positive things derealisation taught me

positive things derealisation taught me

ayushi thakkar

Oct 24, 2026

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months ago, i remember sitting in my living room one afternoon and looking around at everything i’d spent years making familiar. the furniture was where i’d left it, the sun was coming through the windows, and it was a perfectly normal afternoon by all accounts. i knew exactly where i was. and yet, for reasons i couldn’t properly explain, the room felt as though i were looking at it through a screen. i could recognise everything around me without feeling entirely connected to any of it.

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i could carry on having conversations and do whatever needed doing, but there was this unsettling distance between me and my surroundings. i’d look at something familiar and wait for the usual feeling of recognition to surface. the more i checked whether everything felt normal again, the more conscious i became of the fact that it didn’t.

derealisation is difficult to describe to somebody who hasn’t experienced it because the words never seem quite adequate.

dreamlike

comes close, although even that suggests something more interesting than the actual experience of being deeply uncomfortable in a perfectly familiar room. for me, the hardest part was the constant awareness of how different everything felt and the amount of time i spent wanting that feeling to disappear.

i wouldn’t romanticise the experience or pretend that it was an especially enjoyable way to discover something profound about existence. but looking back, i can recognise a few ways it changed how i understand myself and the life i want to live. some of those lessons have stayed with me long after the moments that prompted them:

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