Derealization
You look out of the window of your mind, and you see a dream.
This dream has all of your hopes, joys and delights before you, and yet because of an invisible barrier you feel as if you cannot touch it.
It is as a one way mirror.
I think of Zeno’s paradox. Where there is a beginning and an end of a race, and a racer always goes a half of the original half. He gets ever closer, yet he doesn’t get there.
It feels like something is always just a bit out of reach.
Nevertheless, somehow the desire reaches across the chasm. It reaches out to you, yet you cannot reach out to it.
To have a dream come true just doesn’t feel real, and over time it doesn’t even feel worth your time.
This is how I would describe derealization and depersonalization.
The former is where the world doesn’t feel real to you, and the other is where you don’t feel real.
I’m not describing imposter syndrome. Perhaps this is common with it, yet I would say it is different.
I have felt this kind of numbness in moments of my life, and I have learned that though it tries to tell you that it cannot be escaped, you must lean into it, and you will be freed.
For the wrong thing to do with it is to tell yourself to just get comfortable with not getting what you want and feeling what you want.
It is the brain’s way of protecting itself from stimuli that it considers overwhelming. It especially kicks in when you are a child.
When your nerves are on fire, this is kind of a nice thing to feel.
When the fire is out, and you want to feel again, and it remains as a zombie of dullness… that is when it gets scary.
You are not going mad, and this feeling is not going to kill you.
It is like a firefighter just trying to keep you safe.
When they come out of a fire, they smell of the same fire that they fought.
When the battle is over the war can still linger on the soldier.
And sometimes it feels safer to stay in the moment where defeat was indeed imminent.
When the soul has believed that it wasn’t worth the time of day to save — yet it was saved — it still remembers and lives in the moment when it abandoned hope. Just like the fire lingers on the firefighter, and just like the battle lingers in the soldier.
Reason seems unreasonable to the heart exposed to this reality of things quite often.
Blaise Pascal said that the heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of. I understand the gist of what he meant, yet I would add one more thing.
The heart has reasons that only it can reason with.
It speaks a different language than we do for the most part. It speaks in feelings and emotion.
It has its own cups for the fluid of its concepts.
Words are like cups. They have a definition, and a connotation. There is the cup and then there is the meaning that it holds.
What happens when the cups have no coffee? Though they were made for it?
What happens when the coffee has no cup to be put into?
They remain distinct and disconnected even though they became purposed for each other.
Over time they forget that they had a relationship.
Thankfully. Even should the cups become cracked, the coffee remains what it is.
There is always some kind of anchor for the mind that disbelieves in itself.
Feelings have minds too. The cosmic rainbow of your emotions with their own opinions, however childish, can think. Perhaps they are childish and triggered by what turns out to be a meow from a paper tiger, but they can connect, trust, and return to a shape that can fill a cup again.
Their greatest weakness is also their greatest strength.
They are fluid.
We must learn to allow our cups to become more fluid as well.
Cups were made for holding fluids. Not the other way around.
We must allow both to transform into something that befits a life of meaning and purpose.
What for me has resisted this process of healing and readapting the most is a fear.
This one.
The fear that we are in fact able.
In derealization and depersonalization it is important to allow for change of belief that discourage you from believing that you are an overcomer.
You can overcome the grasp it has of your attention, and freedom, in lieu of believing that it cannot be done.
And to believe in the illusion of derealization (with the sense of powerlessness that accompanies it) as binding reality, we must assume something about the allusion.
The allusion that you are safe and that you are loved, at least by you.
Believe in this,
That what is looking back into the window of your dreams is the real, adaptive, incredible, and loving you, and that that You is held safe and true in the love of God.
And this is no illusion.
This is what we do not want to believe. For if it is believed as true and it turns out not to be, even the hope of happiness is dashed.
There is a reason this hope remains through thick and thin. Even when it feels robbed of the power of encouragement that it provides normally.
Because it is true.
It is the light that comes into your window. It is the substance by which your window even consists.
If it were not true and substantial, how could it even affect you?
It is your light, and the light of Christ for you.
It is the ultimate eternal reality that embraces the limitlessness of your heart.
And it is this light shared between you and heaven that makes you real.
Blessings.
