Have you ever just felt not real? Like, yes, you’re aware that you exist but things don’t always feel like they are correct. You don’t think the way your mind works is correct, certain things you see seem wrong for some reason, you look at yourself in the mirror and it feels more as you are looking at a picture of someone else rather than yourself. Dissociative disorders are not a fairly common mental illness but to those it affects it takes a toll more than anyone can know. The toll ranges from both mentally to physically. I noticed the toll beginning to take to my psyche when I had come home from work one day to notice the pictures on my wall had been rearranged. The thing about being in a dissociative state is that you sometimes will do things but not remember doing them. I chalked the rearrangement up to just that.
Allow me to introduce myself, I am Harley Szczuka, and I’m probably the most boring person you will meet. I work in an office, answering customer calls, sorting through files in the sea of cabinets, eat lunch at my desk, and very rarely interact with my coworkers. Don’t get me wrong, though, I’m very happy doing this. I was always very awkward when it came to socializing and happily spend my weekends eating popcorn alone on the couch while rewatching old movies. I don’t know if I was always anti-social, but it definitely increased when I started experiencing dissociative episodes more frequently.
The most frustrating part of dissociation is that I forget a lot. I try to think back to my childhood and often can’t remember anything. I will occasionally forget the name of my mother, my only living relative. I don’t talk to her much regardless, I live in a completely different country and the time zones make it difficult to communicate.
As I already said, I came home after a usual day of work to notice that the three paintings that I have on the north wall immediately once you enter the house, were not in the same arrangement I had last remembered them being. They looked better this way, so I thought to myself that I must have changed them one day and simply forgot. Minor things like this are not rare occurrences, but I usually think the same thing. ‘I forget everything, even sometimes my own name; I must have moved it and just forgot.’
However, the concern began the day I woke up and my bedroom was not set up the way it had been when I had gone to sleep. My bed, usually perched centered under the window of the East wall (I like the rising sun to wake me), was now in the corner; my night stand moved with it; my dresser stood adjacent to where my bed once was. Now, I know I move things and forget, but I know for sure that the dresser is too heavy for me to move by myself and I definitely didn’t have anyone over last night. I called the police who came to inspect and found no signs of a break in but couldn’t come up with a conclusion as to what happened. The lead officer gave me his card and told me to call if anything else happened.
I felt myself slip back into that ghost-of-a-shell feeling of nonexistence and the next thing I knew it was two weeks later. I’m sure I went to work during those missed days, since I didn’t have any missed calls, but the days had slipped passed me more intensely than they usually had. The only thing I knew for sure was that I was so hungry. I felt as though I hadn’t eaten in that entire two weeks. I went into the kitchen and attempted to gorge myself, yet nothing seemed to do the trick. I felt weak and slowly crept to the bathroom. The girl in the mirror was about 10 lbs. lighter with hollow cheeks and dark, sunken eyes.
As I sulked around the house I felt as if something was off, but I couldn’t quite tell what it was. A sensation of sorts that there was something different, but I was too tired and too weak to focus on what it was, or to even care. My stomach rumbled loudly as I sat on the couch and turned on the television. I knew I could find comfort in being distracted.
I must have dozed off on the couch because I awoke to a nightmare. I was strapped to a hospital bed, my wrist restrained so tight and I couldn’t move them at all. My ankles were the same, and two large straps went over my chest and my hips. Three men stood around me, though a bright light above me made me squint and unable to see them clearly. I moved my head to the side to look around the room and felt a cold metallic band on my head and wires to my temples.
