Do you ever feel like you're experiencing life while living it? Like that you're simultaneously watching your life happen before your eyes while you're actually living it?
I can't really explain it. Sometimes I feel like I am on autopilot... as if I am just going through the motions of life, but at the same time I am watching myself do it all. I guess it's kind of like an out-of-body experience.
Have you ever read The Great Gatsby? Nick Carraway, the narrator of the story, is out with his friend from college and his mistress and they are drinking the day and night away. Nick had drank a decent amount and was drunk at this point (which he talks about in the book). He talks about how the life and the moment he is living in was not his own... He was an outsider to that world (of booze and women and wealth) and he describes it like so:
I wanted to get out and walk eastward toward the park through the soft twilight, but each time I tried to go I became entangled in some wild, strident argument which pulled me back, as if with ropes, into my chair. Yet high over the city our line of yellow windows must have contributed their share of human secrecy to the casual watcher in the darkening streets, and I was him too, looking up and wondering. I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.
Nick's description of this is probably the best way for me to describe how I've been experiencing life lately. It's incredibly surreal to feel this way; and not in a good way.
These moments of depersonalization... the ones where you look in the mirror and cannot comprehend that you are the person standing before you... that you are that person and not someone else... these are apparently symptoms of anxiety, which makes sense.
I feel this way a lot, but more so when I am going through a big change in my life. (Such as moving across the country for the second time in seven months to start life over, but who is counting, right?) The times when I can't comprehend that I actually did something like that. It's honestly still so surreal to me that I packed up my life to move to the PNW seven months ago, just to turn back around and move back to the East Coast. The fact that I drove across the country twice feels like a weird dream. It doesn't feel like the life I'm living is my own and I'm trying to grapple with that and put it into words for people to understand, but honestly, I. Can't.
Maybe one day, I'll find the perfect words that resonate with others, but for now, I'll stick with what I've got.
