This is what my therapist calls depersonalization-derealization disorder
Published on 2025-02-13
The question motivating today's article is this: how often do you feel like you're attuned to the natural world?
My campus is built on the side of a mountain. If you walk up passed the academic buildings, past the residence buildings, you'll eventually find yourself at the mouth of a path that leads into the backwoods. Following this path through the ponderosa pines will eventually take you to a fork in the road. If you take the much steeper, winding path on your right, you'll eventually find yourself in a clearing on the peak where workers seem to have dumped fill that has since overgrown with shrubs and small trees, possibly while constructing the old water station nearby. It's one of the most beautiful spots on campus; from it, you can look out over the whole valley, watching the sun set over the mountains on the other side
Some of my best memories since moving out west for school are of sitting with my friends in the dirt in this clearing. Sometimes I wish we went up there more often, other times I'm not sure if that'd spoil it. It's a bit hard to imagine anything being able to spoil it. Sometimes I'll walk up there on my own, often times when I'm feeling fed up with the immediacy of life down in the valley.
There's a lot of good reasons to physically surround yourself with nature, but when I'm doing it alone I often like to try and position myself in spirit within the natural world. We're always "in the natural world" in some sense, but with the constant rush of life, it's easy to forget.
To directly answer the question I posed at the beginning of the article, if I'm being honest, it's quite rare I feel attuned to the natural world, and I think there's a few reasons for that.
I realized last month, about a year after I seriously committed to write an article on my website every day, that January through February 2024 was probably the most put together my life has ever felt. Since then, I've been trying to figure out why, specifically. I think a big part of it was the fact that during that time, while I was doing all this writing, I put a lot of emphasis on thinking about what I've tagged in my bespoke blogging engine as "human ecology"—thinking about the way people related to one another, society, and nature. I was trying to take things that otherwise felt "unnatural", like the University, and to think of them as ecology—the human ecology. So, even while I wasn't spending all of my time surrounded by stands of fir trees, I was, in fact, attuned to something—something I decided to understand as a "natural" phenomenon.
I think this "attunedness" is a more important part of human experience than I've given it credit, and that that probably means a lot of different things to different people. A lot of religions emphasize attunedness. For Christians, it seems like that'd be one's attunedness with God, or the will of God, or God's plan. In Daoism, this is probably wú wéi, or (very simply put) one's alignment with the Dao. In my own bespoke spiritual framework based on my lived experience, I've put a lot of emphasis on understanding a metaphysical process that is fundamentally exploitative, extractive, and detrimental to the realization of one's self. It doesn't exactly propose anything for you to attune yourself to, having unaligned yourself from everything that's holding you back. There is no vision of a better world, I suppose.
Figuring out what that is is a process unto itself.
Communists would probably call this "alienation", which is itself a pretty good way of putting it. Following this framework I'd assume anyone who spends their day working on a computer would feel "attuned" to the internet, or the sort of collective reality one finds themself living in when working for a large company, but I can't say that's ever personally been my experience. This busyness of life doesn't "attune" you to the human ecology on its own. Something I've been continually rediscovering over the last year is that being attuned is more like brushing your teeth than reading a book. You don't just get there one day; you've got to keep getting there every day for the rest of your life.
The question I asked at the beginning of the article isn't necessarily rhetorical, by the way; I'd be interested in hearing how other people respond to it.
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