Image courtesy of Stockvault.
There are times when I feel like I’m an impostor in my own skin. I look back on things I’ve done or experiences I’ve had and get this feeling like they didn’t happen to me. They happened to someone else. Feelings exist, but they’re changed in a way that I don’t believe they belong to me.
The person who exists today isn’t the same person who existed yesterday or the day before. Yet they are all supposed to be one person: me. I can’t reconcile the past versions of myself with the one typing this.
And it doesn’t make any sense why I feel this way. I know it’s wrong. The whole idea is absurd, like in this comedy I saw where the main character is told that every time a person goes to sleep that person dies, a new person waking up believing to be the old one.
I don’t know why I occasionally feel this way. It just happens in fits and starts. When it’s gone, I go back to my normal life.
My worry is that this is some different kind of madness. Madness is something I’m too familiar with, something that robs me of my self-worth and belief in myself. Perhaps all of this is just a side-effect of mental illness. There is a part of me that has had to doubt my own thinking, its existence marked by wisps of shadow and echoes of silence.
Amusing Nonsense 
I don’t know, SB, but it doesn’t sound like madness to me. Everyone processes their experiences differently. Just because your process is different from the “norm” doesn’t necessarily mean you’re “broken”. I do feel you’re your most severe critic. I can’t associate any feelings with past events. I’ve been told it’s a form of disassociation to avoid the pain of traumatic experiences, but as it’s the same for all past experiences, even those that that most people think are wonderful, I think that’s a misunderstanding by the so called experts. It’s just part of being me.
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