Supermarket - Bobby Hall Page 0,28

knuckle” through than to just accept myself as a coward—even though, as a coward, no one would know I was a coward because I would never have to subject myself to the company of others.

Holy shit. This is pretty dark.

Even now as I’m writing this, it is sickening to imagine where I was in my life. And not to break the fourth wall again, but . . . in some crazy way, these feelings are kind of returning now that I’m writing about it.

I don’t want to write about it. But I will because it’s part of the process. The process of healing, I suppose. Writing was the only thing that brought me any solace. My creative energy was the same energy that caused my hyper mind and anxiety. It was a cycle. A bad loop. Madness and creativity. Creativity and madness. Writing was both my salvation and my undoing. I got more pages written, but I got further into my panic. When I was writing I felt whole, like myself. Like a stable person. But the minute I stopped, I started to unravel.

To shake it off I would walk my dog, Bennett. But even then I would be constantly thinking of death and the various ways to go. For example, when I was a teenager, I used to skateboard. I would skate relentlessly, and afterward, I saw the world completely differently from before I’d started. Stairs were no longer stairs, they were called a set. A set of four I could kickflip down, or a set of ten to nollie down. A handrail to grind, a loading dock to jump off. The world had become my skate park.

Only now, that imagination and awe I had for my surroundings had turned into something else. A horror film. A TV stuck on Fox News . . . If a car banks this corner I’m gone, I would think as I crossed the street. If I trip and land teeth first on this fire hydrant, game over. What if there were a tumor in my brain, what if I had an aneurysm, what if that guy in the convenience store wanted to rob the place and I’m the guy who takes a bullet to prove he’s not fucking around . . .

Where my life used to be an adventure, I now wondered, how was I going to get through the day? Slowly, uneventful, typical, everyday, mundane errands came bearing death. And these constant thoughts, plus the feeling of being out of my body, ripped from reality, isolated and alone even in a room full of people? That is what finally turned me on to the idea of actually speaking to someone. And that someone . . .

. . . was Dr. Search Engine.

Why do I feel like I’m not real, slightly off-balance, and out of it?

In an instant, a slew of results came across my laptop screen. Problems with the blood, problems with the brain, problems with damn near every part of my body. Even though I knew all this was impossible, and the doctor had told me my blood results were normal, and I felt in my heart it couldn’t be life-threatening, I wasn’t myself. I didn’t feel like I had before the incident at the supermarket. I typed into the search engine:

Feeling out of my body like life isn’t real

After some digging I discovered a condition called derealization. The dictionary results changed everything for me.

Merriam-Webster:

Derealization: a feeling of altered reality (such as that occurring in schizophrenia or in some drug reactions) in which one’s surroundings appear unreal or unfamiliar.

The American Heritage Stedman’s Medical Dictionary:

Derealization: the feeling that things in one’s surroundings are strange, unreal, or somehow altered, as seen in schizophrenia.

Oxford English Dictionary:

Derealization: a feeling that one’s surroundings are not real, especially as a symptom of mental disturbance.

I spent hours reading reviews, medical articles, testimonials, and people’s personal stories about it. Some people experienced it for a few weeks and it was gone, while others spent years with it. I also discovered that the condition, along with schizophrenia and a host of other mental disorders, is genetic. Fuck. I thought of my dad. How he lost it, left the family, wound up dead by his own doing. I felt a similar fate was inevitable. I felt trapped, shaken to the core. I couldn’t focus on anything else.

It seemed apparent that derealization fed off attention like a stripper whose father never gave her the time she needed as a developing child.