Depersonalization/Derealization Disorder.

‘Night In The Woods’ was one of the best games (personally) released last year, and talked about the importance of friendship as well as mental health issues as faced by the characters in said game. Mental illnesses as well as disorders are portrayed in the game as a part of life, and nothing out of the ordinary. (A more general overview of the examples of the game are shown here.)

The game’s main character, Mae Borowski, is someone who at first glance seems judgmental and ignorant (her choice of words and actions make her seem insensitive as well), but later on makes the player realize that she in fact has a bad case of depression, anxiety and a type of dissociative disorder, more specifically depersonalization/derealization.

For those wondering, it’s a disorder where someone feels detached from their life, thoughts and feelings. People with this type of disorder say they feel distant and emotionally unconnected to themselves, as if they are watching a character in a boring movie. Other typical symptoms include problems with concentration and memory. The person may report feeling ‘spacey’ or out of control. Time may slow down. They may perceive their body to be a different shape or size than usual; in severe cases, they cannot recognize themselves in a mirror.

For Mae’s case, this disorder wasn’t obvious in the beginning, as she only ever vaguely talks about it when she mentions about her dropping out of college due to an incident.

The incident is clarified when Mae talks to Gregg one night when they were sleeping together, and she explains what happened 6 years back when she supposedly hurt someone badly, Andy Cullen, during a softball game.

Mae: “And suddenly, like, something broke. It was just like pixels.”
Gregg: “Your computer broke?”
Mae: “No, like… reality broke.”
“The characters onscreen… like I’d felt like I knew them…”
“But they weren’t people anymore. They were just shapes.”
“And their lines were just things that someone had written, they never existed, they never had feelings, they never would exist, either.”
“And it felt so sad, like I’d just lost these real people, and this whole thing we had was just me. Alone.”
“And like that realization like dumped out of the screen and into real life.”
“I went outside and the tree out front. I looked at it every day, it was like a friend outside the window, now it was just a thing. Just a thing that was there. Growing and eating, just being there.”

Notice how Mae describes how she felt at that exact moment in full detail, giving us a visualization of what went on in her mind.

Mae: “And there was some guy walking by, and he was just shapes. Just like this moving bulk of… stuff.”
“And I cried, because nothing was there for me anymore. It was all just stuff. Stuff in the universe. Just… Dead.”
Gregg: “Dude. Why didn’t you tell me?”
Mae: “I don’t know. What could I have said?”

The description that Mae gives allows us as someone who doesn’t know how these people with this disorder, understand them better as we see it from her perspective. That last line that Mae said regarding her inability to convey her condition out implies that many people who have conditions like this are afraid of saying it out for the fear of being invalidated.

“When Andy stepped up, it was like… he was just shapes too. Just lines someone wrote, nothing in there. And I was so scared and angry and… I dunno.”
“Before I knew it, I was on top of him, smashing his face in with the bat. Just shapes. Red shapes all over the grass.”

As the wiki page stated, after that incident, her doctor, Dr. Hank prescribed keeping a journal as a means of keeping her emotions in check. Mae claims it helps her feel grounded with reality and that it works somewhat. She seemed to be doing alright until she left for college.

There, the effects of dissociation seemed to intensify and Mae never made a single friend at college because she was terrified of leaving her room. She was left starving or else downing entire pizzas in one go. She drank cough syrup just to sleep and forget about her living nightmare. Mae was especially terrified of the rusty statue of the founder outside her window: always a mess of shapes watching and pointing down at her. She felt too scared to phone anyone for help.

After three semesters, Mae finally mustered up the courage to leave and return to the safety of home, where things weren't just "dead shapes."

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Side note: Mental health is something that's very important and something that needs to be validated in many people's lives. Whoever you are out there that's reading this and is going through something, stay strong and I love you.