The first time I heard the word agoraphobia I was twelve years old. Sitting crossed legged in my bedroom reading an old psychology textbook, I came across the word and its Greek definition: fear of the marketplace. I can still remember thinking: “Who would be afraid to leave the house? I am afraid to not leave this house.”
I remembered this fifteen years later as I sat similarly cross legged on my bedroom floor, this time panting at my latest effort to walk to the grocery store and buy bread. Fear of the marketplace. For five nights I had attempted to enter this particular grocery store, failing just as I’d made it through the double doors. I made it back home just in time to swallow several ativan and cuddle with a small floor fan. An intelligent 25 year old woman, well read, and if I may say, experienced and somewhat wise, I still had no idea what was wrong with me. I always had bad nerves, but my inability to leave the house was the climax in a series of escalations of anxiety that eventually landed me at my mother’s house for a summer, wallowing in what I can only assume was a nervous breakdown.
I write this two years later, with many more panic attacks behind me, and many more, I imagine, ahead. But where there are failures and limitations, there are successes and doors that have opened. I still cannot drive on the freeway, but I can go to the grocery store. I went to Philadelphia and LA., a monumental task, not only motivated by therapy, but love, a story I will tell later.
For now, it is enough to say this- I cannot offer promises that your life will be completely normal ever again. Two years, plenty of medication and therapy, I am not normal. But I am learning how to live again.
