Finding Out I Had MDD

[The1andonlyAbber]

Sorry if my writing sounds a little weird, I'm tired and a little bit sick.

Okay, so when I was little, I LOVED to play pretend. Well, most little kids do, but I REALLY loved it. It was pretty much the only thing I ever played, and I always took it to the next level.

Fast forward to age 10: I was misdiagnosed by a school counselor as having an "imaginational over-excitability disorder", but no one believed him because he was always diagnosing kids with serious disorders when there was nothing wrong with them. I told my mom that I was still a bit concerned, because I was starting to notice that the other kids spent most of their time in the real world and I didn't, but she told me not to worry. I still knew my imagination wasn't normal, though. However, I started to think that something was wrong with EVERYONE ELSE because they DIDN'T constantly fantasize. (I was kind of narcissistic at that age.) I never called my daydreams daydreams, I just called them "games".

Fast forward again to age 14: At this point I grew up and stopped being so impatient with people that didn't have as great of an imagination as me. I was looking on Yahoo Answers at some questions people asked about what age people should stop having imaginary friends at, because I was getting a little bit concerned about the fact that I was 14 and had all these imaginary characters, some of them left over from my early childhood. This one girl on Yahoo Answers said she was 16 and still had a bunch of imaginary friends, and she was asking if that was okay. One person in the answers said "Hey, that sounds like what I have. It's called maladaptive daydreaming, blah blah blah." I decided to look it up online. At first I was like "Ha! That's so stupid! That's probably not even real!" (This was probably due to my experience with the school counselor when I was 10. And I actually don't think whoever asked the question had it, what she was describing sounded totally different.) A few days later I decided that maybe I had been wrong and started to get curious about it. I looked maladaptive daydreaming up again and gradually something dawned on me. They didn't mean daydreams, they meant elaborate fantasy worlds. Where you can imagine every detail and the storyline just flows naturally. I realized that my "games" were daydreams. Funny how much, yet how little my life has changed since I discovered that 3 weeks ago.

[The1andonlyAbber]

My daydreams are also more fun than the real world. In the real world I have no life. However, unlike some people on here, me having no life is not actually caused by my MDD. It's just that nobody ever seems to want me around.

[Zaneta]

I only called it daydreaming like at school when I'm reading or something and it sets off a trigger and i sit there "thinking/dreaming" because when im alone or just in a comfortable setting like home or a friend's house my mind immediately turns off the safety mode. And i talk out loud to myself and "act things out" or with the characters that are in that part of my world. I always called it active daydreaming because im up and about doing things and it feels vividly real. Its sad I have more fun there than in the real world.

[The1andonlyAbber]

I call it daydreaming on here for clarity, but I normally just call it "playing a game" or "going into Imaginary Friend World". Because really, "daydreaming" doesn't describe it very well.

[Queen Dopamine]

I was sort of similar to you in that when I first read about this condition, I was like, yeah, what I do isn't called daydreaming. haha. I pace my room, talk out loud as the characters, interact with them, act out these elaborate/emotional storylines. To me, daydreaming is sitting at work or trying to do something and staring off into space for a few minutes. What I do, I've always called just playing with my characters or the "imagination thing". I've started calling it daydreaming after being here so much, but it's funny that you and I both had an issue with it because of what it was called :)