An Agoraphobic on the Road, Part 2: Coming of Age

It has taken me a while to actually believe that this car is mine. On one level, I wasn't that anxious to get it, not just because of the anxiety about driving, I think, but because owning a car changes who I am. I have no excuse any more (well I won't once I've got a little more driving time under my belt) to not be independent. Having a car turns me into a grown up and when you are shaky about being in the world, being a grown up is not necessarily what you crave.

Many of us who struggle with agoraphobia and similar conditions are people who didn't really have childhoods. We were coping with grown-up things by the time we were five or six. And when children carry grown up burdens so early on, they never actually get the chance to really mature into adulthood, but remain in many ways as children who are carrying and trying to balance enormous adult burdens which they really don't know how to cope with properly. They carry on through strength of will and force of habit until one day when everything finally collapses, they discover that they don't have a clue as to how to manage any more. Suddenly the child who has been hiding under that mountain of responsibility is revealed to the world and to him or herself and starts looking around for the mommy who was never there.

Without the company of our burdens, we - these grown up children - begin to feel very much alone. But even as we look for support - everywhere and to everyone - life experience has taught us that you can't count on anyone else. So we run towards help and then dart away almost as we reach it and end up circling and circling, exhausted, frustrated and still very much alone. Until and unless, that is, we are lucky enough to break the pattern.

Sometimes the Universe steps in and breaks it for us with some illness or catastrophe which forces our hand. Some of us wait until we hit bottom and then reach out for help. And some of us hit bottom and lie there for a while still refusing to reach out because bottom can, in it's own peculiar way, feel very safe. I know that the Universe had to club me over the head, kick me in the butt a few times and still drag me kicking and screaming to a healthier spirit. But even when I was fighting recovery I was also striving very had to get there. The will to life and joy is strong in all of us. Most agoraphobics are survivors. We just, by and large, don't realize how remarkable it is that we have made it this far, and that far from being the weak, pathetic creatures we judge ourselves to be, we are remarkably strong. We are also - paradoxical human creatures that we are - remarkably fragile... or perhaps tender is a better word for it. I think that what makes survivors of us is our capacity to love. But with the capacity to love comes the capacity to be deeply hurt. Some, like me have taken that pain into isolation with us, thinking we could hide from it. Others act tough and keep everyone at arms length, living in a kind of self regulated pain. But the trouble with big hearts is that they cannot stop loving and so they leak outside the boundaries of every trick we come up with to encase them. It is an illusion and a delusion to think that we can stop feeling any more than we can stop breathing. We have been wrongly taught to judge and condemn so much of what we feel; anger is generally frowned upon in our society, but for many of us feelings of joy and pride were also on the parental hit list of what not to feel. What an awful theft this is upon the human spirit. Having feelings is the spirit equivalent of breathing. Feelings are inescapable and there is no feeling we can have which is wrong for us to experience. How we act on our feelings is something else. In the act of repressing and judging our own humanness, we often cause much harm to ourselves and others.

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