O
Opus132
Around 15 years ago i had an episode where i woke up one day and suddenly my entire reality felt completely obliterated. It's like i was suddenly plunged into near darkness. Experiences felt vague and distant, memories faded out quickly and whatever i could recall was also faint and distant, sort of like memories during an alcohol blackout. When this happened i went through a lot of travail, had all kinds of tests done to me, but the result was always that there was no structural damage, thus the only diagnosis left was some kind of dissassociative condition (a psychologist even fished out a schizophrenia diagnosis from somewhere). Keep in mind that prior to this i've been suffering from anxiety and depression for most of my life, had social phobia as far as back as my earliest childhood memory, and prior to the onset of those symptoms i was going through one of the worst years of my life, where i was experiencing constant stress and anxiety.
Now, for the record, my symptoms did not fit what i read about dissociative disorders 100%. For instance, i didn't feel dissociated from my own self in the sense even looking on my body or my reflection feels strange or alien, it's just that my own sense of reality feels diminished, and i feel disconnected from my enviorments in the sense my experience of them is reduced and does not imprint strongly in my memory, but my surroundings are not distorted or alien at all, that sort of thing. I also have no memory laps about traumatic events or anything like that. While i do have huge gaps, both in my short term and long term memory, there's no selective nature to the kind of memories i have lost and it's less of an issue with recall and more about the fact whatever i do rember is faint, distant and almost non-existent.
So because of an inhability to find a cause, the fact that despite the gabs i could still "function" in a sense (nothing that would give away i had some sort of structural damage, for instance inventing memories, repeating the same conversation etc), albeit in a vastly reduced way, i sort of "let it go", my existing depression already making me quite fatalistic even before this happened, and for over 15 years i've been living like this, with occational "episodes" where my symptoms would permanently become worse which compounded my fatalism as it felt like there was no point in even trying if i would just get worse seemingly and often out of nowhere.
And so we come to this last year, where again i've been put through a great deal of stress much like the year where all this started (a combination of illness in the family and financial struggles) and due to the pressure i ended up picking up alcohol for the first time in years. I was a binge drinker in my teens but i quit around my early 20s and only had a brief relapse 15 years when those symptoms first appeared (around my late 20s) but i quickly gave it up becuase it made things worse. This time however i didn't feel any immediate worsening of the symptoms which i guess lulled me into a false sense of security. Well, after several months of this (keep in mind i'm not talking about anything crazy, just three small beers every couple of days or a glass and a half of wine at the most, which was usually enough to make me drunk), i now got hit with the worse episode since this started, which begun with an even more drastic inhability to form memories. I held out around two weeks, which was longer than usual (in past episodes i would recover within a week tops and afterwards it was just a matter of reajusting myself to my "new" reality), and then got hit again and this time everything broke to a degree where it actually feels i've been brain damaged, like something physical actually occured. It's so bad i'm struggling to even retain any sense of who i am. It's like i'm a different person altoghether. My memories are at their faintest, almost to the point of near total non-existence, and everything feels remote and unfamiliar. Like when i look at my hobbies, i barely even remember them or recognize the feeling i had associated with them. I used to play video games as a way to escape my anxiety but now i can barely feel anything when i play them and i struggle to even remember what i just played right after putting down the game. The same goes for everything else. Hell, even the things that gave me so much worry like my financial struggles don't seem to matter anymore since they aren't even there in my consciousness anymore except as vague, fragmentary memories.
Basically, it feels like i'm dead, almost completely. Even writing this took effort as going back to the beginning to check for errors or maybe add some things felt alien and distant and i struggled to remember what i wrote even though i JUST wrote it. Right now i'm going crazy about the possibility i may have incurred some structural damage (thiamine deficiency, cortisol damaging my brain, maybe something like a silent stoke who the hell knows), and my anxiety is through the roof since i'm no position to do anything about it (i have 10 bucks in my bank right now) and the feeling that "time is of the essence" is driving me crazy. But the fact it may be just another dissociative episide isn't any less stressful since i never got better in the past 15 years (worse actually), so what are the chances i could revover now that the problem has gotten 10 times worse? Be that as it may, i'd like to at least have my brain shut up about the possibility of ongoing structural problem.
Now, for the record, my symptoms did not fit what i read about dissociative disorders 100%. For instance, i didn't feel dissociated from my own self in the sense even looking on my body or my reflection feels strange or alien, it's just that my own sense of reality feels diminished, and i feel disconnected from my enviorments in the sense my experience of them is reduced and does not imprint strongly in my memory, but my surroundings are not distorted or alien at all, that sort of thing. I also have no memory laps about traumatic events or anything like that. While i do have huge gaps, both in my short term and long term memory, there's no selective nature to the kind of memories i have lost and it's less of an issue with recall and more about the fact whatever i do rember is faint, distant and almost non-existent.
So because of an inhability to find a cause, the fact that despite the gabs i could still "function" in a sense (nothing that would give away i had some sort of structural damage, for instance inventing memories, repeating the same conversation etc), albeit in a vastly reduced way, i sort of "let it go", my existing depression already making me quite fatalistic even before this happened, and for over 15 years i've been living like this, with occational "episodes" where my symptoms would permanently become worse which compounded my fatalism as it felt like there was no point in even trying if i would just get worse seemingly and often out of nowhere.
And so we come to this last year, where again i've been put through a great deal of stress much like the year where all this started (a combination of illness in the family and financial struggles) and due to the pressure i ended up picking up alcohol for the first time in years. I was a binge drinker in my teens but i quit around my early 20s and only had a brief relapse 15 years when those symptoms first appeared (around my late 20s) but i quickly gave it up becuase it made things worse. This time however i didn't feel any immediate worsening of the symptoms which i guess lulled me into a false sense of security. Well, after several months of this (keep in mind i'm not talking about anything crazy, just three small beers every couple of days or a glass and a half of wine at the most, which was usually enough to make me drunk), i now got hit with the worse episode since this started, which begun with an even more drastic inhability to form memories. I held out around two weeks, which was longer than usual (in past episodes i would recover within a week tops and afterwards it was just a matter of reajusting myself to my "new" reality), and then got hit again and this time everything broke to a degree where it actually feels i've been brain damaged, like something physical actually occured. It's so bad i'm struggling to even retain any sense of who i am. It's like i'm a different person altoghether. My memories are at their faintest, almost to the point of near total non-existence, and everything feels remote and unfamiliar. Like when i look at my hobbies, i barely even remember them or recognize the feeling i had associated with them. I used to play video games as a way to escape my anxiety but now i can barely feel anything when i play them and i struggle to even remember what i just played right after putting down the game. The same goes for everything else. Hell, even the things that gave me so much worry like my financial struggles don't seem to matter anymore since they aren't even there in my consciousness anymore except as vague, fragmentary memories.
Basically, it feels like i'm dead, almost completely. Even writing this took effort as going back to the beginning to check for errors or maybe add some things felt alien and distant and i struggled to remember what i wrote even though i JUST wrote it. Right now i'm going crazy about the possibility i may have incurred some structural damage (thiamine deficiency, cortisol damaging my brain, maybe something like a silent stoke who the hell knows), and my anxiety is through the roof since i'm no position to do anything about it (i have 10 bucks in my bank right now) and the feeling that "time is of the essence" is driving me crazy. But the fact it may be just another dissociative episide isn't any less stressful since i never got better in the past 15 years (worse actually), so what are the chances i could revover now that the problem has gotten 10 times worse? Be that as it may, i'd like to at least have my brain shut up about the possibility of ongoing structural problem.
