Gale might just sound like she is depressed, prone to anxiety attacks, and tends to dwell on the existential more than is good for her. I had to figure out how to fake my way through drinking a cup of tea when I couldn't feel a thing." Finally, I went down and our apartments' layouts were identical, and whap, the disorientation of the duplicate apartment triggered an episode. "The woman who lived beneath me invited me over, but I'd been avoiding it because I didn't want to sit and talk. Most of her energy goes towards managing her feelings of alienation and avoiding anything that might trigger an all-out attack, where she feels so disconnected from her flesh and bone that she can barely move. I feel better between four walls."ĭespite having a master's degree in film that once got her a production job at 20th Century Fox, Gale, now 48, hasn't worked in more than 10 years. Then that preoccupation starts to hang over you. ![]() "Everyone says, 'Get outside!' But outside everything is infinite, and it gets you thinking about who you are and what's beyond. "I won't go out without taking a shower, because I don't want to smell or have greasy hair, but taking a shower makes you very conscious of your body"-or in her case, the fact that she feels detached from her body-"so it takes me about half an hour just to convince myself to get in there." By 11 A.M., she retrieves aforementioned breakfast, and then, if she's feeling up to it, she'll do an errand before heading back home for a long afternoon nap. ’feeling unreal: depersonalization disorder and the loss of the self,' one of the leading books on the topicĪ typical day for Gale: She rises around 9:30 A.M., never terribly eager to get out of bed. "I gave myself a ton of time to get ready to meet you this morning," she continues, and the casualness of her clothes-khaki clam diggers and a pink hoodie-suggests that it wasn't her outfit that took so long to put together. "If I feel in the middle of this interview that I have to go back to my room, I will," she says, somewhat bashfully. Unfortunately, the syndrome she's desperate to publicize makes normal functioning a challenge. Although back home in Ypsilanti, Michigan, she considers it a success if she can make it from her apartment to her local Panera's for coffee and a danish, Gale left her comfort zone to fly to DC because she needs to do some reconnaissance for a workshop she's planning for next year's NAMI convention. Attendees include doctors, health care administrators, and concerned relatives, but Gale is, as NAMI euphemistically puts it, a consumer i.e., a mental patient -"a science experiment," she says. Gale is sitting in the lobby of the Washington Hilton on Connecticut Avenue, where a convention of the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) is under way. "Nobody really gets it," she says, sighing. But none of them, she says, really captures how she feels. There are many analogies Sandy Gale uses to describe her affliction: It's as if she is separated from others by an invisible barrier, as though her "self" doesn't completely fill out her skin, or that she is like a Xerox of a Xerox of a Xerox. ![]() This article originally appeared in the April 2007 issue of ELLE.
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