aesmael

A couple of days ago I read something which gave me pause. A person was describing eir experience with dissociating and I recognised much of it as things I do. Things I had regarded as ordinary, commonplace and unremarkable experiences. I did tend to think of these experiences as personal failings, lapses in discipline to be overcome. This view has not necessarily been discarded but now there are competing perspectives.

This relates to a reason I started writing here. I do not know what an ordinary experience of life is like. I do not know if other people experience memory or thought in the same ways I do, or as each other. There appear to be many assumptions I make about what is ordinary or commonplace which do not match with observation; observation leads me to believe this is also true for most if not all other persons.

One reason I started this journal was hoping that sharing my own understanding, my own processes and self-awareness and hypotheses, other people might be inspired to do likewise. This journal is in part a project aimed at increasing understanding and awareness of humans and the variations of same.

It is not something I have been especially diligent about. Months have passed in which I did not remember that this was even an idea I had. It is far from the entire aim of this journal, which could be summarised as 'whatever I think it is at the time someone asks'.

I have also not been diligent about openness when I have written of such things. Although there is plenty I am willing to write openly of in a public or semi-public way there is also plenty I am not. It can shift wildly depending on how comfortable or safe I am feeling at the time and at least one thing I am not writing openly about in part because I do not know how to do so coherently. Interesting to see what is comfortable being said and when.

Back to dissociation. I talked about this a bit with pazi_ashfeather, did some cursory poking around on Wikipedia. Although I had seen the term many times in the past I had not yet performed any investigation of what it is or means. Good enough for a start, perhaps.

Of the articles I looked at, one of the most interesting covered depersonalisation disorder. Much of that seemed quite familiar although not so much that I would leap to self-diagnose on the basis of an encyclopedia article.

What struck me most was the description of not feeling in control of speech or movements, or feeling detached from thoughts or emotions. It put me in mind of the story Learning to be Me by Greg Egan, as well as some of how I think the world works. I do not believe is an 'I' which makes decisions, or that people make decisions at all. Rather, I tend to think of consciousness as a phenomena which arises incidentally and normally experiences itself as making decisions in an illusory way. In this light I might describe people diagnosable with depersonalisation disorder as 'extra sane' for being able to perceive how things actually are.

Still, it does suggest a new perspective.

aesmael: *explains worldview / theory of mind*

Person B: That's, uh, that's depersonalisation disorder. Not everyone has that.

aesmael: Oh.

Another thing I noted while looking at these articles was the variety of my response to details of them. Some sparked recognition of similarity, some other things not sparking so and passed over, while a few provoked angry insistence that they were not me at all. So, interesting.