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__ ???).L..;:n is for numb::.__ _ ___
************************************************************************* ‘Mind and body separate. Pain is anaesthetised. The individual feels depersonalised: numb, unreal, outside oneself, a dispassionate observer rather than an anguished participant.’
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When I was ‘depressed’ I lived most of my life feeling a bit unhappy, discontented, tense and could hardly gather the inclination to move. Every so often I would suddenly feel totally empty for a few hours, where I would wish to be dead. On rare occasions it would last for a few days which was awful because it was a mood I hated so much. Sometimes I would also get agitated and my thoughts would race. I would shout to them to shut up but they wouldn’t. They were mainly the only feelings that I had, although sometimes I would feel kind of happy and content, as though life might be okay in the end. Sometimes I would realise that I was this case study that I was able to talk about on a surface level. It did make me feel quite smug that I could look at my arms or legs whenever I wanted, while everyone else would try to stare when they thought I was looking in the other direction. Or the doctor who, presented with a rash on my stomach, was not satisfied when he asked if I had any other spots and I showed him my back. He just came out with it then, said he wanted to see whether there were any on my arms! Sometimes I did wonder if perhaps my real body was in a coma and I was just a dream. So one day I would either wake up or fade away. When I felt down I longed to fade away more than anything. But later I wouldn’t have liked either of them, this was the ‘life’ that I knew. Places I was unfamiliar with always scared me, I would get quite upset going to places that were not places I knew, or places similar to those I knew. I was like a child who had lost her mother. I could never really identify what emotion I was feeling, like whether I was angry or upset or sometimes whether I was happy or sad. I just wasn’t in touch with them properly, they were someone else’s feelings. It took me a while to realise that perhaps there was something wrong with that feeling that I was not emotionally present. Perhaps it was because I was so relieved to be free of the intense emotions that had plagued me a few months earlier. My friend mentioned how surprised she was that I wasn’t stressed about the exams coming up, which I truly wasn’t, although I should have been. It had already been suggested that perhaps I blocked things out but I hadn’t really believed it. Now I considered that perhaps it was more than a coincidence that my self-harm had increased and I came out in a rash as the exams neared. So then I understood that there is a medium ground between too much emotion and too little. Still, I didn’t want to confront it in case the deadness and the depression came back early, or forever. I was scared to look at people in case they would be able to see through me. I felt hollow and I thought that people would be able to see in my eyes that there was something missing inside of me. Like when light is shone into a coma patient’s eyes to see if they are responsive, I didn’t think that my eyes would react, although they clearly would have done. I did know that there was something wrong when I did not feel inside my physical self- that was always a frightening experience. I guess because I felt nothing most of the time, all my feelings: my fear and happiness and sadness and anger, were all bottled up. Every so often they would build up too high and inevitably the cork would burst out. I think that this was the cause of those times when I would lose all physical sensations as well as all emotional ones. It would start at my legs and creep up, so I was walking on air, in a trance. My mind would feel totally detached from my body as I struggled to regain control. It felt like my legs were just moving and I could not stop them as they ran out into the road. The world would feel blurry, like I was living an echo. If I left this feeling to linger for too long then I would begin to panic and hyperventilate but I rarely did leave it. Why do that when there was a perfectly good razor blade or two (or three, or four....) in my purse, my shoe, my bag, my notebook, my calculator..... Sometimes i would freeze up entirely; unable to move for anything from a couple of minutes to half and hour. It wasnt really scary; my mind would be peaceful, like i imagine being in the eye of a storm. But it would be frustrating, watching people in chat rooms as they tried to talk to me and received no answer, my friends thinking I was ignoring them. |
