Welcome back to me being bitter that Maladaptive daydreaming disorder is thing literally no one knows about. I mean we know about it, but like people without MaDD. Yeah very slim chance.
I’ve been thinking about this and how much MaDD affects my behavior. Which it does to a great extent. It affects all domains of my life, so for my family and friends to not know about it is for them to lack a vital piece of information needed to understand how I work. And ya know, its sad. And frustrating. Because I feel like there are so many situations and problems and struggles that involve my daydreaming. But because no one knows about the daydreaming, I cannot be adequately understood. And since I can’t be understood I am isolated. I am unable to share the unique struggles that come along with this. Don’t you see? How am I supposed to tell them those things? The feeling like shit when I come out of a daydream because not only have I wasted time but I know my life can’t ever measure up to the worlds inside my head. That I cannot accomplish those things in my mind. Coming out feeling like the world is shallow and meaningless, when everything in my mind has so much meaning, depth, and emotions. How do I tell them that I struggle to express myself so instead I go to an alternate world to say all things I wanted to say, do all the things I wanted to do, to grasp and find emotions and experiences that make me feel so intensely. How do I tell them that sometimes I miss my paras, or explain the connection to some of them. Even though not always perfect they are intricate and in depth, and when I imagine them holding me I can almost feel it on my own skin. How do I explain my struggles, insecurities, sexuality, gender identity, since the daydreaming play such strong roles in all of those and more. How do I explain to them that sometimes my body feels useless and foreign, a fleshy cage. How I struggle at times to physically take care of myself because I’m sucked in somewhere else. How those photos and video recordings of me fascinate me because I feel no connection to the person they caught, because the camera can’t catch my daydreams and without them I am unfinished. Or what about the dread and fear that I will wake one day old, alone, with an unremarkable life because I lived out my dreams in my head. The vicious cycle of wanting to stop, failing, and falling back into daydreams to avoid the feeling of failure. The numbing affect of MaDD. How I feel so fucking shitty about it and whenever I feel fucking shitty about the actual world I just run away there. Or the suffocating feeling that you’ll always be like this. Taking your baggage and running off to that little world in my mind instead of talking about it. How its so hard to understand what I want as a physical person instead of what my parame does. The loss and confusion of identity. There’s so much but how I can tell you any of this since you don’t know what it is and I am too tired and ashamed to tell you.
