Today I woke up, completely stressed out. “Please, members of the Examination Office, make an exception for me, please.”, was my first thought. I had just recently written my Bachelor-thesis and forgot to sign up for the additional oral exam. Unfortunately, the deadline is already over.

I was planning on starting my Master’s this fall, but a delay in finishing my Bachelor’s would mean to wait one more year. ONE MORE YEAR and I have already lost my last year (more on that later). So I wrote an “Application for Exemption” a few days ago and was now  checking my e-mails every ten minutes as I nibbled off my fingernails. And then… salvation. They granted an exception.

Tears welled up in my eyes as I read the good news. And more and more tears followed, but not because of my success with the Examination Office. But because I realized how blessed I am to be worried about such things as my oral exam instead of Meditation, Self, Free Will, Buddhism, Depersonalization, “The Dark Night of The Soul” or any of that other crap in a long time. Approximately one year ago, that was all my mind circled around. One endless loop. From sunrise to sunset and then again and again with no hope in sight. My life looked dark, pitch-black.

And now I’m back, embedded in Life with all its silly worries and little pleasures. I’m reading books, watching movies, even smoking and drinking from time to time, hanging out with my friends and family, kissing my girlfriend…

There is a quote I dwelled about today: “The worst moment for the atheist is when he is really thankful and has nobody to thank.” But there is somebody I want to thank. Dr. Britton and all the other people from the support group who showed me it is possible to recover from DP. That alone carried me a long way. I can’t thank God, since I don’t believe in a traditional sense of God, but I can thank Goodness.

I want to show my gratitude for Goodness by helping all those suffering from Depersonalization and can’t see the light at the end of the tunnel. I know exactly how you feel. There are two steps which for me were critical.

(I’m almost sounding like one of those filthy self-help gurus myself ;)

1.      You need to trust in the ability of your body to heal. It knows what to do if you let it. You can go all neuroscientific and read about which parts of the brain grow while suffering from DP and all that. But the important thing to know is your brain will return to its normal state, and it knows how to do so.

2.      All those thoughts about DP, No-Self… which keep your DP running because they scare you,  need to be accepted. You need to allow those thoughts to come and be there and once you start doing that (training that muscle so to say), they’ll go away and with them your DP. It seems counterintuitive, but it actually works very similar to a vaccine. Let those viruses intrude your body, don’t push them away (or your body will perceive them as a threat) and they’ll let you in peace. There is a quote from a helpful article (link) :“continuing to ruminate, worry and brood about your intrusive thoughts (in our case thoughts about DP…) maintains the false belief that they’re dangerous or a problem to be solved – which only increases the likelihood that your mind will continue surfacing the thoughts.”

I hope, one day, you too can go out into the world and scream at the top of your lungs: