A complicated chain of
events brought me to the place in which I am today, and it might be difficult
to join them together and make a logical continuity. The symptoms described are
both physical and mental and exist in disorder and confusion. I will try to
begin at the beginning. Up to the day of the event that marked the beginning of
my illness I was a functioning teenager, without any physical difficulties. I
will not hide the fact that during the three years before that day I had
suffered from clinical depression, but that was the total of my illnesses. I
was a person amongst people – thoughtful, quiet, introverted, and maybe a bit
unstable – but for all these, I was a human being.
On the 1.9.03 I began my
studies at the eighth grade. In the renewed meeting with my school friends the
shyness and tension that were typical for me were aroused, and in order not to gather
myself inside these feelings, in a sort of amused game, on that day I chose to
present an image that was the opposite of myself: I raised my voice up to a grating,
I joked a lot and I took on a body language that was strange to me on top of an
eastern accent. Utterly personal, I saw in this a sort of substitutive personality
for one day, a comic intermission and no more.
The school day came to its
end. I made my way home accompanied by my friend M. and as the traces of my
other image were still noticeable in me, remarks were heard, that I was not the
person that I used to be, what has happened to me and if things will continue
in this way we would have to cut off our relations. I explained that it was no
more than a game that has nothing behind it, and that soon things will return
to be as they had been. I meant to take off my new skin on the spot, but did
not succeed in doing so. Despite my efforts, strange behaviors kept taking hold
on me with no control. How it could be possible that I would not be able to cut
off the image play, I thought; soon, my own image will return. I tried to calm
myself, but I panicked.
A day passed, and my substitutive
was the only person that was left. I could not take it off. It was a whole
month during which I was drawn into a sort of uncontrollable ecstasy of a jumble
of extreme behaviors, such as I had chosen for myself on that day, and that was
now part of me. I have no recollection from that month; my brain had worked out
of ecstasy, in aggression, in an endless race, it could not be stopped. All the
words that my mouth uttered and all the behaviors that my body performed came
from an unknown place, while I myself was not there.
It seemed as if another man
was living instead of me and as if a power stronger than me was acting inside
me. I remember that things were performed with an unusual energy, with an
egocentricity in which a person sees himself only, without being able to stop
and think, with short and rapid breath. This memory is blurred and partial like
a dream.
A month passed and excited
responses were shot from all over the place. Who are you? What has become of
you? Suddenly a darkened corner of my mind, in which remained my own self, woke
up and understood that something had happened. After great efforts the ability
for self-awareness returned, but I myself evaporated into space. The whole time,
a physical urge to perform the strange behaviors accompanied me; as if a demon
was walking beside me, attempting to pull me back into the other world with
violent energies. I struggled incessantly with the need to rage and scream. If
I would have succumbed to these urges, even for only a moment, I would have
been instantly drawn into a diabolic whirlpool where my reasoning would have
been taken.
Who was the person who
remained during moments of sobriety between times? No one did. When I awoke to
my new life reality, I realized that the person that had lived inside my brain
and my body during the 13 years that had passed before that day no longer
existed.
I am fuzzy and without
strength.
I fail to form my vague reaction to your words into language. I just wanted to leave something here that marks that someone has read this, someone has more than read this.. someone understands, painfully.
ReplyDeleteDear Reem, thank you for this. This was published quite a few years ago and has never received even minimal attention. It is unfortunate that I am still depersonalized.
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