I never feel like I'm myself, only some eminence that happens to congregate around this body. Like this body is something else entirely. I look in the mirror and see an alien, I feel like an alien. I don't feel like I belong in this body, and it's awful. I can't look into a mirror and see myself, I just see something that happens to be where I am. What is this? What causes this? Do any of you experience this? This feeling felt stronger as I grew older, and now I just look into the mirror and feel a mixture of dissassociation, nothingness, and discomfort. It's been that way for years, even before my parents divorce and the awful depression that has brought upon me.
Yes, like Sass says, this does sound like depersonalisation, but I think we need to do a bit of digging in order to come to a firmer conclusion. What I would ask is, when you look in the mirror, do you see 'you' looking back at you, or do you have the feeling that the person looking back at you is a stranger? If the latter, this would indicate a neurological issue.
The other side to this is that, from a purely rational (i.e. philosophical) point of view, the particularity of our bodies represents something quite absurd about our existence. I think Hegel had something when he posited
Geist to describe an experience of 'universal consciousness' - from the point of view of our subjectivity, we are the only conduit through which existence is experienced, and I think this invokes the expectation of something like 'universality' within ourselves too. As '
the subjective observer' of the universe, we are abstract entities, and so I think that it's a little jarring, therefore, to consider just how very
particular we are in our physical forms, when our minds wander free in the aether.
This is exacerbated in those who are prone to contemplation, introspection and abstract thought, of course. Existing in an undifferentiated wash of universal, general, and abstract ideas can make us prone to a certain kind of shock when confronted with the peculiarity of our
concrete selves. I've done it myself - to look at the fellow in the mirror and puzzle over just how very
particular the body is - black hair, not blond or red, &c. &c. It's a jarring, disconcerting transition to integrate the concrete into what is generally an abstract experience of the world, and we might experience something of this feeling when we seemed to be defined by others in a way that doesn't feel right to us, or in a way that otherwise 'closes down' our sense of self from the 'open generality' in which it rests.
In this sense, there is nothing 'wrong' with a certain feeling of depersonalisation, since on philosophical grounds it's highly justified - any rational contemplation of the matter will lead you to this position (and in that way, our
conscious really messes with easy diagnoses, as a lot of rational contemplation can imitate mental illnesses in their foci). Alarm bells should only start to ring if the discomfort becomes unbearable, or you develop some kind of unmanageable existential terror at the thought.
Make sure you get enough vitamin D.