My Experience Regarding Agoraphobia

+ How Agoraphobia Feels

The best way I can explain it is, imagine you had a fear of heights and you're standing on top of the Empire State Building with no harness and your feet are right at the edge. That feeling that you get when you look down and see people like ants and cars like little dots is the same feeling multiplied by 10 that this girl is feeling every time she steps beyond her garden gate. That's exactly how it is for me when mine hits me bad. I have social-anxiety along with agoraphobia too so I feel that same sensation when I'm faced with having to interact with someone on a social level. Sometimes its worse than other times where at its worst I cannot leave my bedroom to talk to my family, having to literally wait until everyone leaves the house so that I can use the shower or the toilet and I'll typically wait until everyones gone to bed before I leave the room to eat something.

When Im going through a really bad episode it wouldnt be uncommon for me to not leave the house for up to three weeks. Recently my anxiety was that bad that I hadnt left my room in 10 days (save for about 2am when everyone was in bed) and such was its intensity that over that 10 day period I got approximately 4hrs of sleep and was beginning to get mild hallucinations due to sleep deprivation.

This was the last straw for me and I've made the decision to make an appointment with my GP to get a referral to a professional who can hopefully help me put this chapter of my life behind me because believe it or not I wasn't always like this; I used to be an extremely social individual however over the years my depression has just become progressively less manageable and I cannot exist like this any longer. It is literally driving me insane; due to the self isolation I lose all concept of time, my short-term memory is virtually non existent and I've begun to exhibit ADD like symptoms where I cannot focus or concentrate long enough to hold a conversation with anyone as by the time they're finished asking me a question and its my time to answer, I've already forgotton what they were asking me and it will keep happening over and over again.

I'm in my mid-thirties and this shouldn't be happening to me however its been going on since I hit puberty (early enough at the age of thirteen) but began to get really bad by the age of eighteen and much to my shame and utter embarrassment I've very rarely been able to hold down a job for any significant amount of time (in fact I believe just over a year was the longest).

I did manage to go to college and graduate with two degrees however due to how often and unpredictable my illness is in terms of when its going to hit me I've never been able to take on a full-time job. When I have worked its always been part-time or from home and its no way to live ones life. I myself am at the point where I would rather go for euthanasia (when my mother and brother pass away) than exist like this for one more week.

To anyone out there that's suffering please go and seek out a psychologist and dont leave it for years expecting it to go away because from what I've experienced it just gets worse to the point where you socially isolate yourself away from everyone and you're left on your own like a hermit in a living hell, exiled inside the prison of your own mind.


+ My First Bout With Agoraphobia

If I remember correctly (I can come back and edit this later when I look through my Journals and verify the facts) the first time I experienced a bout of Agoraphobia was when I had to defer my Journalism BA for what was initially intended to be only a year but unfortunately ended up being for much longer. This was back in 2007 after I was coming to the end of my first year and was failing almost all of my classes due to the severity of my depression and anxiety. It lasted for approximately 7 or 8 months and within that timeframe I left the house perhaps twice. Now when i say 'left the house' I'm talking about walking as far as my garden gate.

With severe levels of anxiety they say you enter into whats called the 'fight or flight' mode which I'm sure you've all heard of, but what I dont hear people talk about is a third state called the 'freeze' mode. Thats what would happen to me - I would freeze up like a board and I would be so anxious that I would have severe difficulty with even walking. The ability to talk or think clearly enough to have a conversation would virtually impossible too which is where I believe the seed of what grew into Agoraphobia came from, because I would be so afraid of bumping into someone i knew and not being able to talk/interact with them (and not be able to explain why) that I essentially retreated into my house for vast periods of time where I knew I wouldn't see anyone at all.

Things really got crazy when it got to a point where I began to freeze up on front of my own immediate family and so I found myself not being able to leave my room while I knew other people were in the house....[To Be Continued]