I met an elderly woman on a metro-north train in Connecticut. Without any prompt from me, she began explaining why she gets off at Harlem 125th instead of Grand Central Station. Though Grand Central is closer to her home, it is a daunting space for her to navigate.
“I have a fear of open spaces,” she shared. Before I could dredge up the word Agoraphobia (that anxiety disorder that Woody Allen, and even mermaid Daryl Hannah are labeled with), she launched into a lament about how her children and husband never understand and that she can only cross a street in NYC when someone walks with her. Otherwise, she spirals into a debilitating anxiety attack.
“What about fields outside? Does it happen there too?” I asked, because a life without the distinct pleasure of feeling tiny in the natural world seemed to me like no life at all.
“Well, I’ve lived in the city my whole life, but anytime I have been in a field, it’s the same,” and she rambled on and on, as if I were the first person to listen.
Some people with Agoraphobia can never leave the house or “safe space”; most photos detailing it show people staring out windows with painful/longing/confused looks on their faces. As an open-space junkie (which isn’t to say that I don’t also love a nook), I had a hard time hearing this woman’s story and imagining all the lack of arms-thrown-open delight in her life.
Are we each born with a unique spatial orientation? Why would the shapes I see coming at me look the same as the shapes coming at you? Like everything, it reminds me of the nature v. nurture debate. And then I tracked my own fear. Though I can lie in a sparse field for most of the day, at some point, the cells in my body register that animal-feeling of wanting to take shelter, to dash towards a cozy spot under a tree, or at least to know that there is somewhere to hide.
Tags: agoraphobia, open spaces