A Life Dissociated

A Life Dissociated (Originally set to be published October 26, 2023)

I’ve had those moments in my life when I have often wished that I wasn’t me – particularly when I haven’t been happy with my life or with myself.

As I grew to learn more about myself, I grew to love myself, and there was less of a desire to be anyone but me.

Yet, I’d still have those moments where I didn’t feel like me, didn’t feel as if I belonged in this world, and didn’t feel quite connected to anyone or anything.

I still have those times, and I can’t really say that those times are more or less. Those times actually come and go … blow through like the wind.

I have noticed, though, that there are many times of sadness that come with those moments too. When I get through them, I am like myself again. However, I don’t know that I am more of myself, but I feel least dissociated and more in tune with life and living.

As of late, there’s been a time of distance … where I don’t feel attached to anyone. I feel as if I am in this world but less and less a part of it. I don’t really know the reason. I am not in pain. So I don’t feel that I am necessarily suffering even when I feel sad. I tend to take those moments as just being a part of this life. I don’t know that I am making any sense, but that’s how I often feel.

Just recently, I have had troubling nightmares – dreams of feeling disconnected … a life dissociated, and I don’t know what to do about it. The dreams play out with the same consistent theme. Someone is after me. That someone is angry. That someone wants to kill me.

More specifically, that someone in my dreams wants to shoot me. When they aim to do so, I don’t understand their reasoning, but I cower and lift my hands to protect myself from the blast of a bullet. I see the person’s face, and I realize I don’t know the person, and then I suddenly realize I am not myself. I am someone else.

Within the dream, my body is inside of the body of someone else, and only then, I realize I can escape. Yet, when I attempt to escape, there are a series of steps to go through … like some great obstacle course or maze. I am almost always fighting my way to escape through a tunnel from inside of a house or building that leads to another place somewhere far away … even as far as another town, city, state or country.

It’s the stuff of movies, but it always feels real. Sometimes, I don’t know if I can escape, and I feel as if I will die … that I will be found and shot by the person chasing me, but then I hear my mind speak to me and say, “All you have to do is get up and get out. It’s not your body,” I literally climb out of the person’s body and leave it behind.

I dissociate just like that … as if it’s the easiest thing for me to do, and in my waking life, it is so easy to do.

Perhaps I’ve read or seen so much news about public shootings, that I have anxiety about it happening to me. There are more times now, when I go out, that I think about what I will do in the event of an active shooting. I want to protect myself. I want to stay safe. However, I think these dreams are less about the reality of those fears than they are about something else.

The most recent dream I had, I could see that I was not myself. I was actually a woman of another ethnicity, and I had a daughter who appeared to be about the age of seven. I only knew I was not me based on my physical appearance. I, as the woman, was someone I’d never seen before. Neither had I ever seen the child before, but I knew my history as if I had lived it before. It was strange.

In the dream, I was separated from an abusive man. I don’t know if he was a former boyfriend or husband, but it was apparent I was not with him because he was violent. I am not sure how long we had been separated, but it was his weekend with our shared child, and I was living with friends attempting to keep myself safe. Somewhere within me, I knew this former boyfriend hated me enough to want to kill me. So I wanted to escape.

In the dream, my first escape from death was when he’d come to kill me while I was standing next to a car. He got out and came up to me to shoot me. I ducked and flinched. He was so close that I couldn’t see a way of escape. So I did the most instinctive thing I could do. I crouched down and lifted my hands to avoid the impact of the shot. That’s when I heard a voice within my mind say, “It’s not your body. You can climb out. You can leave it behind.”

The next time this former boyfriend came, he was even angrier. I could see his face. At some point in this dream, I realized that it wasn’t my story. It was the life and story of someone else, but I was literally standing in their shoes living out their greatest fears. A man wanted me dead even though we shared a child together. How could he hate me but love our child? It just didn’t make sense.

In the dream, the boyfriend was set to drop off our child at a specific location. It turned out to be the exact same spot that he had intended to kill me the first time. I was fearful of this exchange. I didn’t know what to expect. I knew to save myself, I might have to let my daughter go. If I wanted to live, I needed to make my escape and possibly without her. I didn’t know what to do.

When the exchange was set to happen, the daughter grabbed my arm. I felt her tight grip. I knew I had to survive for her. Our lives depended on it. So once I got the child, we went into the house. My mind spoke to me and said I could escape by climbing out of the body. I could only live and save the child if I left the old body behind. Yet, the body wasn’t mine in the first place. It was someone else.

During the night, when my friends were all asleep in the house, I made my plan of escape. My spirit left the body of the person I inhabited … I left her completely behind, but as I lifted myself out of her, I could clearly see she was dead as her child lay next to her. (I wish I could explain this better.)

Somewhere in another part of the town, the former boyfriend was on his way to carry out his attack against me. He was going to kill me. He just didn’t know that I would be able to escape without ever being seen. I would escape through some hidden tunnel within the house, and it would carry me through an underground tunnel until I reached an opening into another city or town.

I would escape and be someone else, and I would save my daughter’s life. She would be someone else too, and we’d never be found. And just like that, I woke up. I woke up without much understanding. The only think I knew was that sometimes I know I dissociate to escape, but in some circumstances, this cannot always be the case, and not everyone is so fortunate.

For the most part, I have lived my life in a very much dissociated state, and sometimes this actually keeps the real me from living. It’s like living a life in a daydream where I’m awake but living in an alternative universe of my own making. I suppose my thinking is that if this life could be so much different, things might be so much better. Yet, I have to live. I have to survive, and dissociating my way through life has been my very own form of survival.

A therapist once told me that it takes an intelligent mind to will itself into a state of dissociation. For the most part, though, I’ve always thought of dissociation as a way of escape. I escape pain – whether it be physical or emotional. I escape from situations I’d rather not be in at all. I escape people who I’d rather not be around. I escape living through the agony of a situation that is not only terrifying, but also stifling because of it’s will to destroy me. I also escape me.

Since I can remember, I’ve used the ability to dissociate. My earliest remembrance of this was before I could even walk. I saw myself hurting and bleeding but felt that I was watching the situation happening to someone else. It was clearly my body, but I felt nothing. I was an infant watching events of trauma happening as if looking through a window while unable to verbalize what was happening. Yet, I felt absolutely nothing. The pain was stifled. My brain had turned everything I could feel off.

How long does this continue? I don’t really know. Perhaps this is the next phase in my journey of understanding and healing. I’d love to stop dissociating enough to finally live life. I just don’t know always how to go about doing that since I’m so accustomed to looking for an escape. I finally want to live life before it’s too late not to have one. I now feel that I no longer have reasons for an escape. I’ve walked through the darkest tunnel, and I know there’s light at the end of it.