No other description fit

This is a long ramble, which I posted on r/Depersonalization. I'm not going to edit this into a smoother shape and feel.
If this contradicts the rules in some way I apologize. And I know this won't apply to everyone. These conditions seem to come in a wider range of "styles" than I realized, In fact, I'm 62 and never even realized that there was a label that fit what I'd gone through so long ago. And I'm hoping that what I wrote below (again, I'm sorry how long it is) might help some people who shared a similar "style" of this condition. I'm also hoping that what I say doesn't make it worse for some folks. It's hard to offer help. It ended for me 40 years ago, but it remains a significant event, not only because it was horrifying, but also because it was a challenge to see through this problem a new possibility for life. So here's what I wrote over on the other subgroup:

I'm just going to ramble without much editing.

Depersonalization/derealization is the only label I've ever found that comes closest to describing what happened to me during my teenage years (I'm 62 now and don't suffer from this anymore). I'm curious if this sounds similar enough, or whether it was a schizophrenic experience, or some combination.

I read the rules before posting this, and the warning against assuming that this is some kind of existential crisis, but I'd like to raise the question nevertheless, because there are existential issues that often seem to accompany illnesses, including schizophrenia. Here's what happened to me.

Precursors: From about the age of 4 to 13, I was frequently sick with high fevers and would run amok (no joke) through the house. The house seemed to recede and a landscape of hell replaced the house, as if I could see through the house itself. I remember being particularly afraid of doorways, which always seemed to represent a threshold across a bottomless pit, and my parents would coax me back to the bedroom, but navigating these thresholds was terrorizing. As I got older I learned that if I peed (oddly enough) this seemed to reduce the symptoms, as if the slight pressure in the bladder added to a ratcheting panic. Then directly leading up to the main event I became obsessive/compulsive.

One other precursor that seems strongly relevant was that the question of what is real had become part of my obsession. I realized that everything I experienced was a projection of imagery, and that there was no way to prove the existence of anyone or anything. This terrorized me, it felt like an undeniable fact. I wasn't merely entertaining this notion. I felt the reality of this alienation from reality, this sense of being stuck behind a cataract of thought and imagery, without any way of contacting a real world or real people. It was frightening, perpetually bothering me, but not to the extent yet, or in the same way, that it would later.

And then on May 17th, 1973, at about 10pm (at age 13 and a half) I got hit with what felt like an electric cattle prod to my brain. The fears, the obsessive thoughts, the sense of being isolated behind a veil of imagination, unable to contact anyone or anything, this all combined in one physical jolt that left me numb and vague. On the verge of panic at all times. Like I was walking around the pits of hell, ready to fall.

It was a physical sensation of radical isolation, BUT it also carried along with it what I've come to understand as a mis-understood insight, a hallucination that had a maddening element of undeniable truth to it, which gave the experience claws, or which seemed to rip away a facade of life to reveal nothing but deadening isolation.

I'm describing this intellectually in retrospect, but I experienced it as inexplicable horror. It's taken me forty years to articulate some of the hidden assumptions that made me susceptible to this problem. But the problem itself was felt physically. It was only in trying to think my way out of it that I realized the futility of thought. And this failure provides some negative insights, some realizations of why thought can't help, and why thought mixes itself up in this problem, prolonging the condition. It was like trying to wash away illusion with illusion.

Maybe we could say that the condition itself (which is not existential) generates existential angst that contributes to the problem, cementing it in place. Or there are hidden assumptions which we don't consciously notice, which make us susceptible to this condition, when some form of trauma hits.

At any rate, in the aftermath of this radical realization of isolation, the panic that wouldn't subside (it felt similar to the fevers I had, which Ironically stopped at that point). But in the aftermath of the initial shock I tried to think my way out of this, which is futile. But encountering this futility helped me learn something about the nature of the problem. It was clear that what I took to be me was only an image, and every attempt to refute this perspective involved the further employment of imagination, extending the fabrication infinitely. It was like trying to climb out of a deep pit, and every ladder I climbed evaporated as imaginary. I couldn’t merely “forget it.” I felt stuck behind a perpetual veil, and this delayed my social development. It stopped me dead in some ways.

So I learned something in these failures. I learned that thought itself spreads a cataract or glaucoma of unreality. It covers the world in a kind of transparency that can't be removed. And this realization led to an eventual breakthrough, which I'll end by describing briefly.

At any rate, it was a physical sensation AND a conviction, an accompanying story of sorts, a confusion involving thought and thing, map and territory, which either translated into this physical sensation, or vice-versa, a deep, underlying confusion was startled into place by a traumatic encounter.

I remember the first night clearest. After that first night, there remained a perpetual panic, or threat of panic, and a constant sense of vague, dazed distance from everything. For instance, I'd smell bacon and hear my friends exclaim how much they loved the smell, and it made me acutely aware of how cut off from them I was, how impossible it was for me to enjoy sensation, because nothing could be trusted, nothing seemed real.

I'm rambling as I warned. But I wanted to say that on that first night I had a vision of sorts. I saw an undivided (singular) awareness twisting in and out of stories fabricated to reflexively fend off the horror of an inexplicable isolation. The cold horror of that experience was the worst thing I’ve ever known or could imagine knowing. The tacit observer (the sense of Self) got stranded (so to speak) as a kind of disembodied suffering under the glare of that “singular” consciousness. I felt manipulated by my senses, a kind of paranoia took hold.

The intense stage of panic and near-panic lasted for months. From morning to night it flattened everything, left me feeling buried alive, unable to reach out for help, because if I tried to explain this to anyone they wouldn't understand, it seemed too preposterous. And the failure would reinforce the sense of isolation, and I saw no way out for years, although the intensity would diminish after a few months, then roar back every other year for a few more months. But the pressure of this fear never left until I had an insight into its nature when I was 24, when the fear finally subsided. (Again, I'll end briefly on how it ended).

I couldn't find any substantial proof of reality to quell the fear. But I realized something essential. The fear of unreality (this added weight over and above the sensation of separation) was also merelyl a story, also unreal. This gave the horror a certain handle, not much, but a little at first.

When I was 24 I had a kind reverse experience -- a kind of re-realization. And it banked on this realization above, that everything is a story, including the horrifying conviction itself. Like most human beings I had a kind of literal relationship to my own imagery and thoughts, to the voice in my head. So while I felt everything was unreal, I still regarded my own voice, this sense of an isolated Self, and the stories it told, as if they WERE real. But when I realized that even this sense of isolated, horrified Self was also just a story, it relaxed the fear. If EVERYTHING is a story, then whatever scares you is also just a story. And so I began to relate to reality directly, not through the mediation of words and images. The world came rushing back. The isolation ended finally in a period of ecstatic communion.

In the years that passed I've written about the implications of all this. One significant implication is this: There ARE ways of knowing what is real. Three ways that I know of: 1) through negative realizations, through the discovery of what is NOT true. Reality intrudes on our delusions one way or another, and sometimes these intrusions are extremely painful. 2) through a proprioceptive relationship to the world, the capacity to see through our own cataracts of thought. We can see, in other words, the reality of our own deceptions and distortions. and 3) through a new relationship to thought itself. When thought is not taken literally, we don't try to pin the world down, we don't conflate reality with our images, which makes thought more pliable, more metaphoric and shifting. We stop confusing these images with reality, stop living in the virtual reality of the mind.

Thanks for letting me ramble. I'm not saying that this is an intellectual problem, but I'm saying a fundamental relationship to reality in our culture makes us susceptible to it. That's one way of looking at it; a certain angle. I'm not suggesting that everyone is experiencing the same thing, but this label is the closest thing I've found to what I experienced.

I know this may not apply to everyone and it may in fact contradict the assumptions medical science has about this condition, but it applied to my situation and seems at least partially relevant. Thanks for letting me go on so long.