No, You’re Not Crazy

My heart is racing. The room isn’t quite spinning, but I don’t feel the ground beneath my feet. I can hear people talking, but their voices sound far away. I feel as if I am separated from the world, from the people around me, but I have no idea why. 

I try to speak, but my voice sounds even further out of reach than the other people’s in the room. Is that even my voice? 

Why do I feel like this? What’s happening?

Am I losing my mind?

I kept these feelings to myself, unsure of how to describe them. I was convinced that if I was even able to string words together to explain it, I would sound insane. I mean, I had never heard anyone else talk about this–would anyone understand what I was going through?

Eventually, it became too much and I told my mom. She didn't understand at first, but she was supportive anyway. She would listen to me cry--the discomfort and fear this feeling causes is one of the worst things I've experienced--hold my hand, hug me, try to talk me through something that she didn't have any frame of reference for.

Whenever I talked about these feelings, the word anxiety popped into my head. I'm not sure why I associated the two, but I began to wonder if they were actually connected in some way. But then again, I thought, I don't have anxiety! I'm not an anxious person!

Oh, honey. If you only knew….

Fast forward about a year. I'm sixteen, a sophomore in high school, and a newly diagnosed type one diabetic. While I was in the hospital, a psychologist was sent in to talk with me. She essentially listened to me talk for about fifteen minutes before she said, "From what you're telling me, I think you're showing signs of an anxiety disorder."

Oh.

Once I was discharged, my mom and I, accompanied by my grandma, would make the thirty minute drive to my new therapist's office every other week. 

The first few sessions were awkward, to say the least. I realized after talking with her for a while that I had disconnected myself from my feelings, and was really only reacting to things when I couldn't hold my emotions in anymore–as she would say, I would bottle up all those feelings until my bottle was about to explode.

I decided that I wanted to tell my therapist about this weird, dream-like feeling I had been having on and off for about a year. Again, I didn't have any vocabulary to explain this, and because of that I'm not sure if she truly understood what I was talking about. She suggested that this feeling was triggered by exhaustion, which resulted in me using that as the primary trigger for this out-of-body sensation. I remember talking to her in one session about how often I felt that way, and she asked me why I was so tired all the time.

I mean, I was pretty much constantly exhausted that year, but we don’t need to get into that right now. 

So from that point on, I started thinking that exhaustion was the cause of this feeling. But then, I thought, why was I feeling this way when I wasn’t tired? If I was completely well-rested, I shouldn’t feel that way, right?

Fast forward a few years to the summer of 2020. My anxiety was out of control, and this feeling was the worst I had ever experienced. I finally got in contact with a new therapist and I filled her in on everything I knew so far. She listened, asked me a few questions, and came to the conclusion that this feeling was called depersonalization, or derealization. Once we got off the phone after that appointment, I took to the internet to do some more research.

Why am I telling this story? Well, like I said, depersonalization was the first real sign of my anxiety disorder, and it was something that I had never heard anyone else talk about before. So I’m here to tell you that, if you’ve ever felt like you’re crazy—either with a similar symptom to mine or with anything else—you are not alone and you are definitely not crazy.

Stay safe.

—Abbie