Seventeen years ago Nathan Dunne was locked out of his body, or at least that’s how it felt. He talks about his battle with depersonalisation disorder – and his sudden fear of water
On a cold winter’s night, in a “fit of spontaneity”, Nathan Dunne and his girlfriend went for a midnight swim on Hampstead Heath in London. They had been living together for a few months and, although it was dark and chilly, they “had a summer feeling in that first flush of the relationship”, Dunne says. They shed their clothes and waded into the shallows. After diving into the icy water, Dunne’s girlfriend put her lips to his cheek, and as they pulled apart, his life changed beyond all recognition. “It was like being struck. Like something came down,” he says, slicing the air with his hand. “The flip of a switch.”
Dunne’s transformation sounds like a fairytale in reverse: one kiss, and his life turned into a nightmare. Seventeen years have passed since that night, and he still mostly explains the change in himself in metaphors and similes. His eyes filled with soot. His voice was a robot’s. He felt as if he were locked outside his body, which became a sort of “second body”. Any form of water, from a raindrop to a warm bath, made everything worse. His terror and panic were so great that the next day he smashed a vase and used a shard to cut himself. An “attempt to not live any more”, is how he describes it.
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