When I was a kid/teenager, I absolutely loved books. II mostly read fantasy (I started with Harry Potter (oh the irony), then went on to Markus Heitz Fantasy universes and ended up with Robert Joardans Wheel of time) and (psycho-)thrillers (mostly Sebastian Fitzek). I read the same books over and over and over. I spent almost all of my free time reading. I was reading so insanely fast, that I could easily read over 300 pages on a single day. One thing that kept annoying the hell out of me back then was, that while reading I somewhat regularly had this “experience”, where my vision would “zoom out”. Everything looked much smaller than normally and like it was much further away from my point of view, than it normally is. At the same time it got incredibly hard to focus on something. I could read a book, but I did not comprehend what was standing on the pages.
All of this made reading while having this “experience” basically impossible which annoyed the hell out of me (what else should I do, if I could not read). Just recently did I realize, that this is literally the definition of dissociation.
Before I realised this, I thought, that the earliest signs of me being trans occured at the age of 14 (or around that time), but I experienced this kind of dissociating at least since the age of 10.
Shit, it reminds me how I played mass effect for the first time. It was during an intensive part of superior studies and I sacrificed my sleep to play it, like until 4 in the morning, whule waking up at 7am. I did the full trilogy and at some point, while doing some hacking in the second, I remember seeing everything, my body reacting succesfuly but I couldn’t consciously understand what was happening on the screen, how I could react to follow through…
Side note: the hacking in mass effect 2 was roughly having to match a given pattern inside thre scrolling columns. You could switch between scrolling patterns before comfirming the one you were on, while avoiding some forbidden patterns.