Let's get this show on the road

[Placidia]

I'm thinking of setting this up as a separate blog just about MD.  I feel . . . so happy to know that there are other people out there who have this condition, since prior to this I've always felt alone.  I've been daydreaming since I was 5 or 6.  Granted, all kids do daydream, but I think I knew right off the bat that there was something strange about mine.  They were definitely different in some inexplicable way from a "normal" daydream you might expect a kid that age to have.  (Although I can't entirely explain what specifically it was that made them different, just . . . something.)  I definitely remember being 5 or 6 and feeling like there was something terribly wrong somehow with my daydreaming, and that it was imperative that I quit. 

 

Eventually, it became a thing where I could choose to daydream to remove myself from any situation I happened to find boring, and that wasn't so bad.  But definitely by the time I was in high school it had become . . . almost an obsessive-compulsive thing with me.  I always have this thing where I am preoccupied with finding anything that has even the barest relevance to my daydream, but in high school it was particularly bad.  For instance, I would hide in my room reading the same books over and over --- but it wouldn't be the whole book, only the parts of it that I thought were relevant to the daydream.  When you find yourself compulsively doing things like that, it's hard to feel like your behavior is normal.  (Or, at least, it's hard for me . . . . )

 

I think that this is a difficult condition to try to describe to anybody who doesn't have it, and that's why I've never really tried.  If you say to someone that you have a problem with daydreaming, they'll think that you actually mean an attention problem.  And if you try to say that the daydream is like this obsessive thought that won't leave you alone, they're more likely to think that you're describing some kind of mild psychosis.  I would compare it more to an addiction than anything else --- but trying to explain that your addiction is to a thought, not to a substance or activity, is difficult. 

 

I tried bringing this up several times with my therapist, but I don't think she ever understood the full significance of what I was saying/she seemed more interested in talking about other issues.  And I wasn't ever able to really insist to her that this was important, because I didn't have the vocabulary at that time to express just how central of an issue I think this is for me. Now, I really would like to find someone who is a professional who has a background in this, although since it's not a formally recognized condition, I understand that that may be hard to accomplish . . . .