Trying to hang on, has anyone been here before?

Hi all. I'm here hoping someone may be able to understand what is going on. I have been experiencing a change in my anxiety which has me concerned, not for the safety of anyone but for my stability in reality. In order to keep this from being an autobiography, I will stick to the important details. I hope it's not too long.

My life is marked by a series of knocks to the brain. When I was a baby I had a very high fever that nearly killed me and later fell down a staircase and knocked my head on a metal bolt at the bottom. In my adolescence, I had two trees violently pinch either side of my head underwater in a creek. My sister and her friend saved me, but I had a very hard time recovering. I had a concussion and this led to an MRI which also revealed that my brain was way too large inside my skull and was being pushed into my spinal cord, which caused a cyst to grow inside it and slowly began to paralyze me from the neck down. I am truly grateful to live now because they were able to fix it with neurosurgery, but THEN they found pieces of my brain just floating around at the bottom where they weren't supposed to be. I feel these episodes have helped knocked the screws loose.

I find myself so isolated from the real world, that it seems...too real. And not real at the same time. My therapist called me "cerebral". I am also a synesthete, and I have OCD and PTSD as well as general anxiety. I think very visually, and have many overlapping filters to my vision. I can only perform mathematics if I draw each unit out separately, and follow a visual map of numbers in my head, and each number and letter has its own color. I can only tell left or right apart if I look at my hands. I am always "layering" the inner structure of something over what I see. All these senses work together to make my real world existence very bizarre. For example, when I am in a grocery store, everything will stand out and I will be so drawn to certain stimuli that the whole world seems to melt away. I will reach out and touch and play with everything instinctively, like a little kid. When the cashier talks to me, her voice is like a ribbon that hums, and has a certain color, and I can see the bones moving in her hand when she gives me my money. I can also hear the noise of the fridges, and my lungs fluttering, and feel the ground firmly beneath me. I can't really focus on talking to the cashier because there's too much catching my attention. She probably thinks I'm so rude to only give one word answers, then hurry away, but I just can't handle the stress. I have to get out, but I feel so bad for not being nice to her.

Sometimes I just feel dull and disconnected. Like this is all a dreamy time soup, where everything is just happening and I'm just floating around. That I'm a part of everything, and that the universe is everybody trying to understand itself. Its weird I know.

I'm worried because, I lose time during this, and forget what I'm talking about mid sentence. My muscles will tense, my heart will beat fast, and I get a glassy look over my eyes, getting lost in a bad memory. It's only been getting worse over the past few years.

So if you know what I'm going through, and have come out of it, I would love to know...I feel rather lonely and embarrassed of these things. I try to remain sane on the outside, because I don't want to concern anybody. But it's so hard on my heart to live with.

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