#self-disorder

If you have problems in these areas, you may want to consider looking into self-disorder AKA ipseity disturbance! There's very little research on the topic unfortunately, but at least understanding the categories may be able to help give you language for your experiences; I've found that these are very difficult experiences to put words to, so knowing what they're called can itself be immensely helpful.

You can also take a questionnaire (the Inventory of Psychotic-Like Anomalous Self-Experiences, or IPASE) here. I wasn't able to find information on the validity and reliability of that test, but again, it can at least be helpful for finding language. The scoring at the end says to sum it all up, but if you actually find the mean instead (you can use a mean calculator here), you can compare your score with the average scores:

(Source / free version) (The mean is the first number listed in each cell, e.g. 3.04. "Positive schizotypy" refers to those with positive symptoms like hallucinations and delusions; "negative schizotypy" refers to those with negative symptoms like anhedonia.)

If a genie was to ask me if I wanted to go back and change any decision I've made at any point in my life, I genuinely could not think of a single regret I have.

There are some awkward social interactions, some information I wished I could have known beforehand sure, but at every turn in my life I ended up making the only decision I could've made at that time. Knowing how things turned out afterward would not affect my reasoning beforehand, and I would have to have been a different person with different beliefs and perspectives in order to have made a different decision.

Combined with the fact that much of my misery was completely out of my hands- I wouldn't have been able to stop my father's drinking, I wouldn't have been able to make high school any more bearable, I wouldn't have been able to protect my brother any better- it makes for an strange view of my life as a whole.

A common experience I hear people talk about is feeling embarrassed or ashamed of the person they were as a teenager. They can't believe the way they acted at 12, 14, 16, 18 etc. And that makes sense! Teen's brains aren't really developed yet and their impulse control and regulation is way out of wack, I assume most of us already know this.

But, like. I don't think I've changed hardly at all since I was about 12. I can't be embarrassed about the person I used to be any more than I'm embarrassed about my current self. I'm a bit more unstable and dysfunctional in my life because my circumstances have changed, but I haven't.

This is... good? I guess? Surely it's better than constantly feeling shame and regret for one's decisions?

Though, importantly, it means that I feel no more competent than a 12 year old, as I hold no sense of being better experienced and grown since then. And less importantly it means that I can't blame my past self for anything.

I have always been an extremely passive person. So perhaps I feel this way because I've never acted impulsively or rarely made any active, in-the-moment decisions and therefore have nothing to regret and no dissonance with my past self.

Or perhaps this is due to intense dissociation- hard to feel anything for something you don't identify with after all. If I see even my present self as an other person, it's easier to reason out their actions and see them as the same person they've always been.

It's probably a mix of both, as most things are.

I've been struggling recently with an adjacent concept that brought this to mind. Feeling like I'm changing, morphing, somehow and that the final mutation will replace me- kill me. I think that scares me because I've never not been me; I don't have the reassurances that most people have of "I've been through this in the past and I was fine so I can go through it again".

I have this sense of lessening core identity, you know, not the superficial one but rather the feeling of actually being myself, of being a person. I have this diminished sense of agency, not physically, but agency over the inner workings of my mind. My perception is way off. It shifts between different versions of reality, all of which feel abnormal and have no reflection of “me” in them. My thoughts are very out of control. There’s this unstoppable constant introspection and subconscious attempt at describing my thoughts and feelings and experiences, yet absolutely no description feels accurate or like it fits, so the thinking doesn’t stop. Recently, my mind has started getting “stuck” in different perceptions of reality and my body. Like it misreads it. I’ve also started to lose the sense of “natural self evidence”. Which leads to actual thoughts and feelings of unreality. Because reality and this that I’m experiencing does not seem possible.

And lastly, there’s a persistent feeling of not being able to “make sense” of anything, yet with my subconscious perpetually trying to do just that. Like it’s trying to get everything right, tie everything together into normalcy again. Like I’m constantly trying to understand what’s going on.

Do you know what it’s like to be this mentally ill? This is what I imagine hell must be like. A constant, never ending downwards progression of THIS.