After Derealization
You don’t really hear too much about life after mental illness. You really only ever hear about mental illness when the person is currently ill.
“I’m so depressed today”
“I’m having really bad anxiety right now”
“I’m having a hard time focusing on things lately”
A lot of people will follow up if they care. How many times do friends and family not follow up though? A lot of mental illnesses stick with a person forever, or its a reoccurring thing, so I guess a lot of people think you’ll just get over it on your own.
My boyfriend suffered from derealization/depersonalization for almost eight years.
Eight years of feeling nothing.
Eight years of looking at his life like he is behind a veil, or watching through a TV screen.
Eight years of trying to explain to friends and family what it feels like to feel nothing at all.
Eight years of hoping he will get better, trying anything and everything JUST to feel something.
Well, I’m happy to say that he doesn’t have DR/DP anymore.
But now he kind of wants to kill himself.
If you have spent eight out of 21 years of life not feeling anything and then all of a sudden you’re making connections with people again, you’re going to freak out a little. Its like a dam has broken and there’s nowhere for the water to go to be contained. All hell breaks loose. Its confusing.
Instead of realizing that this was just a normal social anxiety he was feeling, he mistook that apprehension for attraction, especially towards men.
He thought he was gay, but hes not.
That, my friends, then turned into what we thought was HOCD.
However, we realized that this was not it after a few months. I am the one that realized that he did not suffer from this. He told me about when he was talking to someone he used to work with, he felt this odd attraction to him and that scared him. The light bulb clicked!
It was just a fondness for that person that he started talking to.
Like when you first meet someone you kind of get that feeling that you either like or dislike that person and either decided to avoid that person for the rest of your life or you want to talk to them again.
He did not know that feeling.
It broke my heart. Here this entire time he thought he was attracted to men (which everyone knows, you can’t just wake up one day and decide to “turn gay”) but in reality, he was just making interpersonal connections.
So now we’ve gotten over that (kind of, the fear still can’t be shaken) we have identified that he has really bad anxiety. Like I said, its been an uncontrollable mess. He can’t exactly get help from a therapist because he doesn’t have health insurance, but he has talked to the suicide hotline and he has resources if he needs them.
Its just been so scary and stressful. I feel helpless for him. There’s nothing I can do that eases his pain no matter how hard I try, but I know he will make it out of this. I’m a firm believer in things have to get worse before they can get better. It just has to be taken a day at a time.