Searching for an anchor

Time, change and increased isolation have had a negative impact on me lately. My new jobs' non-traditional hours sometimes get switched around so that my weeks are not uniform, which messes up my sleep schedule. For weeks now I've been feeling lost, disconnected, sometimes uncertain as to the date and what time of day it is and what my purpose in life is. These past few weeks I have had an increase in negative internal feedback, old tapes of punitive messages playing over and over in my head. I definitely need to do something to alter the mental direction this is all heading in.

Some of the difficulty is trying to integrate the new role that I play at work with my overall concept of "me." Who I am at work, what I do and the overall industry that I work in is so different than who I've been in the past. When I return home for my several days in a row break, the contrast is striking and leaves me confused and lost. So far I have not built a bridge to knowing that work me and home me are both me. Instead, to cope, I've embraced an old stand-by SLEEP. It helps my physical body recover from the odd hours work schedule, but is not helpful in building a transition me that can connect two very different worlds.

Its as if I were a Kaliediscope - an old time toy, built like a small telescope, with the inside lined with a series of mirrors, and the body of the telescope being two pieces, one which holds hundreds of tiny colored chips. The smaller piece of the telescope body can spin, making the chips tumble. As you look through the eye piece, you see patterns formed from the chips reflected off the mirrors, like infinite new snowflakes. Depending upon the capacity of the kaliedescope, the patterns will eventually repeat themselves, though not always in the same order. Now as someone with DIDnos, I try to understand myself to be the body of the scope and all the parts of the scope. But the issue comes in when I believe that the individual patterns (snowflakes) are ME too. Or rather, me ONLY. That each snowflake, each me is totally and only me at the time that I perceive it to be me. I forget that I am also the mirrors, the body of the scope, and all the chips. My perspective becomes skewed, and my identity narrows to me seeing the world only from the perspective of that one snowflake. With the slightest twist of the small scope, the chips can fall, making a new pattern, erasing the old snowflake and a new perspective/identity is taken on. Most times the transition is flawless and unnoticed but not always. Sometimes the new snowflake is so foreign that confusion results. Meaning is lost and the way through the day/week is lost.

What can make a transition for me so that my work snowflake and home snowflake are not so very far from each other in my patterns in life? How do I integrate this new snowflake into my overall body of who/what is me? How do I stop buying into the idea (or habit) of believing I am the individual snowflakes instead of the kaliescope as a whole? These are the daily challenges of someone with didnos.