Derealisation

I experienced some pretty profound depression around the age of 15. My dad recently mentioned a letter that my counsellor apparently sent to my headteacher, because at the time I had been put on 'daily report' because I wasn't performing as I should have been. I don't really remember this at all, but my memory in general is very patchy, especially around painful experiences, or even happy experiences. I certainly didn't realise that correspondence of this type had gone on between my counsellor and my school, and felt pretty embarrassed about it when I heard.  I don't remember being on report, either. Apparently the letter said that I was experiencing 'morbid thoughts and derealisation'. The word 'derealisation' had never been mentioned to me before my dad brought this up on the phone a few weeks ago - at least not in my memory, which doesn't mean that it didn't happen. But when I looked it up, I recognised the description. I think generally my experience of it was pretty subtle - I know some people will feel more literally that the world is not real. I think I had experiences like this in a limited way, from time to time, but generally speaking I related more to the secondary description on Wikipedia: 'feeling as though one's environment is lacking in spontaneity, emotional coloring and depth'.  I had always characterised what I experienced as being part of depression, as being depression itself - what happens when depression gets that deep and low - I didn't realise that it is a symptom in its own right. I always compare my experiences since then to this time, and no matter how I've felt since then, it can never be as bad as those few years. 

Often, the world seemed colourless and grey, bald and white, devoid of meaning. Other people seemed empty to me. Sometimes I felt completely empty, flat and without emotion or real feeling, with no reaction to the outside world, and I could see absolutely no worth in anybody or anything. I was untouchable, nothing could move or sway me. I was a mannequin, muffled and shrink-wrapped, absolutely starved of real emotional content or personal connection. 

My moods were very changeable, and I remember comparing the movement between this depressive state and a more normal state to somebody turning the light on and off; I imagined a table with many objects laid out before me. The objects were the people and things in my life. When the light was on, they had colour, depth and meaning - I could see them and interact with them, they had an effect on me. But when the light was off - nothing changed, really, everybody and everything was still there - but they were grey, entirely grey. I could see their outlines, but they had no meaning, I did not care about them at all. They could not reach me emotionally, they were ghosts, they were of no interest, they were far away, they were in shadow. 

My English teacher lent me a book of poems called 'Ariel' by Sylvia Plath, and it spoke directly to me. 


'The nights snapped out of sight like a lizard's eyelid:
A world of bald white days in a shadeless socket.
A vulturous boredom pinned me in this tree. 
If he were I, he would do what I did. '

- The Hanging Man, Sylvia Plath

I saw the world as white, clinical. I/the world was a terrible void of emotion, meaning or interest. I loathed myself; how could anyone be so flat, so unreactive? Where did my soul go? Where was my emotional core? I loathed everybody else - where was their pain, their despair, their emotion? I could not see that the people around me had an inner life. For all I knew, there was nothing inside them, nothing in their hearts or minds. Everything was worthless, flat, grey. 

Other times, - rare times - colour and light and pain would flood in and fill me with sensation, with what I termed to be 'meaning'. I felt things; I was alive, I was moved, I was filled with sorrow or melancholy as I listened to music late at night in my room - better than the terrible numbness. I would constantly search inside myself in vain for this authentic emotion, for this real experience, and the more I searched the more it eluded me. Or I was excited, manic, filled with nervous energy - loud, impulsive, jovial - but always on the edge, hating myself and my behaviour, terrified of when I would crash.

This only served to make the numbness, the grey, all the more terrible when it came. This greyness made me believe that I felt nothing, that I was empty, that the world was utterly cold, plain and white, that there was nothing in it that meant anything. These profound changes in my perception - like turning off and on a light - made no sense to me. I could not understand why one day I would wake up in one world, and the next another entirely. There was no rhyme or reason for the change in temperature, in the quality of the light, when nothing externally had changed at all. Why did I sometimes not give a damn about the people around me, about what they said or did or whether they were there or not? Was I completely evil, empty, blackened, dried out, hollow, unreal? I could not understand. I wanted to die. 
This led me to almost fetishize emotion and feeling and experience itself - I called it 'meaning', and for many years painful honesty and emotional over-sharing has been a big problem for me, as I attempt to force this genuine experience of the world. I have idolised the experience of emotion, the sharing of innermost thoughts and secrets, the deep soulsearching and digging up of important feelings, because I desperately needed to be reassured that I had an inner life, and that other people did, too. I would test them - trying to find out if there was anything behind the mask.