Thoughts.

[Charlotte]

So I joined this site about a year ago when I first came across the idea of Maladaptive Daydreaming and got the feeling that that was what was going on with me. I promptly forgot about it as life got busy again, but over the course of this year it’s become more and more clear to me that, while I don't know if I have MD or not, my daydreaming habits aren't like other people's and are one of the major factors in the (particularly) academic stresses I've been having recently.

I'm guess I'm just using this as an opportunity to get my thoughts about the subject written down somewhere, so this post may be a little rambley but oh well.

I'll start at the beginning. I don't think I've always had a compulsion to daydream per se, but it’s always been a favourite activity of mine. As a child I was very shy and introverted, I found talking to other people intimidating and social skills didn't come naturally to me. As a result, I was very happy to play alone at nursery and school, I would be able to lose myself in fantasies and ignore everyone around me, I also had a lot of imaginary friends and a strong sense of my toys being real people with feelings (even the ones that didn't have faces). I don't suppose any of this is particularly unusual for a small child but I do think it's the first instance of me using daydreaming to try to 'escape' something (in this case; social interaction).

I didn’t experience any major trauma as a child, such as abuse, but there are three factors that I would speculate combined to cause my daydreaming to become more compulsive.

1. My shyness/social anxiety.

2. The way I dealt with (or rather didn't deal with) my parents splitting up.

3. When I was younger I would say I was slightly uncomfortable with my gender (I'm not transgendered but that's a whole other tangent to go off on).

My parents split up and my Dad moved out when I was about eight. I still have a vivid memory from this time (though whether I'm retroactively matching this memory with that time to fit in with my theory, I can't be sure) of lying on my mum's bed daydreaming for about an hour or so, and at the end feeling exhilarated by the escapism and making plans to return to the daydream as soon as I went to bed that night.

Back then, I never starred in my own daydreams. I would think up adventures for an extremely idealized male version of myself (not that I admitted that to myself he was meant to be me at the time), nine times out of ten with romance as the main plotline. Whereas before I used to like to read until I fell asleep, now I would lie in bed daydreaming instead. I never used to pace or anything back then, but I would often unintentionally speak as the character out loud. Luckily, my family just assumed I was talking in my sleep.

So, at the beginning, all of my excessive daydream ‘sessions’ where confined to bedtime. Gradually, however, I’d start do it during idle moments of the day, especially walking around.

When I started secondary school I had a nice fourty-five minute walk there and back to enjoy every day. I would use this time for solid dayreaming and to this day, falling into daydreams whenever I’m walking somewhere alone is a really hard habit to break. The worst part is, I often make myself laugh while I’m doing it, and my habit of smiling to myself like an insane person when walking alone has been noted upon by several people haha.

Right now, I think that daydreaming has become my number one go to activity whenever I get stressed or anxious. Last June during the last few weeks of the course I was one at the time, I was under a lot of pressure to have a project done in order to get the grade I needed for a place on my dream university course. It was probably the most stressed I’ve ever been and almost every evening I found myself compulsively grabbing my ipod and ‘going for a walk’. This wasn’t helpful. I would walk around daydreaming (to stop myself from thinking about my project) until I was tired enough and it was late enough for me to go home and go to sleep without having done any work.

Luckily, this was the first time I ever realised my daydreaming habits were having a negative impact on my life and I forced myself to snap out of it and get the work done. It was really hard though. There was one morning that I phoned my tutor on the edge of tears unable to provide an excuse as to why I couldn’t meet the deadline that day despite having had enough time at the weekend to do the work. I feel like I’m just making excuses now for being a poor student now but my point is that before then I had never considered that my beloved daydreaming could be in any way a negative thing. I used to think I was just lazy and of course, in some senses of that word, I am. But laziness is just procrastination and procrastination is just a response to a fear of failure and my particular response to fear of failure, as well the prospect of dealing with any other fears or stresses or sadnesses in my life is to lose myself in my own imagination.

And so, now that I’ve realised that, I just really want to try my hardest to stop it. Now I’m at university and on the brink of being a ‘proper adult’ and the stakes are so much higher. I’m not really sure how but writing all my thoughts out like this has already helped.