I had a talk with my mother a couple days ago. I don’t remember how it started but I started explaining some of the problems I had. I told her about my memory problems, not being able to picture things, and how these may have developed my issues. I mentioned depersonalisation. I only mentioned depersonalisation to her once or twice before. The first time was a year ago on the phone when I was studying abroad. I find it really hard to remember the details of the conversation. When I speak to someone, whether it’s a family member or a complete stranger, I feel even more detached from myself. I feel even more derealised as I have trouble “believing” that the person is really in front of me and that we’re really interacting. I’m more dissociated when my sense of separateness from others is threatened. Often, when I’m with someone, I stop being me and become me+them. I have difficulty with self-other differentiation in addition to self-constancy, and self-object constancy. I will explore these in the future.

Anyways, I wanted my mother to tell me about my childhood; if there was anything she noticed that wasn’t quite right. It’s not the first time I’ve asked her this because she always says the same thing: “You were a good, nice, sensitive kid. I didn’t notice anything wrong with you. The only thing I remember is that you didn’t have friends and had a speech impediment when you were a child and then as a teenager. Apart from that I don’t have anything to say”. This response leaves me unsatisfied because I feel that she is in denial about my issues. She pretends everything was perfect, when it wasn’t. She said that she also had memory and mental imaging issues, and it was something she always had. Then she realised that even my father, brother, and paternal aunt have similar issues. I then mentioned alexithymia (inability to identify and describe emotions in the self), and aphantasia (inability to form mental images), and she said that all the family had issues with them. She said it was probably why we never told any stories at the dinner table, and why we had trouble vocalising our feelings to each other. Remembering the conversation requires a lot of effort for me. I know the memory is somewhere but I can’t access it whenever I want. I know that some time in the future, I will remember another segment of the conversation, and then inevitably forget it, unless I write it immediately. There are a lot of things that were said, but I can’t recollect them right now. It even pains me to try to remember the moment, so I’ll pass to something else. I remembered something else. I told her that I didn’t feel any continuity at home because we never talked about what happened the day before; each new day was as if we were born again. The family is definitely dysfunctional in many ways. I may explore this in the future here.

I do remember crying on a couple of occasions during the conversation. The second time was when I said that I had trouble picturing the house when I was abroad. What I wanted to say was that I couldn’t picture my parents’ faces and basically forgot their existence. I feel really guilty about this. Sometimes I look at my father or mother and I’m like: “who are you?” I know intellectually who they are, but I look at their face and don’t know what they mean to me. I know it would have been too emotional if I said that to her so I opted not to.

I touched on many things today. I have a habit of jumping from one thing to another very quickly. It’s difficult to stay in a certain topic and really develop it. My thinking is very fragmented. It’s hard to think or write a narrative with a logical sequence. No stream of thought…Thinking is like trying to start a car with a dead battery. Writing these posts takes so much effort, but I really want to make it a habit to write every day. I’ll paraphrase the research if I have trouble thinking.