Not Really There?!?!

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Yeah, this happens to me occasionally. I think having too much going on around me can trigger it. I remember it happened once when my family visited New York City of the first time; riding in my sister's convertible with the top down can trigger that feeling too.

You are welcome. I myself struggled with it for about three months after a month long panic attack. Yeah, the attack was a month long, you read that right. It came and went, but the shadow of it hid in every corner, and I had to keep myself busy from rise to rest or it would have driven me insane. Good luck snapping out of it; when I came back into reality I had no idea what hit me.

I get that feeling OFTEN. Particularly about being in a store and not knowing that I'm there and detaching from reality and maybe spacing out.

I've tried to find a reason for this and it's a mess to get a clear answer. If any one is thinking it's an AS thing, well I'm NT. My dad's a psychiatrist and says it's definetly depression, my brother's an ER doc and says lots of causes perhaps ADHD. My counselor has attributed this to not giving my head a break or having things to sort out internally. I wish I really knew why.

I avoid walmart and impersonal huge stores because of the feeling they give. I blank out at a horizon and when a store is more 'confined' I see things around. My counselor's advice to sit down and give me head a break or just a chance to think helps.

Lost girl, I've been trying some mental exercises that use the left side of my brain because I'm right brained dominant. I'd perfer these activities over drugs because I already say a lot of dumb things lol

For me it's called depersonalisation. But that's more about having no feeling around people.

My problem is not remembering the steps how I got to a place.

There's no getting out of it for me unless it's derealisation (hallucinations). That's supposed to be the environment not making any real sense to you. I usually get minor hallucinations. My brain is a bit messed up.

If I'm understanding the thread topic correctly, "Not really there," is pretty much the story of my life. For me, it's basically walking around in a fog, lost in my own head, only vaguely aware of my surroundings. I'm prone to startle when someone unexpectedly approaches and speaks to me, or suddenly appears (it seems) my walking path so I need to navigate my way around them. When another person interacts with me or comes into my personal space so I'm forced to acknowledge their existence, it's a lot like being abruptly awakened from a dream.
This spaced out, foggy state is pretty uch my default setting. I need to make a real effort to change the setting and tune in to my actual physical surroundings. I can tune in, but at a certain point, it becomes exhausting to sustain this "tuned in" state of mind.
I never thought of this as "disassociating." I always thought that was more like completely blacking out and having no recall of what one said or did after the fact, and I don't experience it like that. I suppose there's different degrees of disassociation. Maybe I am disassociating, on a milder scale. Hmmm...
Interesting how there's so many clinical terms to describe this particular phenomenon, "disassociation," "depersonalization," derealization." I'm familiar with all of these terms, but it never occurred to me to apply them to what I do. The whole "here but not here" state of mind is just normal part of my every day experience.