I can’t remember the exact moment my depersonalisation – the sense of being outside of one’s own body – emerged. Perhaps it was always lurking in the shadows ready to change how I saw my body. But I know that it started with my hands.

Have you ever realised that nearly everything we do involves using our hands? We use our hands to drive a car, get dressed, eat, wash, tidy, work. One day, I was driving, looking at my hands on the steering wheel. My mind had been drifting and I wasn’t really paying attention to what I was doing but my hands made sure I arrived safely at work. As I looked at my hands on the steering wheel, I suddenly felt they were separate from the rest of me. The more I looked at them, the more separate they felt, and reality tilted.

For the rest of the day, I was distracted by keeping busy at, but when I drove home that evening, the weird sensation of my hands feeling separate returned. Over the weeks that followed, that sensation came over me every time I drove until I felt so anxious that I stopped driving altogether.

This sensation was almost impossible to describe and seemed so illogical that I didn’t know how to explain it.

I tried my best not to look at my hands anymore. If I ignored them and pushed these thoughts out of mind, maybe it would all go away.

One day, as I was brushing my teeth in front of the bathroom mirror, that same uncomfortable sensation washed over me. Was that me in the mirror? The ‘me’ in the mirror didn’t seem completely real. I recognised what I looked like but didn’t feel connected to what I saw. Panic pounded through me, and my mind went blank. What was this feeling? Would I forget who I was? Where I was? Everything was the same, except one note in a chord was out of tune. And only I noticed it.

From that point on, every time I looked in a mirror the strange sensation came over me. I avoided mirrors as much as I could. I couldn’t leave the house without checking I looked presentable. But if I was at home, then I would brush my hair and get dressed without looking in a mirror. 

I kept all my fears bottled up, and it will come as no surprise to hear that one day the bottle burst. I couldn’t stop crying and felt as though I couldn’t live another day like this. Work or leaving the house felt impossible. I sobbed when I visited my GP the next day and was told I needed a referral to a psychiatrist. I was lucky enough to have private medical insurance, and within a week I saw a psychiatrist at a mental health hospital.

I told the psychiatrist that it had been a difficult couple of years before these symptoms started: my mother had died the previous year, I’d left a difficult job and now faced a restructuring at my new employer. The psychiatrist explained that I was experiencing a form of anxiety.

This confused me as I had overcome acute anxiety as a young adult. I knew how to deal with a panic attack and understood the fight-or-flight response. These weren’t panic attacks. My body felt numb, disconnected and separate. 

The psychiatrist explained that anxiety wasn’t only about fight or flight. There was a third response – freeze. Like a rabbit in the headlights, too frozen in fear to run away. And when levels of anxiety get too high, the brain disconnects so that it can do what it needs to survive. It goes into autopilot mode. I found this hard to accept. It was like anxiety had tricked me, and now I was stuck in its web again. 

I started treatment, but many of the usual methods for remedying anxiety simply didn’t work. Meditation, for example, only increased my sense of disassociation. Instead, I needed to ground myself in the world around me. I walked outside with bare feet, feeling the sensation of grass against my skin. I bought a bottle of smelling salts and sniffed it every time I felt disconnected. I have never smelt anything so eye-wateringly strong; it immediately pulled my attention back into my body. I crunched strong mints for the same effect. I practised counting things I could see, hear, touch and taste.

I started to drive again and found a way to distract myself from my hands on the steering wheel. I listened to political talk shows. These shows often covered controversial topics with lively debates. My attention was drawn into these debates and before I knew it, the hour’s drive back and forth to the hospital passed comfortably.

I wish I could say this was an easy condition to overcome. Therapy is hard work and takes time. I spent three days every week as a day patient in the hospital attending CBT sessions and group therapy. It was like attending a school for the mind. Gradually, I became less overwhelmed by those sensations and I was able to look in the mirror for longer and longer. I was able to accept that there was nothing seriously wrong with my mind. 

The situation forced me to tell my family and my work about what had happened. I didn’t have to pretend that everything was OK anymore and that alone lifted a weight from my shoulders. I found out that what I felt had a name – depersonalisation and derealisation disorder and there was a dedicated self-help charity for it called Unreal UK. This made me feel less alone and slowly, over many months, I became grounded in my body.

I still get the sensation from time to time. But now I’m in control. I know how to handle it. 

I have tried to get something positive out of this experience. I now write psychological horror stories, exploring some of these frightening sensations through the safe medium of fiction. It feels like a small silver lining to reap something creative from what was such a dark time in my life.

Frame Of Mind is Stylist’s home for all things mental health and the mind. From expert advice on the small changes you can make to improve your wellbeing to first-person essays and features on topics ranging from autism to antidepressants, we’ll be exploring mental health in all its forms. You can check out the series home page to get started.

Images: Melissa Elborn