been gone a long while; social isolation

[Trinity]

For the first 5 1/2 months of this year, I had stayed in a behavioral facility (not for MD, though I don't want to share the personal details of the reasons why I was there). I just got back home last week. While I was there, I was forced to share an entire living space with several other girls. Think of military barracks. There was one room with bunk beds lining the entirety of one wall. We were supervised constantly. About 17 weeks into the program, a few of us (ones with the best behavior) were able to be moved into a smaller room with more privileges and less supervision. The reason why I wanted to talk about this is because of how much that has affected me and my maladaptive daydreaming. For almost six months, I was forced to hide my disassociation, although I spent as much time as I could by myself and daydreaming. Now that I'm out, I daydream frequently like I used to, but the comfort from it isn't the same. I don't feel like I'm escaping anymore. I miss it, though, because right now I need nothing more than to just escape. I feel like my life has been so out of control. I mean, I've always kind of felt like that, but it's been especially bad this year. 

I titled this post 'social isolation' because lately I've been struggling with two forms of isolation: actually being isolated from the outside world, and being present in society but feeling isolated anyways. All I want is to be able to feel normal- be like everyone else. But instead I feel like I've wasted so much of my life fighting things that I don't even understand. I feel so alone. I'm slowly getting closer to moving out of my mom's house, which is what I've been wanting for a long time now, but doing so scares me. I fear being even more isolated and alone. I can't not-seclude myself, though, because the fear of being open to anyone scares me even more.

I'm sorry if this post seemed like it was going everywhere and didn't make sense. I had some things I've been burying since January that I needed to let out for just a second.

[Valeria Franco]

Hello @Trinity, posts don't have "to make sense" but they can just be the way of telling what's in our mind.

A person in my family has been in a mental health facility a few times, for a shorter period though. 

The impression I get from it is they tend to create a "holiday effect", where everything works differently than in normal life, some things are hard, others are really positive, like having time only to focus on yourself and having people taking care of you, or meeting people with similar problems than yours. 

But when you come home, it's a bit strange and you need to transfer that experience into your day-to-day life.

A good thing to do so is to keep in touch with some of the people you shared the experience with, if you had made some friends there. 

So... welcome home, Trinity :-)