Jan 17
On Keeping One’s Own Company
Let’s talk about agoraphobia and the pandemic.
I haven’t spoken much about this in the past, mostly because I haven’t wanted it to define me, but the older I get, the harder it gets to tell the difference between something that’s “wrong” with me and something that’s just different from most people. Which is to say, I am learning to accept myself more, I guess, even the parts that are difficult to deal with. The people closest to me know all about these issues already, because I’m not ashamed of them, and you also can’t be close to me for too long without noticing them, but I haven’t made them public knowledge just because I guess I didn’t really feel the need to. But it’s such an enormous part of my daily life, my whole way of being, that the more I think about it, the more it feels strange that I’ve never really opened up about it.
Unfortunately, I think a lot more people are dealing with issues similar to what I’ve dealt with my whole life, post pandemic, after living in lockdown for so long, and that’s another reason why I decided to talk about this now. I have a decent slice-of-life sampling situation, being the owner of a shop, where I have exposure to and chat with people from a lot of backgrounds and walks of life, not just within my own usual social circles, and what I’m hearing from people are a lot more social anxiety and agoraphobia-tinged issues popping up, where maybe they didn’t exist before.
Agoraphobia is one of those things that I feel like most people only ever really encounter in books or movies, partially because it’s fairly rare, and partially, I think, because people like me who deal with these issues tend to be extremely private and at least a little bit guarded. Because of that, I think, its depiction in popular culture to me, at least, feels a little…. well, a whole lot off. It’s often depicted as a crippling fear, with reactions to going outside being played by actors as if they are running through a corn field in a horror movie. I can’t speak for everybody, but it’s not like that for me, and it’s not like that for many of the accounts of others who deal with agoraphobia that I’ve read. Of course, there are varying degrees and manifestations of the damned thing, but what I have heard from others is a lot more in line with what I have experienced as well, and I can’t think of a single mass media depiction that has gotten it anywhere close to correct.
Where you can spot us in pop culture is in our dominant form, which is masked as hermits, recluses, extreme introverts and homebodies. People know we exist. They just don’t always understand why. It’s the nature of the beast that we aren’t very likely to open up about it.
So what is it really like? Well, I have to start by repeating the fact that I can’t speak for everyone. I can only speak for myself, and my issues with going outside are tied to a few different things, the main one being social anxiety. I have always hated being around a lot of people or being the center of attention, since the time I was a very small child. Then, when I turned 12, things got a lot worse. I was going through a lot in my home life, so it was hard to tell at the time exactly what was going on, not only for the adults in my life, but also for me. Looking back, what seems most likely is that it was a combination of environmental factors and the fact that puberty is the age when a lot of anxiety disorders begin to really manifest for a lot of people.
I essentially just stopped talking for nearly a year, unless it was absolutely necessary, and became so withdrawn and reluctant to leave the house for any reason or to see anyone that my mother took to tricking me into meeting friends by telling me that we were just going to the store or to run some other small errand. This continued more or less through my junior high school years, although I always had friends and did fine at school. I just didn’t want to extend myself beyond that.
There were periods throughout high school and college when it got a lot better, and others when it got worse. It has always been difficult to pinpoint a trigger. One big thing that has always helped, though, has been having a group of friends who are extremely close. Having a group of “my” people around me goes a long way in making me feel secure. The periods in my life when these issues have faded the most into the background have always been the times when I have had an almost claustrophobic circle of friends to rely on. But that isn’t always the situation, and has gotten more difficult to come by the older I’ve gotten, for many, I think, obvious reasons. And even with that kind of group of friends, certain other factors can intervene to make things flair up regardless. If I’m dealing with a lot of stress or grief, or if I feel unsteady or exposed in other areas of my life, leaving the house naturally becomes more difficult than it usually is. How much of this is related to feeling more uncomfortable with going outside, and how much is just being worn down in other ways to the extent that I don’t have as much energy to face the daily struggle to push myself, I can’t say for sure.
And even on the best of days, it is difficult. There has never been one time in the past twenty-odd years that I have left my house without feeling some level of anxiety. It doesn’t matter if I’m only going to walk the dog or to meet a close friend for a casual lunch or to work. I still feel it even if I’m just running five minutes up the street to grab something from the shops. Getting myself to walk out the door is always a challenge. It is a thousand times worse when I’m walking out to face something that in and of itself causes anxiety, like meeting someone new or going to a group gathering with people I don’t know that well or, god forbid, to take an exam or have a job interview. But even talking myself into heading out for a walk by the river can take me several hours some days, even when all I really want to do is to walk by the river for a while.
What am I afraid of? I know that’s the question most people are probably asking. The answer is, I have no fucking idea. I don’t know. I’m not afraid of anything. The only answer I have is that it’s just some kind of neurological misfire. My heart rate increases, my breathing becomes shallow and, depending on how bad it is, my vision can even start to get blurry. The night before out-of-town trips, I sometimes get dizzy and feel faint out of nowhere or start running a fever. I’m not consciously afraid of anything, but my body just reacts as if I am. Even writing this now, just thinking about all of this, my heart is racing a little. Something is telling my body that there’s something to be afraid of, but it isn’t me. The only word that really comes to mind when I try to define it is exposure. When I’m in my own home, my own garden, I feel cocooned and protected, but stepping outside the front gate feels exposed.
Exposed to what? Again, I couldn’t tell you. I can tell you, though, that if there were no other people out there, I suspect that I would feel just fine. What do I think those other people are going to do to me? Nothing. It’s not about that. It may be for some, but for many people who deal with agoraphobia, there is no real answer to that question. It’s just about feeling exposed in general.
One thing I’ve seen a lot of people who deal with these issues say, though, over the past few years, and something that has been true for me as well, is that wearing a mask during the pandemic helped a lot. That’s the level of “logic” we are dealing with here. While pop culture presents agoraphobics as people who have gone through traumatic events and are afraid of being attacked or some kind of violence on the street, we are actually comforted simply by hiding half our face with a piece of fabric. It simply isn’t logical, and trying to find the logical reason for it misses the point entirely.
On the worse days, going outside, I feel very simply like a turtle without its shell. A soft body that is not equipped to deal with everything that’s out there. I am less a terrified horror movie protagonist sprinting through a corn field and more of a wary stray cat keeping eyes on all directions and moving quickly through the streets.
On better days, the trouble stops as soon as I step through the front gate. The fear is all contained in the anticipation, the moments leading up to getting myself out the front door, and once I’m out there, I’m totally fine.
On the very worst days, I don’t make it out there at all.
I’ve always treated my agoraphobic issues kind of like an addiction, because in a way, they are. When I give myself permission to withdraw from the world for a while, I feel so much more relaxed and happy. I feel like myself, like I’m finally not going against the grain and fighting everything that comes naturally to me. But I’ve always tried to keep strict limits on how long I allow myself to indulge in that feeling, because it can easily take over and slip out of my control. And then what started as an indulgence can become a compulsion, and what felt like a respite can begin to feel more like a prison.
But over the past few years, I’ve begun to wonder what would happen if I accepted that maybe my daily environment is not helping. I’ve lived in some of the most crowded cities in the world for the past 20 years. What would happen if I just considered for a moment that I’m not cut out for that? What would happen if walking out my front door no longer meant walking smack into a crowd of hundreds of people? If going anywhere father than I can walk didn’t mean cramming myself onto a bus or a subway with dozens of strangers?
My brother asked me a few months back if I thought it was a good idea to move to the woods by myself, given my already overwhelming tendencies to keep to myself, and I guess that’s the other reason I’ve been thinking about this more lately. I can admit that it is a dangerous game.
I have spent my entire life fighting back against my urge to stay inside and to keep to myself, so much so that in some ways I’ve lived a life that has been far more exposed than what many people ever experience. Not wanting to give into the fear has pushed me to set challenges for myself that I might never have faced otherwise. Since I realized this was an issue for me, I began to seek out the solution in a kind of never-ending, self-designed exposure therapy. The last thing I ever wanted was to have a small, closed-off life. I love learning new things and having new experiences, and I was not going to allow this irrational fucking thing my brain does to stand in my way. I got on the planes. I went to the job interviews. I stood in front of the audiences and the classrooms. I put on my shoes and went to the river for a walk. Not every day. But on enough of them. And I’m so glad that I did.
But now, I kind of want to find out what will happen if I just allow myself to be myself for a while. I don’t plan on closing myself off from the world, but I want to reinterpret to some degree what it means to be connected to it, on my own terms. I want to see if it’s even possible for me to get lonely or bored on my own. I want to see what’s at the bottom of it all. Because spending time on my own is not just something that I do out of fear. I genuinely love it. And I need it. I didn’t let fear stop me from finding and testing my boundaries in the one direction, so I don’t see why I should allow it to keep me from going in the other. I’m old enough and experienced enough now that I feel like I can trust myself with this. And I want to see what it brings me.
I’ve always found the relationship between neurology and personality to be an interesting, but frightening one. No one wants to think that their whole identity is really just predetermined by whatever is written into their DNA. But dealing with my anxiety and agoraphobia in terms of a neurological disorder has helped me a lot. Understanding that it’s not necessarily about who I am as a person, but just something that my brain does all on its own. It’s not a character flaw — it’s a disability related to biological functions that I can’t control, but instead have to find ways to cope with and work around.
Just like addiction or depression, anxiety is one of those things that society has often tried to tell us is just a matter of having a weak character. Not having the gumption or self-control to overcome. But while it is up to us as individuals to figure out how to cope with these things, it isn’t always helpful to engage with them on the premise that if you were just a stronger, better person, you wouldn’t let these things affect you so much. Sometimes, you can’t will your way out of certain issues. Sometimes, you need help from people who understand it better than you do, resources, a strategy. Just like any other illness related to the body. Because in the end, that is actually what it is. You wouldn’t get anywhere trying to overcome cancer by being a stronger, more disciplined person, and it’s not much more likely to be helpful in the case of neurological issues, either.
That having been said, we do have to consider how much of what we are dealing with is something that’s “wrong” with our brains, and how much of it is caused by an environment that is not hospitable to good mental health. I think this becomes more relevant by the day. One of the most incredible features of human beings as an animal is the extreme adaptability of our brains. But we can still only be pushed so far.
I think it is becoming clearer by the day to many people that we are living within an exploitative, abusive system that encourages division, isolation and the abandonment of the self and our natural instincts for more productivity and consumption. Poverty, racism, misogyny, and homophobia are not internal struggles. The isolation that comes from being pitted against each other, and against the natural world, in order to prop up existing power structures is not a neurological issue. The unrelenting message that what will make you a better, happier person is producing more — and more and more and more — is a call that is not always coming from inside the house. Sometimes what’s called for is not just an assessment of what misadventures your brain may be about, all on its own, but also a reevaluation of the world around you and how you engage with it, whether that’s your choice or not.
And that’s a big part of what I want to explore for myself, going forward. What if my brain isn’t just misfiring, but also rebelling? Against being stacked on top of other people, living like busy little ants in an anthill. Against the idea that having natural, seasonal biological rhythms that call for more activity at some times and more rest and withdrawal at others, is a personality flaw. Against being surrounded by smog and concrete. Against the cold, competitive nature of this city. Against being told that how I can be a person of worth is primarily determined by my gender. Against complete and total isolation from the natural world.
Do I think I’m going to fix all my problems by running back to nature? No. I’m not an idiot. I know there is at least some weird stuff that my brain does that I will always have to live with. But I’m curious to explore to what degree these things can be tweaked by changing how I engage with the world and with myself as an animal that can’t be fully domesticated.
And if you also find yourself dealing with some sudden onset issues following the pandemic, as I know many people are, I would encourage you to consider a few things as well. Up until a century or two ago, it would not have been normal for the majority of people you encounter throughout your day to be strangers. It would not have been normal for you to keep the exact same daily schedule almost every day of the week and all throughout the year. The office/work environment that is typical now was completely unheard of. It would be bizarre for you to have to go completely out of your way, possibly even setting aside vacation time, to encounter nature in any real sense. Vacation time was also not a thing.
I am not one to romanticize the past in its entirety, because for many — most — of us, overall things are much better now, and none of this applies to all of us equally. However, I think it is worth considering that it may not be that the pandemic caused you to develop issues. It may be that, for the first time in your life, you had some rest and respite from some very unnatural practices that were stressing your system. And if you’re someone who falls into a category that deals with additional daily abuse out in the world, it may not be just an unnatural schedule and environment that you had a rest from. Not having to deal with as many daily aggressions that people who are not your people toss your way based on bigoted beliefs may have settled your soul in a way you’ve never been able to experience. Having the excuse to withdraw more completely into your own tribe, to people of your own choosing, may have healed you in a way that makes having to go back out there hurt so much more than it did before.
You may not have a choice in resuming some of those things. Being able to drop out entirely is a luxury that not many people have. But I still think it’s worth taking some time to parse how much of the blame you decide to carry on your own shoulders, even if you don’t have a say in shouldering all of the burden. In some cases, it may not be you who is wrong. It may be the system. And just knowing and understanding that can go a long way toward at least partial healing.
