Fun part of my personal mixed bag of brain weird: I can see myself in a mirror and almost not recognize myself because what I see doesn’t match the vague thought of ‘ME’ that I can manage to establish sometimes, and even when staring at a reflection of myself I’m unable to accurately view my shape and boundaries of my shape. I can see others and their figures just fine. But for me, I’m left with big red question marks, tilting my head in confusion. Because… where am I. What am I. Where are my edges, here? No, HERE??? …No clue, fuck it, draw a cat. It's distressing, especially as it's kind of a double slap to the face when I'm faced with finding boundaries of myself that are far wider than I'd initially assumed, usually when trying on clothing. "But the mirror didn't seem that bad. But looking down didn't seem that bad." meets "LOL NOT RISING OVER YOUR THIGH HONEY." Therapy has never touched this because I was apparently far too difficult to cope with, as I disliked being treated like I was 5. But I don't know myself, or have a stable sense of what I even look like to others that doesn't either settle in a haze of ".....?" or "OH GOD THAT'S HORRENDOUS DON'T LOOK." Anyone else experience this?
I have a, I think, pretty accurate mental depiction of myself, but the person I see in the mirror just doesn't register as "me" in most cases. When it does, I start panicking because, if that's me, then I'm an actual person, as in, I exist, which means I'm eventually going to die, etc.
I get pangs of that now and then too, but mine isn't triggered by my reflection. 8/ Any time a joint acts up badly or my POTS gets overly active from me standing or sitting or laying wrong at all, it rattles the bars and hollers for a while. That's really rough that it happens with mirrors. D:
My reflection might as well be like my avatar on a forum, except I don't get to customize it however I want. But yeah, whenever I sit down somewhere, or have to move past an object, etc. I have a tendency to think I need a lot more space than I do n reaity? So even when people reassure me there is enough room I just sorta stand there anxiously for a few minutes before taking their word for it. However I think those two issues are unrelated since I have a pretty bad perception of space-time in general.
Sounds like depersonalisation (a type of dissociation). I don't know much about it but that might be a good term for you to start looking.
Yeah, I've got diagnosed BPD and those two're a big part of it, but the thing is nobody has ever addressed it with me. I've been told alternately: "You'll learn more about yourself in time." "Well, if you dislike yourself already and are so negative, how can you expect to do that? We need to boost your self esteem first! :proceeds to alienate me so badly that stop seeing them:" "It can't be all that bad, not everyone knows their true self!" "I don't know what you're talking about.. are you playing a game?" and finally, "Well, maybe we can play a game! Make a personality you want and stick with it till it's you! :failed to do that, thought it was a fucking stupid idea and said as much, wound up having a gigantic fallout with them the next week because they treated me like I was 5 and also was under the impression that Passive Invasive Thoughts didn't exist in normal people: 8I; So I've got no clue how to fix it and it's becoming more distressing the more I try to deal with it.
Wow shit that's awful. The way you explained it here made it really obvious for me the kind of thing you were talking about. In terms of practical help, what if you took your measurements and compare those to garments you're thinking of trying on? If you're as terrible at estimating size as I am, carrying a cute lil roll of measuring tape can help.
Just throwing this out there, but a technique for calming anxiety that a therapist once suggested to me seems like it might be helpful here. Basically, I was to focus on being aware of one body part. An easy one to start with is your hands, since you're generally more aware of them than other body parts. You don't have to do anything with them, just be aware of how they feel (warm/cool, pain/no pain, tense/relaxed). If it's hard to get a sense of a part of yourself, clenching the muscles in question can help (e.g., making a fist). You can do your whole body one part at a time, or just focus on one part. It's kind of a grounding exercise, basically.
:Nodnod: I may try this. Tomorrow I'm also instigating a new thought. I realized that I have no photos of myself aside from vague snapshots on my laptop as status updates. My mom stopped taking photos of me when I was little, and I developed a fear of photo taking after that because the only snapshots were candid photos of.. well. Me being terribly alone and awkward and miserable looking bc increasing bad health taken by school staff for yearbook and stuff. We have next to no photos of our wedding, either. I have nothing. I don't even take photos on my phone, it's just.. not something I do. It's like we don't exist. Married for so many years and nada. >:I So I'm gonna take my phone, symptomatic as hell or not, and I'm gonna snap pics while we're out tomorrow. I'm gonna get shirts, and basic makeup again. I'm gonna get lunch with him, too. The walking/upright will kill my disabled ass, but I want to see if actually seeing myself existing might help a bit. ... Think it's worth a shot? Look at myself till I believe there's something there and work once I get my grounding?
Selfies actually help me a lot with depersonalization/disassociation/dysphoria issues, I've found, so I think that's a good idea!
Yeah can confirm that taking selfies whenever i go out helped me tremendously with getting a solid idea of how-i-look into my brain. And besides, taking a gratuitous amount of selfies can be fun!
Because I can sense this is gonna be an issue early in the game.. Any thoughts on how to deal with the mental NopeNopeNopeOhGod that'll potentially occur when I actually see the pictures?
Okay so how I started liking pictures of me (but only those I or my designated photographers take): take approximately 200 pictures. different angles, sun at different angles around you. pose, don't pose, smile, don't smile, do goofy stuff. Delete all the ones you don't like after the day is done, but try to find reasonss outside of 'This meatsuit is ugly'. I throw out a ton of pics because the angle is off or the lightning make me look like the fucking rapture is happenign on my skin. Among a generous estimate of 200 pics there's probably at least one or two that you like. Now look at those. There might be a few things that stand out immediately that work well. if not, then set the pics aside and try the exercise again. Do until you figure out which kind of pictures of yourself you like. Then until you figure out which features of yourself you like. Then until you've learnt that even the features you hate can look kinda cute if the picture is right, and aren't the end of the world if picture is not perfect. *shrug* but i don't know it might not work for you? I'm okay with pictures of myself laughing by now even if I still prefer the resting-bitch-face and sparrow-faced looks for selfies in most cases and rarely do soft smiles. But the only features i was actively appaled by were my nose and my laughing-mouth
Seconding Ivy, lots of pictures and lots of angles in the beginning. Some of them will look TERRIBLE, it's okay, everyone's selfies are worse the earlier in their selfie game. Good luck to you. :)
That sounds very reasonable actually. ouo I'll give it a shot. I've trained myself out of smiling very broadly because of all my broken teeth so that won't be an issue.. and if I just remind myself it's okay to delete things it might be alright. (training myself out of that Do Or Die thing is a doozy, this is a good start.)
There are a lot of things you described that I relate to very strongly, though I don't think depersonalisation (as a type of dissociation) applies to my experience. It might apply to yours. My mental image of myself is not very accurate - at least, not instinctively. Adjusting it to match my current appearance takes concentration, and is hard to maintain when thinking about past or possible future situations. This is complicated by the fact that while I have visual/auditory+ memories I can recall, I usually think about past events by imagining a sort of third-person image of the situation, probably because I'm trying to imagine what it would look like to someone else. In these versions of my memories, the image of past-me usually does not actually look the way I looked at the time. Spoiler: example This happens when I think about my latest psychiatric consultation. I have an audio recording and a decently-accurate memory of what I saw and heard and felt with my own eyes/ears/body. But when I think about it more "objectively", I construct an alternate image of the situation, as if present-me is sitting to one side and looking at past-me and the psychiatrist. In this image, past-me has a certain appearance which I know is not actually what I looked like at that time. (Weirdly, she looks a lot like an aged-up version of how my brother looked when he was ten years old and still presenting as female.) For most of my life, my mental image of myself is accurate, but several years out of date. The way I looked when I was five continued to be my internal self-image until middle school. During middle school it updated to the way I looked is fifth grade. In high school it was the way I looked in seventh grade. For a while, in university, it was what I looked like at fifteen. Then it just turned into a big inconsistent mess, and thinking to myself "What do I look like in my selfies lately?" will bring up a much more accurate picture than "What do I look like in real life?" Selfies do really help, though! Learning to take super flattering selfies is nice, but it's also nice to take more candid ones and use them to teach yourself that you look OK without doctoring the lighting and the angles all the time. :) This might be unrelated, but your drawing [made me laugh and also] reminded me of something I struggled with throughout childhood and adolescence. I felt like other people looked more real than me. Not as in "I do not exist", but like... they were animated by Pixar and I was cut and pasted from South Park, you know? I usually worded this as feeling ugly/fat, but that wasn't the actual complaint, it was a side effect of being "badly drawn". Spoiler: (briefly describes weight-related body image stuff) The "fat" thing was partly because I did think I was too fat, but also very much because I thought the only way to make myself look "more realistic" would be to lose weight. I figured that surely my skeleton must be normal, so the less stuff on top of it, the more normal I'd look. Ironically, I now know that some of the specific things I considered "unrealistic" about my appearance are actually traits of hypochondroplasia, a mild form of dwarfism that runs in my family. (We don't know if I actually have it, but I have some of the traits. My limb length to to height ratio is below the fifth percentile and my my leg-to-trunk ratio is two standard deviations below the norm.) HCH is characterised by rhizomelic shortening of the limbs, which means that the bones in the arms and legs - especially the humeri and femurs - don't grow as long as they're supposed to. So it turns out that my skeleton was the reason I looked "weird" in the first place. :P Is the "badly drawn" thing something you get too, or do you not feel connected enough to your bodily appearance to experience it? Sometimes when I've been thinking about People and Life from a general viewpoint, and thinking specifically about how people relate to each other and the different experiences they have, I spot my reflection and have this really jarring moment of "oh yeah, I am that one. That one is me." Sometimes it's really upsetting ("why did I have to be THAT one??") and other times it's just weird ("huh, I kind of forgot").
You're wording this very much better than I can grasp and that feeling you brought up of being out of date is me to a goddamn tee. I remember actually, the therapist who diagnosed all my grab bag goodies finally had made the comment "You're mature. But you say you've ALWAYS been mature. ..But it's as if that 'mature' level has never changed. You're mature by a child's sense but in the adult sense it's.. not really there. In talking with you, it's like you've emotionally and mentally stopped developing at about fifteen or so, you don't come across as someone in mid-20's the longer I speak to you. You sound more like that. Like a very mature child, who slips while speaking now and then.. It's nothing bad. It's just the impression you give." My hellhole of a life hit the ceiling at about that age, because my dad finally died. I'm not surprised in the least if that's true. But.. yes, I feel that a lot. I feel like I'm Actually some fifteen-sixteen year old but I'm in this way too big, clunky, broken apart Adult suit and it's full of holes and awful and it's not ME when I look in the mirror. None of it matches. It's like they looked at the reference sheet and tried, because I see my eyes and the shape of my face if I stare in the mirror, but everything's off model. 8I; People around me are Real People and I'm just.. not. I'm the free clip art in Word and they're fully functional fully rigged Art. Whiiiiich doesn't help because I want to draw myself, even cartoony, but if I draw myself how I picture myself (how I used to be/how I keep thinking I am incidentally is me before I got much sicker and before I gained a good deal of weight) I'll look completely different. I'm aware that it's Not Me to draw myself that way, but drawing accurately is.. Also Wrong. It's not 'me'. Also yes, fuck yes, I always remember things as a third party watching, if I can remember them at all. I don't remember things from my own eyes. Brief lol tho: if anyone did one of those awakening scenes like in videogames where you see from the character's eyes, but it was me? They'd have to deal with ghost-vision from the side like "Oh, yeah, that's me. Time to blink? Huh. ...Yep. That's kinda creepy. :D "
oh, also! I forgot to take lots of pictures because i have no urge to do so naturally, and it was HELLA bright out so I couldn't see the screen, but I took some candid shots and haven't even checked at them yet. BUT. Spoiler: This date brought 2 u by: YAY WHEELCHAIRS! Date went fantastic! We changed venues so I could access a wheelchair instead of be stuck walking a ton and have more pain, and ended up at this really cool indoor/outdoor mall setup that was more like a little town. Complete with trolley! Had a nice meal at Genghis Grill and now Nate's hooked, watched Zootopia (AWESOME MOVIE, HOLY SHIT, CAN'T WAIT TO GET IT ON DVD LATER!) and thanks to the previews have movie dates planned for every coming month planned. The boba tea place was closed, and I forget that malls don't stock Ryn Sized Goods that aren't decorative circus tents made of tissue paper. But we went and got ice cream instead. I had the salty caramel and espresso, Nate got a few different flavors including lavender. It was.. tasty actually, just not something I'm used to since we don't cook with it ever. Tastes just like it smells, with a hint of citrus. Even stopped at LUSH and got a fancy soap bar as a treat before beating the rain and coming home. Perfect weather the entire time, big fat clouds overhead and a crisp spring breeze, no pain because I was in a chair. No burny foot, either! They were a bit swollen and overly tired because I couldn't handle wearing the compression stockings so the blood pooled a lot, but no burning! So much laughing and peace and tranquility, just. We really needed that yesterday. We're sore and tired now, but we really, really needed that.
