What is a Trippy Sneaker?

A Trippy Sneaker is a made up word that my best friend and I came up with when we needed something to call our fantasy lives. The lives we lived inside our heads as a way to escape reality.

Alot of people with Bipolar Disorder self-medicate with alcohol or drugs. Especially people who are unmedicated. As a way to escape reality..to get away from their thoughts and their lives.

But I never had to. I found someting else.

Back when I was thirteen I was dealing with my first bouts of depression and anxiety. I started spending alot of time listening to music and creating elaborate fantasy lives that revolved around my favorite movies.

I began to live inside my head more and more over the next few years. In my head, I was a completely different person. Even had a different name. I was everything I wasn’t in real life.

This was my escape. My protection from the world. It took me out of my boring, unhappy life, and put me into an exciting world were I was thin and beautiful, with a boyfriend. I usually focused on Scifi tv shows and movies.. so my fantasies involved scifi fantasy stuff.

Retreating into my head was the only way that I was able to deal with my life and my depression.

It became a type of disassociation.

The worse my depression was…the more I retreated into my head. I could go into my head for hours at a time. I would have no concept of time. I would only ever come out if it if I needed to eat or shower or go to the bathroom.

Only one person knew about all this. My best friend. When I finally told her about it..she suprised me by saying that she did the same thing. Maybe not to the extent that I did.. but she also created elaborate fantasies where she was a different person, living a different life. So she understood.

It felt wonderul to be able to talk to someone about it. We would tell eachother all about these fantasies but we never really knew what to call them. Daydreams..fantasies..didn’t quite seem to cover it. We decided that we were going to come up with an all new word for it. A word that had no other meaning.
My best friend said that it should be somthing weird.. something silly.. like trippy sneaker. We both laughed and I said..why not just call it that? A trippy sneaker.

We tried to think of something else.. but it just stuck so we decided to just go with it.

Now we could talk about it out in pubic and no one else would have any idea what we were talking about.

I still Trippy Sneaker everyday. There have been periods of my life where I was feeling better and didn’t feel the need to do it all the time. But I have never been able to stop doing it completely.
I am sure that if I didn’t have this.. I would probably be an alcoholic or addicted to pain meds or something. I have a very addictive personality so that is practically a given.

Right now.. it is the only thing I have that makes me happy.

With the way things are right now…I can spend days trippy sneakering…loosing all track of time. But I am trying. And I can now spend some time away from it. To do things such as write in here..or on other messageboards. I am trying to take some time each day where I focus on reality.

I was shocked to find out that there is actually a name for things like this. Depersonalization. Or derealization. It is also vaguely related to disassociation.