Friends, when I was a kid, I hardly had my feet on the earth. I bumped into everything, dropped everything, felt constantly dizzy, and my head seemed to be covered by a large jam jar that made life look distorted and strange. Like many survivors who suffer from dissociation, I felt extremely alone in this. I felt that speaking about it would make me a laughing stock and reveal my secret, shameful mess. It would take YEARS for me to discover I was experiencing dissociation due to ongoing abuse.
One day, in my teens, I read Nausea by Jean Paul Sartre. In it, the protagonist looked into the mirror and saw his facial features swimming around and rearranging themselves. “Wow!” I thought to myself. “That’s what happens when I look in the mirror!” Even then, I didn’t know it was dissociation, but I felt like someone else in this world GOT IT, and that made me feel better.
Today, whatever I’m reading, when I find a great description of dissociation, it feels like coming home. (Someone else gets it! Someone else has been there! Isn’t that a beautiful thing about stories and writing?) So, when The Man and I were halfway through RETURNING FOR HIS RUTHLESS REVENGE by Louise Fuller (which, btw, became a bit of a rabbit warren with the same twisty-turvy conflicts repeating themselves), I loved the descriptions of dissociation that the main character, Gabriel, experiences:
“This was always the worst part to remember—that and the bit that had followed. Usually whenever he got there he couldn’t seem to make the room stay still. The first time it had happened at work he’d had to hold on to the desk to stop it moving.”
“For weeks afterwards he hadn’t been able to look in the mirror in case he saw no reflection. Even the memory of it now was doing something strange to the air, making it hiss like an untuned radio.”
Yes! I’ve experienced that, and that’s comforting to me, like the author has reached out their hands and is saying, “Come here. I feel you.”
And in some ways, isn’t that all we really need?
Have you suffered from dissociation? Does it help when you find someone else who knows what it feels like for them?
Romancey Pants 