Looking at My Life

[Katherine Milano]

This post is really just for me, but I think it is important that I write it. It has to do with my life in general, not just MD.

Lately, I have been thinking about how different my life is now from how it was even a year or two ago. While I still DD, and it affects my life in a big way, I think it is important to look at all of the progress that I have made.

I have been daydreaming for as long as I can remember. For a period of time, in middle and early high school, it became the major focus of my life and something that I could not escape. I would spend hours upon hours curled up, DD. These were often really dark. I was honestly just looking for that "high" that only daydreaming can provide. Three years ago, I entered a Catholic high school. At that point, I was atheist, lazy, and completely controlled by my MD, which seemed to me to be a strange, nebulous habit that only I out of all the people in the world engaged in. I had chosen this school because it was academically excellent, and I wanted to give myself a leg up in college admissions. I had a huge ego. That year, I slowly started coming to God. The Church gave me a lot of answers, and I was blown away by the beauty of the monthly masses. There were a lot of devout Catholics around me, and their humility and love demonstrated a way of life that I hadn't ever considered pursuing. By the time Lent rolled around, I was essentially converted, in my heart if not through the Sacraments.

That Lent, it was obvious what to give up. For six days every week, I went cold turkey on my DD, for the first time in my life. I had never tried not to DD before, and I was amazed at how real and vibrant life seemed without it. This first time I made an effort to "quit", in some sense, MD, it was easy. Still, every Sunday, I would spend the entire day DD. By that, I mean that I would sit in a corner for four or five or six hours, just daydreaming. One day, I was sitting in mass, staring at the San Damiano crucifix, and, believe me or not, a clear forceful voice said only one word, "Stop." That was the moment that I knew that I had to quit MD for good. After I made that decision, life opened up for me. The numb feeling that comes from a life lived DD went away, and I felt a genuine joy that I had never before experienced. That summer, on May 4, I received my Sacraments and entered into full Communion with the Catholic Church. Quitting MD, obviously, wasn't easy, and although I continually crept back into old habits, I essentially considered that I had quit, and really did treat those as isolated incidents.

At that point, I had around me a wonderful group of friends that were really more like family. The five of us would be in constant communication, 24 hours a day, and it was rare that there would be a weekend that we wouldn't spend at least five or six, if not ten to twenty, hours together.

Then, that winter, everything changed. Very, very long story short, my parents decided to get divorced. This changed the entire make-up of my life and of my emotional landscape. For a while, I was able to fend off MD, but eventually it forced its way back into my life with a vengeance. It was as if I had never tried to quit. I became emotionally distant, and my relationship with my friends changed dramatically. I had always told them almost everything, but I could not find it in me to tell them about my parents' divorce. At the same time, all of them started doing tech theater, and they started spending their time with that group of people, who I didn't know. No one was trying to leave me out, and we still spend a large amount of time together, but I felt isolated. School was insanely difficult already, and my MD and emotional instability led to an inability to focus that caused my grades to suffer.

MD became an increasingly frustrating portion of my life. I was angry at my self for my lack of self-control, and my day revolved around DD. I would wake up, determined not to DD. Then, I would DD. I would be angry at myself and that anger and disappointment would cause me to DD again. This cycle would repeat several times until I would finally turn to prayer, always at the end of the night. I would feel comforted, validated, and encouraged, and I would go to bed certain that tomorrow would be different, which of course, it wasn't. One night, I was feeling frustrated and helpless, and decided that I needed to figure out what was happening. I didn't know what "maladaptive daydreaming" was, and for all I knew, I was the only person in the world who had this problem. I needed a context to think and talk about what was happening in my life. I started furiously googling. For hours, I searched the internet, finding nothing. Finally, I found this site: http://daydreamingdisorder.webs.com. I cried. I no longer felt alone. I no longer felt helpless. For the first time in a long time, I felt hope.

I found this site. I started connecting with other daydreamers. I learned ways to cope, and I learned that other people, of all ages and backgrounds, shared my experience. My grades improved. I became emotionally stable again, or at least more so. When my formerly close-knit group of friends began to drift apart, it wasn't the end of the world. I still daydreamed, as I still do, but I had it much more under control. I knew from reading other peoples' experiences that this was natural, that it happens to everyone. My MD ebbed and flowed. Sometimes I went days, sometimes weeks, without DD. Sometimes I could hardly go an hour. The most important thing was that it was no longer the center of my life. I didn't think about it 24 hours a day. I didn't measure my day by the frequency of my DD. Now that I understood, now that I knew that I was not alone, it became only a part of my identity, something that I had to deal with. Far from every day being a battle against my MD, every day simply became… well, another day. Oddly enough, I had never lived that way before, at least not since I was very young. I thank you all for that, for giving me the opportunity to just live my life. I can't imagine a better gift.

Now, I am entering my senior year in high school. It has been almost exactly two years since I found this site, since I understood what maladaptive daydreaming was. Like I said at the beginning of this post, I still DD. I hope that will change. I hope that someday, I will be able to tell people that I used to be a maladaptive daydreamer. At this moment, I can proudly say that I used to be someone who was afraid of "doing" anything, who procrastinated and shrunk from leadership positions and tried not to think about the fact that I was an actual living human whose actions had consequences. In the past two years, I have slowly grown into someone who, oddly enough, works hard. I have channeled a lot of the energy that used to go to DD into writing, something I have loved doing since I was a kid but hadn't really done since my DD started to become really consuming in eighth or ninth grade. I also hadn't read a book for pleasure in years. I read now. Like, a lot. Like, yesterday, from nine in the morning until nine at night the only thing I did, literally, was read. I'm interested in stuff again. I know it's weird to attribute that all to understanding MD, but it is my ability to control MD that caused the change.

If you actually read to the end of this post, wow. Sorry it is so long and irrelevant to anyone but me. I was just feeling a little depressed this morning, and it was important for me to understand how much my life has improved and how much progress I have made. Knowing how much I have already been changed gives me hope that things can continue to get better. Much love to all.

[Dreamer]

Thank you very much Katherine for your testimony. It was very informative, inspiring and well written. I am 51 now and reading it made me wish that I had understood what was happening to me when I was your age. Unfortunately, there was no internet around then and the term maladaptive daydreaming hadn't been coined yet. So people like me indulged it not realising the harm we were doing to ourselves. 

I was interested to read how every aspect of your life improved when you got to terms with the habit. Like yourself I attribute my declining grades in high school to MDD. I just wish I had this site as a resource then. Good luck with your continuing recovery and God bless.