“Hello darkness, my old friend…”

I’ve been cursed with the “McDonald Teeth” – that is to say that I have entirely too many of them and they’re all kind of jostling for space in my mouth in the same way people crowd around the reduced section in Tesco,

When I was around 7 years old, it was decided that some of these teeth ought to be unceremoniously yanked from my mouth, presumably to make room for more teeth.

I remember the dentist counting me down from ten as the sleeping gas was administered so they could pull the teeth out.

In the months that followed the procedure, I was plagued with the recurring thought of “how would I know if I hadn’t woken up from the anaesthetic?”.

My juvenile brain became convinced that I was living in some kind of simulation and that I’d never woken up from the procedure ergo nothing around me could possibly be real.

I would imagine myself prostrate on the dentist’s chair, rapt in my own inner world while the real world continued to go on outside my head. I devised various strategies to test the veracity of existence, I would quiz people incessantly in an attempt to discern who was real or who might be a construct of this new simulated world I’d found myself living in.

On reflection, these thoughts and feelings might have been my first experiences of “de realisation”. Little me (or rather, littler me, I’m still only wee) had no concept that there was a name for those thoughts and feelings, much less any comprehension that other people might have experienced the same thing.

Today was the first day in a long time that I’ve had those same feelings.

I’ve been awake since 2.30am, for no particular reason that I can place.

It’s fortunate that my life is so monotonously predictable. This monotony provides a safety net of sorts when I’m forced to rely on autopilot to get through my morning. Autopilot was the only pilot I had on board today. I realised fairly early on that something wasn’t quite right, that I felt detached and disconnected, that the world around me wasn’t quite as it should be.

Derealisation is a hard thing to quantify. It feels a bit like being stuck in a dream state. I’m not hallucinating, but there’s a vague sense that things don’t look the way they normally do, that they’re not just as tangible or concrete as they should be.

This makes it really hard to interact with the people around me. I feel as though I’m staring through fog trying to make eye contact and probably come across quite Dahmer-esque as a result. When people speak to me, it feels like I’m trying to listen underwater – the sound and the words are all there but they’re hard to pick out and almost impossible to respond to in real time.

My sincere apologies to anyone unfortunate enough to have had to converse with me today.

Sometimes, I find these feelings frightening. You know those stereotypical movie scenes of someone banging on glass, trying to be seen or heard whilst everyone else is oblivious to them? It’s a bit like that.

I’m never quite sure whether it’s obvious to other people or not. I feel as though it is. Although I’m generally a bit odd anyway so perhaps another layer of oddity doesn’t make much difference?

I’ve really struggled to anchor myself all day. I got home this afternoon and promptly took myself to bed where I lay curled up with one hand plastered to my face and the other to my stomach in an attempt to remind myself that I’m an actual flesh and bone thing.

I can feel the creeping anxiety, like a skittish black thing around my feet.

And I’ve been telling myself the same thing I’ve had to repeat many times over these past couple of months – that one bad day is only that – one day.

I feel that so many people have invested so much in me that becoming unwell or unstable would be an insult to them, as though it’s something I’ve done personally to affront them rather than something I myself might be victim to.

I’m trying not to lend too much weight to the calendar, but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t hyper aware that this time last year was the beginning of the downward spiral.

I haven’t yet learned how to untangle the trauma of having lived that experience from actually reliving it so you’ll have to bear with me if I’m not my most effervescent self over the next few weeks while I work through that.