Derealization - Julia Juan

Derealization: The feeling of being detached from your surroundings. Objects and people do not seem real even though you know they are.

  You wake up, eat breakfast, grab your backpack, and put your shoes on. Your hands look strange as they pull the back of your sneakers over your heel. Almost as if they're not yours, even though they are. Just to make sure, you make a tight fist, tap your fingers on your thumbs, and hit the base of your palms together a few times. Opening the front door, you are met with a still setting, picture-like. Pausing to look back, you realize that the room lacks depth as well, as if you're staring into the scene of a movie. Every neat edge seems like a page out of a magazine and the disorganized corners are like the organized mess in a kid’s I Spy book. Stepping through the door makes “outside” seem like a separate area, a space with boundaries, like a room. On autopilot, you walk down the stairs, travel the length of the street, cross the main road, and wait for the bus. You can sense the vibration of each step on your feet but it feels like you’re floating through a dream when the world stays unnaturally steady and doesn't shake with each falling foot. You wonder if it is possible to escape from the dream but you are ill-fatedly incapable. You immerse yourself in your phone so that you are not required to look at the world anymore. If not comforted by the flat screen, it is at least a distraction from the fact that life is meant to be experienced in three dimensions and not two. But you don't want to distract yourself, you just want the world to appear normal. When you finally forget about how abnormal it is, it’s suddenly time to put away the device that helped you forget. Time is confusing. The concept is simple, if asked to guess when ten seconds had passed you would have no problem. Although time usually passes normally, a single second will sometimes stretch when you can't help but notice all the insignificant details. It's exhausting to zone out and be aware of the placement of everything, what people are doing, the pointless prattle, the positioning of your hands and feet under the desk. You shift your eyes to various objects, roll a pencil between your fingers, feel the texture of the eraser in your pocket, and repeatedly squeeze one hand with the other in frustration, struggling to bring yourself back to reality. It doesn’t work. Instead, the people start to seem fake too. Something feels off, their features are like those of an avatar, they’re like NPCs in a video game or characters in a show. They are someone you can only observe and can’t influence through interaction. You wish you could make them real but each conversation sounds scripted, each person can be characterized as if in a story. Looking through plastic shields, the class closely resembles pictures in the frames of white borders. The captured moment, nearly frozen in time, slows another second and serves as a reminder that you are powerless, unable to interact with the people within the image. Long seconds turn into longer minutes and your brain turns off so that it can stop processing information. You are thoughtless, paralyzed, and isolated. When you finally get home and open the front door, you are again met with the movie scene you had left in the morning. Walking through the set makes you feel like there is an invisible veil separating you from all the objects in sight. You reach out to grab a glass of water but wonder whether your hand will touch it or make it waver out of existence. You are able to pick it up but the relief passes quickly when you realize that everything else is still fake. Retreating your dark room, you finally have a chance to close your eyes and run away from everything. But even then, you desperately want to be home, to a place that seems real. You go to sleep having failed another day of trying to wake up from real life.