K & DP

According to wikipedia, it seems that no one has yet come up with a cure for depersonalisation.

Depersonalised persons are known to be chronologically challenged (and by that I don't mean we're alway late, or age backwards like Benjamin Button), and we find it difficult, bordering on impossible to see our lives in a chronological sequence. June may come after May, but we may not remember it that way. To us, it's just a big mess of strings, all rolled together in an impossible tangle, awaiting the joys of unravelling them.

In saying this, i know someone reading this would think, "hey, i have that too!" - and it's true; everyone has problems with that, just that in our case our journey of life becomes a huge, flat plain with no identifiable markers. High school, secondary school, college, our first job - they all seem like they just happened yesterday. On the plus side, we have Really interesting mix-ups when we are lost in whatever business we're conducting and walk right back to our high school for lessons. And on the negative side, our lives become a huge, tragic comedy. Let me explain this point.

In searching for my purpose for living many years back, I came to several interesting but ultimately inconclusive answers - first of which was that it all depended on the person's point of view, and from which angle the person was viewing "life" as he or she saw it. So what was the meaning of life? (the answer is 42.)

If you look at life from the perspective of biology, human life exists purely for procreation and spreading its gene and seed - just like how all living, biological creatures are wired, including viruses.

From the perspective of religion, Christianity and Islan would say it's to fulfill God's purpose. Buddhists would say it's to attain Nirvana, and so on and so forth.

From the perspective of the individual as an economic unit (i.e. employee, worker), the purpose of life is simply to contribute to the economy and add value to it.

From the perspective of the individual as a member of society, it would be to give back to society, and be a useful member of society, whether through contributing in science, medicine, law, education, or even consumerism. By now I'm sure you get the idea.

The point here is that the "meaning of life" is simply whatever meaning the individual puts into it, whatever we hold in high priority within our cultivated template of values; and they need not be singular meanings tied simply to society, or the economy or religion - they could be a mixture of several values, hence creating in us some thing that we can only loosely define as "an individual, and his/her life". In short, our meaning in life is to do what we think/feel is important to us, regardless of whether or not it actually is. There is no overarching raison de'tre to the entire human race (except the biological one), no use for us as this huge computer that generates the answer to the ultimate question of life.

And what constitutes a person "living"? His experiences, values, actions, thoughts, his legacy. To the individual, what ultimately counts, when he says "I have lived", is simply his experiences in life. What he has seen, what he has done, heard, gone through, endured, enjoyed.. all of it. It is quintessentially him.

And that's what makes living life so tragic if one is unable to discern chronological sequences properly - the fact that we cannot remember our life in sequence. Through careful mental cataloguing (I use school uniforms for mine), we attain a bare minimum of sequence, but even that is flawed because I can't tell my Sec 1 from Sec 2, Sec 3 from Sec 4, and of course my Primary School days are one huge ball of yarn with Kindergarten somewhere near the centre of that ball of yarn.

And the greatest curse and blessing of depersonalisation is the greatest source of pain for me - forgetfulness. Not general forgetfulness, but the fact that our lives are always covered in a haze that causes us to only skim emotions and experiences no matter how deeply we try to dive into them. We end up remembering only vague echoes of our loved ones, what they do, what they say, and what experiences we had with them.

It makes us ghosts in our own lives, forever observing, forever hovering, even as we live them and try to experience the loveliness that is life. It makes us numb to joy and satisfaction, but greatly attuned to despair and pain and fear.

A person who is rendered this half-life cannot, in all fullness, say he lived. So until the cure is found, one does not live; one merely exists.