From a very early age, eight years old, I felt the need to understand myself. It was very apparent that I approached the world from a different point of view than those around me, and I wanted to know why. It never occurred to me that my brain might be wired differently than everyone around me.
I remember the first time that I understood that there was a person within me. You could say that it was the first time I remembered having a depersonalization episode. Depersonalization is when you feel disconnected from your body; many people call it an out-of-body experience. My depersonalization episodes are never me being outside of my body. Mine are not feeling as if my mind is connected to the body I inhabit.
At eight years old, I remember crawling up on the bathroom counter and staring at my eyes intently in the mirror. I was trying to figure out how I existed within the flesh when it felt like my body was not who I was. I haven’t felt genuinely connected to my body since that time. I still feel intensely everything happening in my body, but my body doesn’t feel like me; it feels like I am trapped within it. When I am having my darkest moments in life, one of the hardest things to keep myself from doing is cutting myself, as somewhere within me, I have the feeling that if I just let the blood pour out of my body, I will finally be released from the shell I am trapped in and be free.
For me, my mind is trapped in the Inbetween. If you have ever watched Stranger Things on Netflix, whenever Elle connects with the monster from the Upsidedown, she enters a black world with a thin layer of water on the floor. There she sees isolated memories laid out before her. It was an unnerving depiction of my inner world.
When I become introspective and stop taking in outside stimuli through my senses, I enter this world through a drop of water, falling into an inky black pool of water. Once in this world, a wooden kitchen chair sits in a black emptiness atop a thin black water layer, and the avatar of myself sits there staring into the void. Since I've been 17, this has been the age my avatar has remained.
If I am reliving memories, they come up like a slide projector - still frames of moments - many I can make run forward or backward, but they are snapshots of moments in time (a possible reason I am drawn to photography). If I want to examine it in more detail, I'll set myself behind the eyes of my younger self and explore the scene.
My thoughts come to me as figures of the ideas. Forms that appear in the inky darkness of the space as examples of whatever it is I am thinking of. How to climb a tree starts with a deciduous tree with thick limbs to climb. Then a version of me will interact with this tree while my avatar remains seated, observing.
I spend a lot of time in the Inbetween, sitting in that wooden chair, rehearsing conversations with faceless people, because as much as I want to remember faces, in my mind, none of the people have faces. I think it's because I spend a lot of my time, in reality, not looking at people's faces. After all, they make me uncomfortable.
The great thing about the Inbetween place is that I can easily create things in it. The inky water can be shaped into whatever I want, and I can play out anything real or imagined.
A lot of the time, it's a curse to communicate outside of myself, as all my thoughts need to be translated from visual data to words to express, and that can sometimes be a slower process than other people can handle. As a result, I can get stuck not knowing how to verbalize specific words, even though the picture in my mind is so clear.
In parallel to this, everything that I take in verbally is translated into pictures in my mind, and if its disturbing content, those words become vivid, detailed and graphic pictures in my mind. I've even had some people that know this about me use it as a tool of torture when talking to me—unkind souls who found pleasure in the explicit pictures that their words formed in my mind.
It has always been a question of how I ended up having a special interest in writing when I think in pictures. For some reason, translating the images in my mind as words on a page is extremely simple. It is far easier to describe in written words what I see in my mind than to draw a picture of it. I am terrible at drawing original works. I'm, unfortunately, a copycat artist only.
When there is nothing to associate a particular item with, my mind will do a few things: a) create a composite scene from the information I understand, b) turn itself into colour and mandalas, or c) play on an old radio. Of course, these results will have me asking for more detail, but option A often makes me laugh out loud as what my brain is making a picture of is usually nonsense.
Dreaming, however, is entirely different in my mind. My dreams both unnerve and fascinate me. As I am not in control of the situations, they play out in my head from the point of view of the main character (I am very rarely myself in dreams), whether that be male or female or something alien. They also play in my mind exactly as I see the real world. The jarring difference between how I view memories and thoughts and my dreams have always made me have a special interest in dreams. It also makes it hard to wake up from the dream, as it is challenging for me to discern the dream from reality, as they are perceived the same way in my mind. You can probably guess that when The Matrix came out in 1999 when I was 15 years old, it resonated with my vision of reality and dreams but did not help to solidify what was real and what was not. Nevertheless, it is still an accurate description of my view of reality.