There’s this strange artifact that occurs with anxiety. It also occurs with people who have been through trauma, suffer from PTSD, stress, or depression or anxiety. It’s a condition called derealization, and it takes two forms. One is when you feel like an observer outside your own body, watching as things happen around you. The other is the feeling that nothing around you is real, that the things you experience are fake, figments of your imagination or, worse, a facade imposed on you by some outside, unseen force. Based on those two descriptions, I imagine you can guess which one of those I have personally experienced.
Ever since my anxiety rose to the surface, I’ve had periodic episodes of derealization, though I didn’t know what to call it until just recently. The way it felt to me is that a cold chill would sweep over my body, my skin would become hypersensitive, and I would develop something I can only call tunnel-vision, though that term doesn’t entirely encompass the nuance of what happens with my eyes. The closest I can get is by comparing it to that visual effect they use in movies at times where the camera suddenly zooms in on a character’s face and everything around them goes suddenly blurry and stretches out into a kind of circular shape. It’s like being caught in the center of a pool of water, where you are the thing that caused the ripple that pushes out and away from you.
But on top of all that is the sensation that everything around you fake, unreal, and almost cartoonish. Every time I feel a bit like Neo in the move The Matrix,
And then, just as suddenly as it hits, it dissipates and is gone. Poof! A puff of vapor that was never there in the first place. I find myself wondering then how I ever could have felt that way. I know it’s my anxiety. And I know they’re more lies my brain is trying to tell me. I know, too, that they never last long, that they always pass, and I just have to ride them out. But sometimes they are intense enough to cause me to want to panic, and it’s all I can do not to start freaking out.
Fortunately, I’m on a new medication now, one I started one month ago today. It’s a mood stabilizer called Lamictal, and it’s been a godsend. Like all new medications, it’s taken some time to adjust and adapt to, but the last week has been one of the best I can remember in quite some time. I’ve experienced very little anxiety and no panic at all. I’ve been focused and productive and clear-headed in a way I can’t remember being in years. I meet with my psychiatrist again today for a follow-up, but I expect little changes in my medications at this point. The Lamictal is doing exactly what it’s supposed to be doing — stabilizing my anxiety in a way nothing else has to this point. It’s been an amazing feeling to find even more of myself and recover that productive part of myself I’ve always known is there but that I’ve been unable to tap into for so long.
With every day that passes, things get better and better. But I won’t lie. It’s been work. It’s taken effort, an act of deliberate will. Yes, it’s been a journey, but that journey has been a climb up a mountainside. But every step I take brings me closer to the summit. I can see the sunlight peaking over the ridge now, and it’s more light than I’ve seen in years. My life is by no means perfect, but I can honestly say that I am happy and content with my station in it. I’ve worked hard to get where I am now. I feel like I’ve earned this, albeit by God’s grace and strength enabling me to get here. I continue to have hope for the future. I’m becoming more and more the man I want to be, the man I believe God wants me to be, and the leader I know I can be.
