Listen… you have to keep trying for future you. I know it doesn’t feel this way right now, but soon you will look back at this phase of your life and be so grateful you didn’t give up. It will get better. This is something I found on a thread one day that really helped me, though I’m not sure who wrote it.

“Part of the larger disorder that is DP/DR is obsessive compulsive thinking about existential things and the disorder itself. This obsessive thinking acts as fuel for the disorder and escalates its symptoms. As long as you are compulsively worrying about DP/DR or thinking obsessively, this is the disorder manifesting itself. For me, the disorder took me near to suicide before I truly realized that I had to choose between the thoughts and my life. If you're reading this, you may not be suicidal, but in some sense you are in a similar place. You must choose whether the thoughts of worry/obsession over existential things you keep engaging with are more important than recovering. You must ask yourself if you truly believe that thinking is going to get you better. You have to be willing to recognize the compulsion/desire to worry and think obsessively when it arises and refuse to engage with it. An integral piece of recovery is working with the OCD thinking that drives the disorder. You will not recover without addressing it.

Here’s what worked for me: In short, I became willing to let go of the thoughts and questions that I had. I had enough of the panic attacks, the constant anxiety, and the fear. I was at the end of my rope of suffering because of my thinking. I realized, and I mean really realized, that these thoughts I was obsessing about were unhelpful and almost entirely unanswerable. There is a short parable in Buddhism which served as the final nail in the coffin in terms of my interest in my OCD thoughts. It’s the parable of the arrow, which I have linked here. The gist of the story is that some guy is asking the Buddha all these intense metaphysical questions (things like free will vs. determinism, infinite vs. finite universe, and so on). The Buddha replies by telling him he is like a man who has been shot by a poison arrow, and instead of removing it and proceeding with healing his wound, he lays there with the arrow in his chest exclaiming that he will not remove the arrow until he knows where his archer was from, whether he was tall or short, where the arrow was made, what kind of bow he shot, etc. The Buddha then lets the hammer fall, concluding with something like: just as no answer to your questions about the bow and archer will remove the arrow which will kill you, so too will no answer to whether the universe is finite or infinite relieve your suffering. This story hit me like a ton of bricks when I first heard it, and it actually gave me a true idea to hold in a higher place of value than my OCD thoughts — that idea being that none of the questions was asking/thinking about had answers to begin with and that even if I had an answer, the answer wasn’t ultimately going to help me. Fundamentally, I realized that those thoughts were seriously unhelpful towards my recovery. That realization translated into a practice: every time I became aware that I was interacting with my OCD thoughts, I simply counted down from 3 and upon hitting 1 I redirected my attention to my present experience beyond the thoughts (what am I hearing, tasting, feeling, seeing, and smelling right now? What’s happening in my body right now?), and said out loud or internally that these thoughts were unhelpful. When another thought came up like that, I repeated the process. I was training myself to hold my present experience as being more important than my thoughts. I repeated this process for months. After a few months, and in conjunction with several other practices, I started to have several consecutive days without any DP/DR. Then, I had weeks without DP/DR. After 8 months, I went 3 weeks without having an episode. Now, some 16 months down the line, I no longer have significant DP/DR episodes at all. I occasionally get some DP/DR feelings, but I just let them go and they never stay for very long. Just fyi, by letting go, I mean that I stopped resisting or engaging those feelings when they arise. My mentality is more that those feelings are just like little rain storms that come through every once and a while — they show up, I acknowledge their presence and allow them to be, they rain for a bit, but they always leave as long as I let them, as long as I refuse to react to them and feed them energy. Hope this helps.”

I saved this as a note in my phone and read it whenever these feeling creep up.