It’s an April evening in 2024, spring is in full swing, and dark winter skies have given way to drawn-out sunsets. The birds are chirping, and this time last year I was probably sat with a beer on some grass outside a library, blurring the line between group studying and binge drinking. When I was in education, this is what spring-time had always meant: an unlikely cocktail of pre-exam stress and summer-style outdoor socialising, prompted by heatwaves that hit earlier every year. This time round, though, the season has become more monochrome. Everything I love about this time of year is behind a thick and impenetrable screen, impossible to describe or locate but unavoidably real and always, always there. This is how the world has looked since my birthday, four weeks before, when I woke up from ringing in my 24th year with a hangover and the unshakeable conviction that something, in me or maybe in the world itself, was off.
The clinical term for what I experienced for most of that year is depersonalisation and derealisation (DPDR), a common but lesser-known symptom of anxiety. I find this label hard to stomach, though: when I am in this feeling, it is beyond belief to me that it can be a “symptom” of anything, in the way that an elevated heart-rate or feelings of nausea are symptoms. The late Mark Fisher once wrote that depression is not just an illness, it is also a philosophy about the world. If the same is true of other mental health issues, then this particular form of anxiety is philosophy at its most totalising, a powerful and comprehensive feeling of wrong-ness that defines everything you think and feel. You want to escape, but the thing you’re trying to escape is around and within you. When DPDR is at its most intense, it becomes impossible to even imagine what it would be like not to feel this way: when something has gone wrong with existence itself, “being okay’ is a contradiction in terms. Doctors and therapists will tell you that DPDR is a threat response that serves an evolutionary purpose by blocking out traumatic sensory information so that we can focus on survival. My personal feeling is that DPDR has to do with knowing death as much as it does prolonging life: every person and everything you encounter becomes a sign referring to nothingness, every sensory input nothing more than the non-echo of a long silence.
Even as I write, I feel a nagging dissatisfaction with my descriptions, because the scariest part of DPDR is the inability to put your finger on what’s wrong with your experience. All you know is that you don’t feel normal anymore. I know from hours spent on forums, reading the accounts of fellow sufferers, that it’s important to people experiencing this that they are able to describe their experience to other people. There’s this illusion that comes with being in the depths of this kind of anxiety that, if you could only find the right words, you could make someone else understand your feelings and create a lifeline to reconnect you to the world. Of course, the words you’re looking for never come: no sooner do words leave your mouth than they are swallowed up by the all-consuming wrong-ness. From March 2024, when the feeling first began, to August that same year, I spent innumerable hours in therapy trying to pinpoint exactly how it was I was feeling. When it finally came, though, relief didn’t feel like being perfectly understood, and it didn’t come from therapy. The gap between me and the world around me didn’t close, exactly, but I found I could reconnect with others and myself by making leaps of faith. Just by experiencing it for so long, I learned to tolerate my DPDR, and was surprised to discover that feelings of connection, satisfaction and even euphoria could co-exist with that nagging discomfort I was fixated on, if I allowed myself to believe in them. I spent a long-time during this period of my life too unwell to leave the house, looking out the window and wondering what it would be like to feel like myself again, to go out in the world without this ever-present feeling of existential terror. Words like “cure” and “normal” came to dominate my sense of myself. In retrospect, my obsession with normality was at times far crueller and more painful than the DPDR itself. After a couple of months of looking out the window, I got bored and started going on short walks, which I would also spend thinking about what it would be like to be cured. After a few weeks of doing this, my walks got a bit longer, and sometimes I would go on them with other people, who would suggest new routes and distract me from the important work of searching for a way to feel normal again. 2 years later, I am still awaiting a return to normality, but have decided in the meantime to go back to both work and study, and to keep allowing myself to be distracted.
