This is going to be a really hard one for me to write about. I don’t go in to to much detail about it with many people. The reason behind my greatest fear is stupid. I know it is. It’s something I know is impossible. Yet I still think it. And I don’t like to tell people, because I know they will judge me for it. But, this is tumblr. The one place where I know that people, even if they think it’s stupid, wont shun me for it.
I have agoraphobia. Pretty extreme agoraphobia. Not as severe as it used to be, but still, it’s a huge part of who I am. It dictates my life. Agoraphobia is, pretty much, a fear of going out. Of being somewhere unfamiliar. Of being around a lot of people. When I was 15, I didn’t leave my house. I didn’t go to school. I didn’t have people over, except for a couple of friends. Whenever people came over, I would go hide in a bedroom, or go throw up in the toilet. I couldn’t stand being around people. I couldn’t stand not being under a roof. I don’t know how it started, but it eventuated in to me being too scared to even go near my front or back door, and I couldn’t have a window open. People tried to understand it, but they couldn’t. I couldn’t explain it to them. For one thing, it’s impossible to explain how you feel in times like that. For another, I didn’t want people to have my “bad thoughts” in their head. I didn’t want their lives to be ruined by it. I kept it all in, until last year when I finally told some people the reason I was scared of outside. I was scared that gravity would stop working. I know, it’s ridiculous. It’s impossible. It cannot stop working. But when you’re having a severe anxiety attack like I was constantly (there was never a minute when I wasn’t having one…even when I was in bed. I was even having them in my dreams), you think the most stupid things. I still think it, whenever I go out. I have to do things to take my mind off of it…I text people, or go on facebook on my phone, or play games on my iPod…anything to make my mind stop thinking about the fact that if gravity were to stop working, I would fall away and float out in to oblivion. I felt like if I had a roof above me, and walls around me, I would be safe, despite the fact that if gravity were to stop working, clearly things wouldn’t be attached to the earth anymore, so I was no safer in a building than I was out of one. But as I said…your mind makes you think some crazy things. My psychiatrist, Donna, gave me a date. September the 1st. If I wasn’t in her office (she came to my house and did home visits, because I couldn’t go out) I would be sent to Melbourne. They would strap me down and take me, if they needed to. I would live in a psych hospital, where they would force me to go outside every day. Little by little I started taking little steps to getting outside. First, I sat at the door. Then, I stood just outside the door. I’d go one step further every single day. I started walkingrunning around the garden infront of my mum’s bedroom. I’d film myself doing it so in the future I could see how silly I was. I started doing it twice a day. I started walking it. One day, I wanted to go to my neighbour’s house (the first time I would have left my property in 7 months), so I made a dice and a little tea cup out of playdough, got my camera, and ran to her front door, left them there, took a photo, and ran back to my house. But I had done it. I walked to my car, one day. One day, I sat in it. One day, I let mum put the keys in the ignition. One day I let her start the car. One day I shut the door when she started the car. One day I let her reverse half way out of the driveway. One day I let her reverse to the end of the drive way. One day I let her go from one driveway to the other. One day I let her go to a quarter of the way down the street. Every day I did something more. And by September 1st, I did it. I got to Donna’s office. I went in there and had my session in her office. This was a huge thing. It was atleast a 20 minute drive. But I did it. I got there. Being Catholic, I was telling myself that God wouldn’t let all of us on Earth go through that. I started going places close to my house. I went to my next door neighbour’s house every day. First for 5 minutes, then 10, then half an hour, then an hour, then several hours. I started going in to Net School every day, where I made some amazing friends. Every Wednesday I would go to CCB (my real school). I was making so much progress. But earlier this year I started to fall back in to the habit of not wanting to go out. It was when I got sick, and didn’t go out for 2 weeks. But I know how strong I am. I know that I can get through this. I don’t like being in the car for more than 8 minutes at a time, but sometimes I do it anyway. There are some places that I refuse to go…but for the most part, I am still doing extremely well. I face my hugest fear every single day of my life. I still have anxiety attacks all the time. I still don’t like to leave my house. But I know that I am bigger and stronger than this. We are all stronger than our greatest fears. We just need to believe in ourselves. And even when you don’t believe in yourself…I believe in you.
My greatest dream…that would probably be to be get better than I am. I know I can do it. I know that I will. I’ll start going to places that frighten me. I’ll do the things that scare me. Although I do it every day (even going out to my letterbox scares me still, but I do it anyway), I would love to do more.
This turned in to such a huge rant and took me almost half an hour to write. I’m sorry about that, :). But in order for it to make sense, I had to explain it all. I couldn’t just say “I’m scared of outside” and leave it at that. I had to go in to great detail. I bet no one even read this.
No comments:
Post a Comment