One day, I looked in the mirror and did not see myself. I knew I should recognize my eyes, my lips, my brown hair, but I did not. I had only a vague knowledge of these features and that they should be me. The theoretical fact did not match my experience at that moment.
Depersonalization is a mental disorder where a person feels dissociated from their own physical characteristics, feelings, and emotions. It represents a form of alienation of the self and its role in the world, a rupture between the individual and their context.
This phenomenon often occurs after significant trauma, anxiety, or severe depression. Ironically, in my case, it happened after excessive meditation.
I used to practice contemplations of emptiness, incessantly repeating mantras like “I am not the body, I am not even the mind,” while reflecting on the nullity of the Ego, the transience of the material world, and other existential themes.
Our identity is a direct product of our relationship with society, whether through the culture we are embedded in or through small social niches. What you choose to wear, do, your hobbies, and beliefs can be justified by your personal history of social relationships, attractions, repulsions, as well as genetic or mental predispositions.
This led me to question: what are we really? Merely a sum of factors, or is there something more primordial, as religions suggest, calling it the soul, atman, or essence? In Buddhism, there is a saying: “A bone by itself does not make a person. A lung alone does not make a person. A being contains all its parts, but is not merely the sum of them. A body with all bones and organs could still be a corpse.”
When I realized that my characteristics did not define me as a concrete and absolute self, but rather as something mutable and potentially replicable, I lost my connection with them. I still listened to the same music, drew, and frequented the same places, but as an automaton, not as a being endowed with freedom. It was as if my characteristics were a condemnation, a limitation rather than a manifestation of the ego.
Frantz Fanon suggests that depersonalization can occur when a person is reduced to a stereotyped identity, removed from the fullness of their being by the oppressive gaze of others. Indeed, it was as if I were watching myself as a character in a film at times, and at others, acting in it, wearing masks and saying rehearsed lines.
I could feel things, have emotions and experiences, but they were vague and distant, as if they were misty, mirages that did not depend directly on me. Most of the time, it was as if everything were a dream, without real importance or consequences.
Consequently, I also experienced derealization. This sensation is the feeling of unreality in the world, in its objects and beings, rather than in oneself. I felt as if all objects had strange shapes, overly defined, dense, with odd colors, excessively dark or radiant. When I was with the people I loved, I would occasionally forget who they were, questioning why those beings with strange flesh bodies were talking to me and why they acted as if they knew me when I did not even know who I was. Although I loved them, the love felt distant. A part of me felt guilty for this indifference, but I could not contain it.
I felt like a foreigner in an exotic place, with a constant sensation of unfamiliarity, as if I did not know how I had ended up in that space, that family, that mind and body. My limbs felt heavy, and I could not seem to control them, just as my feelings passed through my mental screen without leaving traces. I felt dizzy and numbed, as if I were walking on clouds, and my body was becoming lighter, as if it wanted to facilitate the exit of my essence.
I answered to my name, but did not consider it mine. It was merely the character in a play I insisted on performing, while my real self, the actor behind, seemed absent. The problem was that I could not find the actor, so failing in the search for an essential self, I ended up feeling only the Void running through all aspects of what I knew of myself.
When I encountered Absurdism, a philosophy of Albert Camus about the absurdity of existence and its lack of absolute purpose, it intensified my questioning. Camus argued that the greatest rebellion was not surrendering to the absurd, as fighting against it made it even more absurd. He said that the most common human responses to this were suicide or conformity, but instead, we should embrace the full freedom of the absence of purpose.
I saw my condition as a mere joke. Whether everything was real or not did not need to influence my practical experience with the world. I was still free to feel and act, whether or not there was implicit reality in it. If I had depersonalization, I existed. How could something exist without a being to have it?
I was in psychological treatment at the time and brought this reflection to therapy. We worked on it until we found a conciliatory point. You cannot simply convince someone with depersonalization that everything is real, because you never needed to be convinced of that yourself. Essentially, it is an implicit fact, based more on sensation than on nameable facts. I listened patiently to all the lists of reasons for me to feel myself, but they were theoretical facts that did not connect to my personal experience, so the focus of the treatment was to make my current sensations less disturbing, rather than changing them. Of course, medication also helped significantly.
Currently, I cannot say that I never have crises. Occasionally, I question my identity or the world, but I call this philosophy. Perhaps existence is indeed a grand performance, with daily life being mere repetition and conformity. My identity, pure genetics and culture, and my passions, pure occasion. I no longer think that this really matters. In the end, all that remains is to enjoy the play.
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