My 30 year DD has been disrupted and I am lost without it

[Connie C.]

I've been lurking here for a long time but never posted. I've been curious about my condition but never thought I could fix it and figured it was too late anyway. I am 60 years old and have had MDD as long as I can remember. It has had a terrible effect on my life, kept me from relationships, career, etc. But I have been resigned to it and that's why I never posted.

I am posting now because something has disrupted my MDD and there is no one else I can turn to except this community. I have had many DDs in my life but for the last 30 years I have focused almost exclusively on one that is centered around a real person who was a public figure. Yes I have spent the last 30 years thinking constantly about this one person. In reality he was deeply flawed and held in contempt by most people but there was something about his story and his work that spoke to me. Many aspects of my DD involve how our imaginary relationship made him a better and more successful man. The imaginary man in my DD bears very little resemblance to the real man (who, incidentally, died many years ago).

OK, so the problem is that yesterday I ran across an account of how he behaved really horribly to the son of one of his lovers. And then (according to the story) he bragged to others about what he had done. I don't know why this particular incident bothered me so much. His whole life was filled with incidents of bad behavior, lies, betrayals, etc. But for whatever reason, learning about this one incident has made me feel that I don't want to think about him at all any more. I really mean that I don't think I can keep going with the DD that has been my whole life for the past 30 years.

I have other (much less interesting and satisfying) DDs that I can think about but since yesterday I have come to realize how much this imaginary man and the DD I built around him have shaped my life over the past 30 years. My reading, my taste in music, movies, fashion, perfume... so many of my interests grew out of my DD. I learned so much about the world by learning about this man in order to feed my DD. In many ways he made me who I am. Without him and this DD I don't know who I am.

I don't know how to live without this DD. I don't know who I am without this imaginary man.

Has this ever happened to anyone else? What did you do? Should I try to switch to one of my other DDs? Or make a new one? Or try to continue the DD but replace the man with a different man? Or, the scariest idea of all, should I try to learn to live with no DD?

I would really appreciate hearing your thoughts about this. It would mean a great deal to me if you could share your impressions and experiences with me. As I said, I have no one else that I can discuss this with. Thank you in advance.

[Connie C.]

I really want to thank everyone for their support and suggestions.

Meghan I have taken your advice to continue with a modified version of the DD. At first I had a hard time with it but now it is going just fine.

Bee Anchor, I am sorry to hear that you DD is letting you down when you really need it. I am really interested in what you wrote about trying meditation. I had been working on mindfulness meditation as a kind of half-hearted attempt to curb my MDD. I figured it was basically the opposite of MDD and since there was a lot of study on it and it had proved so effective with other problems I thought it might be my best chance to reduce my MDD. I don't think it did any good however. In fact, it occurred to me that "meditation" would be an extremely effective cover story for my MDD time. As I have gotten older I no longer need to move around during MDD so sitting with my eyes closed and "meditating" would be a great way to MDD without attracting attention. After all, everyone meditates these days! But I would be very interesting in learning how you have been able to actually use genuine meditation to control your MDD.

Anne, I realize my 30 years (actually more than 30) with one DD seems odd. Modifying my DD seems to be working for me now so I won't have to make a new one after all these years. In my whole life of MDD I have had only 4 primary DDs and I kept them all for many many years. I have some minor ones that I almost never use. That is just the way it is for me.

I am always curious about other people's MDD habits and that is one reason I love this group. For almost my entire life, until I found this group, I thought I was the only person who had this problem. Thank you all so much!

[Steve C]

In my opinion if your bond to the DD character is 30 years strong, you can learn to adjust your perspective while you DD so it all goes back to normal. I faced something similar although not as strong. I was able to suspend that sort of judgement, and eventually just worked it out of my common scenarios.

[Anne]

I usually base my characters off of other characters from books, movies or tv series, instead of actual people. However, when there's something I don't like about the original character, I remind myself that it is a fictional character and that it is my DD and noone will ever know about me potentially wrecking a character by changing (or adding/leaving out) something about them to better suit my DDs or preferences (especially when I am more engaged with them in my DDs). I guess I just take some artistic liberties with the 'original' characters. Perhaps something like this can work for you too. You don't need to have this incident apply to your imaginary man. Yes, it may feel a bit weird to ignore this bit that you know of the actual person in the beginning, but after a bit it could start feeling more natural when you feel like this character is 'loosely based' on the real person, rather than to have him resemble the actual man as closely as possible. 

If it keeps bothering you a lot, you could maybe try to DD less about this imaginary man to eventually let go of him a bit and see if you could switch to another or a new one. I find 30 years with one DD a long time. My DDs usually go on for a few months up to maybe a year or so, but certainly not multiple years, so I can see how you would feel deeply invested in this particular relationship and find hard to even think of letting it go.

I hope you manage to resolve this and that maybe I could be of some help. Good luck!

[Bee Anchor]

Maybe its just an initial shock. My DDs dried up for some reason also. I dabbled in meditation and for months they have been weakened where I can stop when I want and its seems very trivial and watered down to me.I don't know who I am now. But maybe you will bounce back...If you held on this long with DD you may as well keep going. I miss my DDs real life is kinda shitty

[debbie downer]

i don't know what i would do if i discovered something like that about one of the celebrities that my characters are based off of. i totally understand what you mean about your imaginary man bearing little resemblance to the real man because my characters are that way, too. i think you should try to keep the DD and focus on the fact that your character is not 100% THE guy: you've changed him in your mind to the point where he is a completely different person-- and definitely not a person who abuses children. you could possibly change his name in the DD to something else and see if that helps, even though it'll take some getting used to. just some suggestions. i hope i was able to help!!