I don’t understand who i am or what’s real
As a kid I didn’t have the best home life or many friends so I spent most of my time in a world of my own making. This continued when I got to middle school, and I started applying this world of my own to the real world (finding fictional explanations for real life problems, out of habit) which naturally caused me some problems. At the same time, I started having issues with identity and major disconnects between myself and my body/existence. When high school started my parents divorced and we almost had to move far from my home. This was while I was severely depressed. So, without realizing it, I went back into a fictional world and created “other personalities” that I could become to protect myself.
Long story short, I have big problems with identity and fiction vs reality, which causes me to have regular panic attacks due to watching movies/tv shows (because I start acting like/thinking like a character since characters are supposed to be relatable etc and then panic because “oh god who am I what’s real”).
I’m asking this here because never in my life have I heard anybody echo this feeling and there are no existing diagnoses that seem to describe what I’m experiencing. I’d like to know if any of these experiences are normal or if anybody else has experienced/known someone who’s experienced this stuff. I feel horrifically alone on this.
P.S. I don’t have the “other personalities” anymore as I eventually recovered from my depression at the time and came to my senses about those delusions that I had at the time. But I very, very often feel myself trying to slip back into those “personalities” out of fear and I have to stop myself. And no, I did not have dissociative identity disorder (multiple personality disorder), as I unconsciously made that happen on my own and never had amnesia etc