Chaos

Dealing With Derealization

Sometimes the words I type feel unreal. Sometimes I think I’m losing my ability to write. I miss my old writer self when I was brave and playful and confident with my words. I wish I could turn back time and try to take it easy with myself. That the universe didn’t have to make sense to me. That I could’ve taken it one day at a time instead of burning myself out.

Someone once said that when you stretch your intellect beyond a certain point, you will crack up. And I think that’s what happened to me. I became so indulged with the power of creation that came with controlling the way that I think that made my mind crack. It’s now always anxious with or without reason. There isn’t a single day that it doesn’t think about death or the afterlife. It was trying to control the nature of my reality that sent me into a mental health facility.

I became so paranoid about something called “the butterfly effect” and how with every choice we make we create a different reality. With other lives that we’re leading. With other people we’re becoming. And I just want to be the perfect version of myself, but I feel like a failure nowadays. It’s hard to succeed when I’ve already lost my mind. And it’s even hard to live when everything I feel feels unreal.

Intrusive Thoughts

The butterfly effect… alternate realities… choices… do I have free will?… time… all sensation is memory… death… reincarnation… other worlds… kill myself… I hate being twenty… the butterfly effect… alternate realities… something feels wrong with my social media accounts… do I even exist?… death… reincarnation… words… words feeling unreal… something’s wrong with my debut poetry collection… numbers… the number eight… thoughts… thoughts create reality… failing… losing… OCD… bipolar… kill myself… life is a dream… am I only my mind?… the illusion of reality… what if I’m crazy?… the butterfly effect… alternate realities… choices… kill myself… kill myself… kill myself.

June 19, 2017

How can I fix my mind if my mind is where the problem is in the first place? It’s getting hard to live day by day when all I could think of is my death. Along with a negative stream of irrational thoughts that haunts me minute after minute after minute.

Do I have free will? Does the butterfly effect cause alternate realities to exist where I could’ve been perfect? Is choosing death the ultimate real choice to freedom?

I’ve been walking around my room back and forth back and forth several times a day feeling very restless and angry. Contemplating about my death. Smashing ice cubes and hangers on to the wall. Arranging and rearranging things. Shouting occasionally.

It isn’t enough that I am understood by the people who love me. I am suffering and there’s no cure to my thought process. Some days I don’t even feel like anything exists. Some days I don’t even feel like I’m the real me.

I am powerless. I am flight. I am panic. I am anxiety. I am a soul that would eventually be set free from this world.

My Mental Health Story So Far

Hi. I’m Juansen Dizon. I’m a writer, and I suffer from pure o ocd including suicidal thoughts and occasional changes in mood.

I am anxious about certain numbers like 2 and 8, and I like the number 6. I am also anxious about this thing called the butterfly effect and how it affects my obsessive thoughts about alternate realities which led me to become depersonalized/derealized for a long time in April. It’s like I feel that with every choice I make I create a new version of myself. That’s why sometimes I think: Am I the real me? Or am I just an alternate version of me that made the wrong choice in life and has failed. Sometimes I think that it’s better to do nothing because then everything remains possible.

Other things that I am anxious about includes reincarnation, my blogs and social media accounts and time and how it makes me feel so guilty and hopeless because I’m afraid that it’s becoming too late to bring permanent justices into my own being.

I help myself by having a routine which includes jogging, having social media detox days, bibliotherapy and working with my current psychiatrist who seems to get what I have, unlike my previous psychiatrist.

Other things I do to help myself but find so hard to is not doing my compulsions which are deleting/decluttering, checking and mentally reassuring myself with the nice thoughts that I think about that temporarily decreases my anxiety. And the last thing is writing. Sometimes I think of quitting not because it’s hard but because sometimes I look at the screen and the words suddenly look like alien and I start to panic a bit, but that’s when I have to keep on writing to lessen the power that anxiety has on me.

And anxiety has been a bitch. I am not at peace most of the time because of it because I am always thinking and worrying and obsessing about the things that I know that aren’t really worth obsessing about. And it makes me want to cry because sometimes I think that I’m going crazy and I’m really desperate for healing and recovery, but it feels like the darkness is winning and it could only be a matter of time before death gives me the final punchline.

Hope is just for people who heal and become better.