The Whole Universe is Humming
On dissociation in the modern age.
We all have vices. Unhealthy coping mechanisms. The things that are always at the forefront of our minds, but never spoken out loud. For me, it’s depersonalization-derealization disorder (DRDP).
It started my senior year of high school when I was struggling with and recovering from post concussion syndrome. A year into this journey was when COVID hit. I didn’t have many people to talk to, so I resorted to, and have increasingly stayed in, a little world in my own mind. Since I was dissociated, the pain of everything I was going through would disappear. The doctor’s visits and invasive tests, having to quit lacrosse, not being able to play soccer in college, losing friends, being quarantined – they were all bullets coming at me, but dissociation was the shield to make sure none of it hit me. Which seems glorious, but with time the dissociation revealed its true colors. At its core, dissociation is a mental illness.
There are two main aspects to DRDP disorder, both of which are classified under types of dissociation. Derealization is feeling disconnected from one’s surrounding while depersonalization is feeling disconnected from one’s self, as if you are an observer to your own life. Occasionally I would look at my hands in front of me, unconvinced that they were actually mine. I have continuously struggled with both of these aspects.
It is a hard thing to describe to people who have never experienced an episode of dissociation before. It is not the same as just staring off into space when exhausted or being easily distracted. The state of dissociation is an extremely unsettling experience that forces unwelcome thoughts in your head about the legitimacy of yourself, the people around you, and the world at large. It is entirely uncontrollable and unwelcome.
There are always new descriptions, or pieces of artwork, coming forward from those struggling with DRDP in attempts to describe the experience to the outside world. When I was first unaware that DRDP was a condition and I thought that I was alone in the feeling, I wrote down in my notebook,
“I feel like I’m asleep and dreaming my entire life. Talking about my memories feels like I’m watching a movie and memories are just retelling the plot. My life feels fake and so do I.”
Coincidentally, the movie analogy is a commonly used way for people with DRDP to describe it. Since it often feels as though you are watching your life from an outside, third-party view, the experience is very similar to watching a movie. It feels as though there is a fog separating you from reality, as if being in the real world is just one window cleaning out of reach.
Think of the way you feel immediately after watching a psychological thriller movie with mind-bending aspects where the plot challenges the audience’s perception of reality, blurring the lines between what is real and what is imagined. Movies such as “The Truman Show”, where the main character finds out his whole life has been fabricated for a reality show, or “Don’t Worry Darling” where the main female is trapped in a fake world while her body lays unused in the real world. Or more popular, “The Matrix”.
How do you feel immediately after watching a movie like this, where the reality of your life is put into question? Do you start to feel a little weird in the head? Maybe you start questioning your reality, asking yourself, “what if I’m actually Truman, and everything around me is fake?” You might even start thinking of yourself and your life in the third person. These are the kind of thoughts that are constantly in my head.
There are other aspects to DRDP as well, things that might be qualified as side-effects of depersonalization and derealization. Dissociative amnesia is when you start to have gaps in your memory of times when you were dissociated. When I started realizing I was having trouble remembering things that happened in my life, I thought it was because of my concussion. As time went on, I realized that the points in my life I have no memory of were the periods in which I remember being extremely dissociated. For me personally, this often manifests into me traveling places and forgetting how I got there. Not in the extreme sense, but in the idea that I have lived in my college town for three years now, and I still have to use a GPS to get to my favorite coffee shop and the grocery store because I often dissociate while driving. My friends often joke that I am “directionally changed” because even on my small college campus, I still get foggy sometimes on how to get from one building to another.
There is another form of dissociative amnesia that is very rare and severe, dissociative fugue, in which you forget important aspects of your life and your personal identity. Generally people with severe dissociative fugue are eventually diagnosed with dissociative identity disorder (DID) in which a person has multiple personalities.
DRDP is a mental illness of its own and is listed in the DSM-5, but dissociation is a natural response to trauma or a way to cope with stressful experiences. DRDP often arises in connection with PTSD, anxiety, depression, and ADHD as a way for your brain to not feel these other mental illnesses. While some people may get dissociative episodes where the sensation only lasts for a short period of time, most people with DRDP experience the symptoms continuously. Why I started dissociating while going through medical treatment for a concussion over quarantine seems self-explanatory. Why the condition continued to grow and get more persistent is a bit of a longer story.
During my journey through the concussion, which continued with strength from the end of my junior year of high school to the middle of my freshman year of college, I experienced severe anxiety. I had always been an anxious person, but this was very different. I got to the point where I was afraid to be alone or drive a car because I didn’t know when the symptoms would hit. This severe anxiety about getting sick quickly metastasized itself into every aspect of my life, especially in school, work, interacting with others, and my appearance.
Being anxious about school, internships, interacting with the people at school and my internships, and constantly thinking about how other people perceived me (since I was constantly seeing myself in third person) meant that I was dissociated for the entirety of my college experience.
The worst DRDP I experienced was during my junior year. In the fall, I was studying abroad in Madrid and my home university sent me to the best economics university in Spain and the 9th best in Europe. I am a smart girl, but my education in economics at my home university up until that point had been, admittedly, subpar. I realized early on in my experience that I was not fit to be taking those classes and despite getting tutors and canceling trips to study, in the end I did fail two of them. Never in my life had I received a grade below a B. I became incredibly dissociated to the point where I was having difficulty recognizing familiar things, like my own reflection in the mirror. I was going through my days, fully thinking that this was all just a dream and I was sleeping.
When I was younger, I went a pretty long time before I stopped wetting the bed at night. Every time I did it, I would have the same dream. It was an incredibly real dream in which I woke up in the middle of the night, needed to go to the bathroom, so I walked down the hall, sat down, and began peeing. It felt so real that I didn’t wake up and realize it was a dream until I started to feel the liquid in my underwear. When I was in Madrid, sometimes I would be fully awake and sit down on the toilet to relieve myself, and feel scared to start peeing, because it felt like I was just dreaming and I was I was going to wet myself while sleeping as a 20 year old.
I don’t remember a lot from that time. When I recall stories to my friends and family back home about the experience, I feel like a fraud. The only reason I remember most of the stories is because I wrote about them in my notebook and have read them back since, so I feel as though I’m just retelling stories I read in a book, not actual stories about my life.
When I got back to the States, I started seeing a therapist who diagnosed me with PTSD from the school experience abroad. That first semester back, I would regularly call my parents after a class saying, “They just want me to fail, everyone wants me to fail.” and they would have to talk me off the ledge, saying the professors at my home university, where the teacher to student ratio is 1:5, did not purposefully try to fail me. I was experiencing paranoia in this sense, but also in a multitude of different ways. I was afraid my therapist was recording me and was going to leak everything I was saying. I was afraid that my parents were going to pull out their funding of my tuition to make me come home and get better mentally. I constantly woke up in the middle of the night worried someone was trying to break in. My dad was also in remission for cancer during this time, which brought forth a paranoia of its own.There is a significant positive association that continuous dissociation influences paranoia, as the link was found in 97.66% of samples.
My therapist also said I had a lot of untreated trauma from my time of concussion, which I already knew, but didn’t want to acknowledge. He did not have a lot to say about the dissociation, just said that if we talk about everything that happened, I won’t be dissociated anymore. It didn’t work.
What I did realize when he was making me go back and talk about all these bad experiences is that I was incredibly disconnected from my emotions. I didn’t expect this, as I have always been hyper self-aware and introspective about why I feel the way I do, which is easy when you are constantly observing yourself from afar in the third person. Showing little emotion and feeling disconnected from your emotions is another normal attribute of dissociation, since you’re not fully acknowledging the bad, or good, things happening to you. This manifested for me into bad regulating of emotions, therefore intense mood swings and anxiety attacks, as I would be dissociated for so long, and then something would happen and the dissociation shield would break and all the bullets would hit me at the same time. My therapist tried to make me more in touch with my emotions. He gave me a chart with a bunch of different feelings on it in an attempt to get me to put a more intricate name to how I was feeling, and made me do the 54321 method (this strategy made me feel annoyed). At the end of our time together, he wanted to go back and talk about all the things I had learned and what I got from our sessions from the past 4-months. I remember sitting there in my chair, looking back to see if I remembered anything, realizing that I had dissociated through all of my meetings with him. I don’t remember exactly what I fabricated for him, but I do remember he was not satisfied with it.
I did find that some of the things he said helped me, but only for that one hour time each week in which I was sitting in his office. As soon as I left, I was immediately thrust back into the real world of being a student with an internship and I had to rush off to the library to be anxious about school and where I was going to work over the summer as someone at a university without recruiters.
It felt impossible to get better while I was still in school and searching for internships. Senior year got even busier, as I was taking six classes, working a job where I had to write four articles a week, attend a four hour long football game on Saturday, be in the newsroom for seven hours on Sunday, and working on my senior economics project so I could graduate in December.
I had always had trouble throughout college, something that wasn’t the case in high school, paying attention to lectures. It always felt like I had to put effort into manually focusing my eyes if I didn’t want them glazed over. Not that I would get distracted and completely lose attention, but I would be in class just enough to write down everything the professor said without actually hearing it. So when a test or assignment came up, I would realize I knew nothing and I would get mad at the professor for putting random things on the study guide, but I would open my notes and a perfect explanation or practice problem would be there detailing the whole process. It was a vicious cycle of being in this disconnected state during class, freaking out before tests, spending more time than necessary teaching myself everything from my notes, promising myself I would pay attention from now on, and then not being able to. This was especially a problem during football games, in which I would have to turn in a recap and analysis of what happened 10 minutes after the game ended, and I often felt disconnected from what had just happened during the game and couldn’t recall anything spectacular.
Since I was so busy during this time, I also didn’t have a lot of free time to exercise. Exercising has always been a good way for me to ground myself, so the lack thereof was poor coping on my part. It also exacerbated my anxiety around my appearance. Not in the sense of being too skinny or too large, but in the sense that people could see my body and when I was devoid of my muscles, I felt as though it was an unnatural state for me, so I must be coming off as awkward to those around me. This is similar to my anxiety around speaking with others, thinking that I come off wrong to the people around me. I was still seeing myself in third person and analyzing what I was saying and my body language in real time. It’s like when you listen to a recording of yourself and hate the way you’re speaking, or how actors don’t like to watch movies that they’re in – except in real time, all the time.
I am not ignorant to the idea that dissociation can no longer be talked about without speaking also on the rise of technology. The idea that dissociation seems to be the sickness of the new era. When I realized how much the virtual world was affecting my DRDP, I quickly deleted apps and reduced my screen time. I recently finished reading “The Every” , the sequel to one of my favorite books, “The Circle”, which is about a near future in which Google, Meta, and Amazon have all merged into a monopoly.
In the novel, one college professor, who was against the technology takeover, wrote a paper on the effects she was seeing in the classrooms. Although she is a fictitious teacher, it seems as though any one of my professors could have written the same thing. She explained that the newest generation exhibits every symptom of addiction in the classroom, and how they’re all exhausted in class because every night, they’re all on their phones until they fall asleep. It’s making all the students overwhelmed because not only do they have to have a normal course load, which has been stressful enough for decades, but now the students have added thousands of messages to read and send, videos to watch, and information to gather about people they are following on the Internet every day. She said, “this level of contact and availability is seen as a prerequisite to participating in society.”
A study by the University of Washington found that people are starting to use social media as a form of dissociation. If something makes them uncomfortable, they turn to social media to forget about it and not feel the pain that comes along with it. Through the research they found that we don’t generally remember the things that we read or watched online, even if it was only five minutes ago. Think about it, do you remember what the last Tik Tok or Instagram Reel you watched was about? I definitely don’t. Since social media triggers a dissociative state, it also triggers dissociative amnesia, so the videos and things we read aren’t going into long-term memory, they’re staying in the short term. A dissociated society makes for dissociated people.
Cutting down my following list to only people I really cared about and deleting apps helped a bit, but I had too many underlying problems and anxieties for that to be a major fix. The thing that seemed to be the next step in getting rid of my DRDP, something that maybe I shouldn’t admit for a large audience in fear of detriment to the next generation, was graduating college.
I turned in my senior project, saw all of my finalized grades, got an automated note from the president congratulating me on graduating, and all of the sudden I felt like I could hear the universe humming all around me.
School has always been an insane stressor for me, in more ways than just being overly concerned with academic validation. My entire college experience happened in a post-COVID world which I dutifully compared to my older brother’s pre-COVID college experience. In the first half of college, everything was online and there were no real tests because they were all open note, or professors just decided there wouldn’t be tests at all. Which of course was nice, but I also knew that I wasn’t really learning any of the material. Then when regular tests were integrated back into the curriculum, it was almost as if I had forgotten how to take them. After Madrid, I was also aware that my economics education was nowhere near being difficult which translated, in my mind, to mean that it was not as valid. In 4 years time I will have the same degree as those students in Madrid, but I will know far less. I wished I would have gone to a harder university, or just one that cared more about my major, so that my degree felt more valid.
I have also always been the type of person who has never really seen the importance of university in more ways than just a hoop you have to jump through to show hiring companies that you can prance around like a show dog. I wish that it was not this way, but in recent years it has started to feel increasingly that this is the case. I have had incredible opportunities through my university to work for the athletics department, be in a leadership position on the student newspaper despite not studying journalism, and have a network of alumni who want to help students, however I have not seen the same kind of outpouring when it comes to the actual education. I regularly tell my dad, who works in finance, and my brother, who also studied economics, that I don’t feel as though I learned a single thing through my classes. I tell them that if I had to take a macroeconomics test again, which is one of the first and most basic classes you take as an econ major, I could not pass despite getting a 98% in the class my freshman year. Everything that I know about economics and finance I have learned from my internships where I was able to practice the art instead of just memorizing graphs and vocabulary words without legitimizing the information.
Even once I got out of the doomsday thinking that my professors wanted to see me fail, I was still skeptical about their practices. Like in my game theory class my last semester. All of our practice problems and the study guides were very focused on mathematical reasoning with a right or wrong answer. Then the midterm and the final were set down in front of me, and it was all about theory. I had no idea how to answer these kinds of questions, as we had not done anything like this throughout the course of the semester. Frustrated, I just wrote down everything I could remember on each of these tests, hoping the answer would be somewhere in the paragraph. I got the tests back, I got high A’s on both of them, but I never really understood the concept or what theories I was supposed to pull, and wouldn’t be able to teach the content to someone else. Because of instances like that, I generally think of higher education as a strategy game where you must figure out how to win (getting your degree) by analyzing the strategies of your other players (the professors) and exploiting those strategies. I do not think of university as a vehicle for gaining knowledge for a future career.
I also got to the point, especially in my last semester of college, that I felt extremely constricted by classes and having to be in them. It felt almost suffocating sometimes, and I could physically feel a strain on my back as if my backpack weighed 60 pounds. Occasionally on Fridays, I just wanted to wake up early and drive back to my parents’ house to spend the weekend off campus. But I couldn’t, because I had a 50 minute Spanish class at 12:00 pm that I had to be at. And I couldn’t leave for my parents’ house after 10:00 am, or else I would be driving at night. So my entire Friday was knocked out just because of a 50 minute class in the middle of the day. It is not as though I could just skip it every once in a while either. After COVID, the language department at my university made a rule that if you missed more than three classes a semester, you would automatically fail the class. This felt incredibly elementary to me. If I felt that I was paying tuition, I knew when the tests were, and if I felt that I could skip a class, then that was on me. It is not a college professor’s job to tell me I cannot skip classes that I voluntarily signed up for. It was also frustrating because I didn’t do well on tests because I listened to lectures intensely, I did well on tests because I taught myself the material later. I often felt like classes were just a waste of time that was tearing me away from my studies. Even in high school, especially senior year, I missed far more classes than three and it never affected my GPA.
All four years there was also just the severe anxiety that came through my appearance in the classroom. When I was supposed to be listening to a lecture, I was really analyzing myself through third person, unwillingly. Contemplating if I should raise my hand, if I was nodding too much, if I was sitting in my chair weirdly, pondering what my classmates around me were thinking about, or if I should write something down despite nobody else in the class seeming to be taking notes.
My brain was always on hyperdrive for college and everything surrounding it, despite not seeing college as utterly important. I think it is important to state that although I had this experience, I am still very grateful for my opportunity to attend college. While I might not have learned from the classes, I did learn from my internships and jobs, which were only available to me because I was in college.
I graduated in December, but during the spring season I am still in the same apartment I have lived in since the spring semester of my junior year. When I moved back into the apartment in January, I looked around and realized it was the first time I really took in what it looked like. It felt like I was waking up from a dream.
Since that moment, I have had weird reckonings with my past self. In years prior, I have felt wholly disconnected from my previous selves. As if I was not the same person. For the past four years of college my life has felt similar to the book “Every Day” in which the main character wakes up every day in a different body and lives that person’s life for 24 hours before moving onto the next person. I feel as though I was a different person when I did online school, when I lived in Arizona, and so forth in each semester following.
As I watch from my window, doing work online, as college students walk to campus to go to their classes, I am starting to realize that all those different experiences I have had throughout my life, I have had in this body. I look back at pictures and recognize that although my hair may be shorter or I had more baby fat on my face, or I was skinnier or heavier than now, that is still me. Instead of thinking back on my memories in terms of recalling what I have read in a book, I have started to feel connected through my body, which has done all of these things.
One morning when I went to the gym at 8 am I was waiting for the crosswalk when the sun hit my face and I heard the birds singing and I felt myself recall what it was like to go to the gym early in the morning every day when I lived in Phoenix. I remembered the feeling of walking from my apartment to the gym with the sun out feeling exactly like this on my cheeks and the squint in my eyes.
One day when it was colder, I got dressed in cream colored straight jeans and a brown sweatshirt and I walked over to campus to meet with a visiting professor to talk about future career opportunities. I met him in a building I hadn’t been in since sophomore year, and as I entered and caught a glimpse of myself in the reflection of the awards shelf, I realized that I was wearing an outfit that used to be one of my staples sophomore year, that I hadn’t worn together since that fall semester when I was 19 and just started at this school. I started recalling memories so vividly from that period of my life that it felt like I was Raven Baxter on “That’s So Raven”, getting a vision reeled in through my eyes.
More and more instances like this have been happening. For the past four years I haven’t had experiences like this, and now it feels like it is happening multiple times a week. When I cooked broccoli and zucchini on the stove the other day I was instantly in the body of myself the summer after sophomore year living in a house and working in consulting. When I went over to my friend’s house one night and her roommate was watching Gilmore Girls in the living room, I had a vivid memory of turning on an episode of Gilmore Girls as my plane was descending into Spain when I moved abroad. When my mom came to visit me at college and I took her to a new restaurant I had found, I remembered when she came to visit me in New York City over the summer and I took her on a 10 mile walk through the city before sitting down to eat burgers outside. When I went to an off campus neighborhood to run I passed by a statue that made me remember walking in that same neighborhood at the end of my sophomore year when I used to spend the whole walk thinking about living in New York City.
I have always thought about myself as a big slab of marble and my job is to slowly chisel down the slab and turn it into a statue. This comes through a lot of different aspects. Anytime I learn something new, when I work out consistently, when I find myself getting more content in my life, those are all things that warrant a little hammering on the statue. Everytime I experience an intrusive memory like this, it feels like my brain is chiseling. With each memory connected to my old self, I am one more step out of dissociation, and there is one more chisel to the marble slab to design the sculpture that I will eventually turn into.
Yours truly,
Calihan
A little disclaimer: DRDP, & dissociation in general,is a very serious thing and at its core, a mental illness. Getting out of university was not a cure, but just something that relieved me, personally, of a lot of anxiety. I have been in multiple therapists throughout the years and will continue to see one who helps me take the professional and healthy way of getting rid of DRDP that is not just finishing things quickly that bring me lots of stress and anxiety. I have also tried taking medicine over the years and although it did not help me, everyone is different and I have heard of it making a big difference for some people suffering from depersonalization or derealization.