Nah, I don’t mean the red pill stuff, or the associated political analogy. I have derealization and depersonalization symptoms. They’re mostly flashes, but sometimes a really hard crisis happens. It’s even often really pleasurable,  as an amorphous wave of pleasure. Once in a while, it’s some specific, disturbing fantasy that feels wonderfully perverse at the moment. Like the time I first heard “Luscious Apparatus”, being by my own in the dark waiting for the bus — I felt I could actually carve poems into my body since it wasn’t really my body and its skin was thick enough I could carve it out without bleeding.

  I have strong memories of that particular crisis whenever I listen to that song, and even really mild DR/DP flashbacks. And that was a pleasurable one, but DR/DP can be terrifying, and I had a really strong case of the bad ones this tuesday.

I was just leaving home for work. Having missed my bus, I had to walk for ten minutes to get to the bus that takes you to the subway. And then I lost most of my sense of context — I had a very very thin string tying me to my sense of self and didn’t know where the hell I was. All I knew was that I had to walk for ten minutes and get into the bus that takes you to the subway to get to work, so I did that in an automatic sort of way while I tried to get my sense of self back, trying to find music on my iPod that would remind me first of my childhood, then late teens and early 20s. And even when I had a clear picture of who I was, I didn’t feel like I was who I was. Thirty or fourty minutes had already passed, I was already on the bus and knew how to get to my workplace, and still I didn’t recognize anything or felt like I knew who I was.

Now, I feel mild amounts of that kind of shit regularly, generally in short flashes, but it’s never strong enough to be terrifying; I usually just tell myself I’m feeling weird and keep going. But this time I was one milimeter away from total disconnect, from the tiny string tearing apart and leaving me wandering directionless, nameless, formless, a strange out-of-time volition with no sense of embodiment at all.

For all I cared, I could be in Slovenia and just following directions. A block away from home, and I’m in Slovenia. And just a string away from losing the instructions.

DP/DR are most often a symptom of complex partial convulsions from temporal lobe epilepsy. When I first discussed them with my psychiatrist — after the mood disorder itself was more or less manageable, he ordered an EEG, which shows no sign of epilepsy at all. So when I called him on the phone to tell him this horrifying tale (he was driving, so it really wasn’t a veredict) he said I probably had an acute anxiety attack masked by the anxiolytic and antipsychotic medication. But we didn’t really discuss this on a formal appointment.

Even in bipolarland, I’m as atypical as they come. Which is why I’m doing this and writing the book and generally spilling my guts out. Nah, I actually do that for exhibitionism and maybe some money and a new career if the book does succeed.