed of this compulsion I had to cut myself open and I knew that my head was wrong, that my head was unraveling and I couldn't know what it ultimately meant.
I most feared that there was no help for me even in the most sophisticated medical facility, if I could have managed to get to one.
Our connection with self is the single most important connection we have in life. It's our center for engagement, for emotional stability, for our moral judgment, and without the ability to recognize ourselves we are truly lost. Without a stable connection with self we lose our physical connection with life as well. When you've lost that, you are without anchor.
I realize now, twenty two years later, that I didn't need to go through that alone. I know now that there is such good help for people with depersonalization disorder*, as well as all the other fun disorders of the brain I am blessed with.
National Alliance On Mental Illness
More national suicide prevention hot lines
Labels: depersonalization disorder, hotlines, mental illness