One’s early childhood experiences can majorly influence how they perceive the word. Because I experienced repeated trauma in my early years, my brain wired with the knowledge that the world around me was not safe and my experiences were not in my control. In order to cope with this, I learned to escape my external reality by curating my own internal reality—I created a world that only I could control, which was only limited by my own imagination.
This curated internal world isn’t a distinctly separate reality from the external world. Rather, this internal reality runs in parallel to the true external reality—it acts as a filter to remove certain aspects of my life from my awareness. My internal reality was curated by the innocence and naivety of a young child who only wanted to see good in the world. Because of this, I developed a strategy to filter out the negative aspects of life and only allow in the positive ones. I’d disown experiences of hardship and abuse and accept experiences of love and kindness as my own.
In my distorted internal reality, everyone is kind and has good intentions. In the true external reality, people can be deceitful and malevolent. In my distorted internal reality, I was exclusively loved and cherished by those around me. In the true external reality, I was frequently controlled, disrespected, and abused. In my distorted internal reality, everything in life was wonderful and I had no negative experiences. In the true external reality, life naturally has both positive and negative components, and both are valuable for personal development and growth.
Throughout my life, this internal world was always there as my escape from the harshness of the external world around me. Escaping to my curated internal world is habitual—by default, I only see the positive components to life. This strategy of only owning positive experiences and disowning all others maximizes my internal comfort, but comes at the expense of missing out on large aspects of my life—anything that the filter created by my young self deems as negative is immediately disowned and forgotten about. Because I see the world in this way, I often miss red flags and fall for deceptive behavior, which makes me vulnerable to people with ill-intentions. When times are stressful, I by default enter this world and disconnect from my external life. Because of this, I have missed out on years of my life as I escaped to my internal reality instead of addressing issues in my external reality.
Until recently, I had no idea that the way I perceived the world was distorted. During my early adulthood, my life experiences were mostly pleasant—my filter didn’t remove too much information from my awareness. However, over the past ~5 years, my life has gotten progressively more stressful due to various external circumstances. Over this time, I retreated into my mind more to cope, causing me to become increasingly confused about my external life. While this was happening, I became unaware about large aspects of my life, which made me miss out on many opportunities for personal and professional growth. As I increasingly retreated into my mind, I was genuinely unaware that anything abnormal in my life was happening. It took me a very long time, support from those around me, and a DID diagnosis to become aware that I was escaping my life in unhealthy habitual ways.
I have now gained enough insight to be aware that my default internal state is one of optimism and innocence. While this is an internally comforting view to have, holding onto this view requires me to perceive the world around me in a distorted way. I can either live in my own comfortable internally reality and miss out on my external life, or I can connect with true reality and have a more nuanced view about life. The most internally comforting thing to do would be to stick with my own internal reality and let my external life pass me by. However, not all parts of me are okay with this plan—there’s so much to life that I’m missing out on by escaping into my mind.
During my recovery process, I’m trying hard to break free from this different reality and connect myself to the “real world” around me. I often get glimpses of it, but I inevitably fall back into my own world. My awareness of my life and the world around me fluctuates readily depending on which part of me is active, whose reality I am connected to, or which lens I am viewing life through. I have periods of time where I am connected to the world around me and can make progress in advancing my life, followed by large chunks of time where I automatically escape back into this distorted yet comforting reality. I am pushing hard to escape from my internal world so I can advance in and enjoy my external life.
I am very grateful that my internal experience was curated in this way. It has allowed me to live a wonderful life despite the hardships I have gone through. This distorted reality has saved me from immeasurable amounts of emotional pain and has filled my internal world with love, wonder, and innocence. But in order to live life to the fullest, I need to realize that this view of life is neither accurate nor complete. While it has served me well in the past, my goal is to break free from this curated reality that maximizes internal comfort in exchange for a more complete life.