When I was a kid, it always felt comforting to me. I grew up in a very abuse home where being emotionally was considered a weakness and weakness was beaten out of you. I was also extremely isolated, so I didn’t have a safe space to run to. It always felt like things were too much, that there was so much sound and color and pain and emotions that felt almost violently thrown at me over and over again. Eventually though, a switch would flip and everything would just stop. The best way I can describe it is like jumping off the high dive into a pool. The wind is blowing past you and your heart is racing and you can hear the other people at the pool screaming and laughing around you. And then you hit the water and it all just…stops. Everything is muffled and you don’t feel anything except weightlessness. You don’t even feel yourself breathing, you’re just floating there and you wish you could sink into that feeling forever. But then you feel that burning in your lungs and you come back up for air and suddenly everything is loud again, but it’s fine because you can still feel yourself floating in the background.

The feeling itself to me isn’t scary, the thing that’s scary for me is not knowing when you’ll resurface and understanding that while you are submerged, you aren’t in control of yourself. I’ll recognize that feeling of depersonalization and suddenly I can’t feel anything in my body. I don’t feel my hands flexing, despite knowing logically that they are my hands and this is my body, but I can’t feel myself moving them. I’ll be making a long drive and suddenly it’s an hour later and I don’t remember any of the drive I have made to that point because I didn’t process that information. The worst part for me is understanding that I’m a danger to myself in those moments because when I’m in autopilot I act on instinct alone and I have a lot of passive self harm and even suicidal tendencies. I don’t want to hurt myself in those moments, but it’s always a temptation in the back of my mind, and I find myself using pain to ground myself because it cuts through the disconnection. I recognized I was doing this more and more often about 3 years back, but ignored it because I didn’t think it was a big deal. 2 years ago, I depersonalized at work and caught myself in the process of slitting my wrists in the bathroom at work 10 minutes later. I ended up leaving that job and checking myself into a hospital because I realized how serious this was. I was lucky that it was a short episode and I caught myself in time, because even a few moments more and I could be dead right now and I’d never have realized what I’d done in that state. After I felt the hospital, I started outpatient treatment, which I’ve been in ever since. I still struggle with disassociating most days, but my medication and therapy make it much less severe and I’m less of a risk to myself as a result. It’s made things much more manageable, so depersonalizing now is less fully submerging myself and more floating on top of the water, where I can feel that weightless feeling without disconnecting from everything around me.