obligatory introduction...

[mcraven333.livejournal.com]

your own psychiatric disorders aren't exactly the type of things people talk about at dinner parties, especially when you're studying to be a clinical psychologist... i guess i always thoughts some things are supposed to be left unsaid, and none of my friends even know about my diagnosis... my mum was the only one in my family that knew, but she passed away a little over a year ago... as a younger adolescent, i was treated for manic-depression, but i never responded well to the therapy... after a while, i came to attribute a lot of my problems to drug therapies, and i started to use meditation and other forms of mental discipline to keep myself in check... i was 17 when i was informed i had "ddnos," so that makes 5 years of living and coping with a known disorder...

no matter how hard i try, i still have days where i am walking around in a strange haze and my thoughts really aren't coherent... it feels as if reality and surreality shake hands and blur then fade into one, leaving me a mile away and looking from the outside in... it's hard to concentrate, and it feels like i have to wrestle with a sentence just to hold it down onto the page... it's on days like this where i feel the most lost inside my head, and even my own name looks funny in black and white... my personality can pause and shift and slide from place to place depending on the environment... i'm not one to wear masks, but sometimes it feels like i have entirely different faces that i've grown into or apart from... and when it gets really bad, i can even disappear completely...

i don't know if i'm a multiple or not, but i know that i dissociate and tend to display symptoms of having more of a split personality... i can't help but to wonder if anyone really knows me because of the fact that i am so different in different situations... sometimes, i am the shy introvert that reads entirely too much and just wants to be left alone, and sometimes i am the outspoken extroverted social butterfly and life of the party... it's all much more complicated than that, of course, but the thing i've been struggling with the most is trying to distinguish the "real me" and develop a sense of self-identity... but that only feels as if i'm trying to decide which me is the real me more often, because i'm always just "being myself"... i just thought i'd share with some likeminded people, since i've never known anyone else with the same or similar diagnosis.

~mcraven