There is a moment before the door opens when the day could still go either way. I have lived inside that moment for longer than I care to count. This is a place about that moment, and about what happens before and after. If you’re reading this, there’s a good chance anxiety, panic, or fear has made your world feel smaller. You’ve probably started telling yourself a certain story about this. A story about how you are uniquely wrong for the world. A story about how you’re the only one who can’t do things. Those stories are liars and they want you to lose hope. But we cannot let that happen.
Agoraphobia is not a single fact about a life. It is a rearrangement of it. It changes what a weekend means. It changes what freedom means. It changes what a doorway means. We did not choose this and we did not see it coming. Fear is tricky that way. It often arrives disguised as caution, as tiredness, as an instinct for safety. Only later, once you’ve given it power, does it announce itself. By then, we are firmly in it’s grasp.
What I have learned, and what I trust, is this: healing does not happen in a single decisive gesture. There is no morning on which you simply decide to be well. There is instead the five minutes on the porch. The hand on the doorknob. The going back inside, and the trying again the next day, and the day after that, without any guarantee that trying will look like succeeding. I started this blog because I needed a place to keep an account of those five minutes. Not to make them sound larger than they were but to say plainly that they counted.
I am not a therapist. I have no protocol to offer you, no seven steps, no magic solution, no simple fix. What I have is the same door you have and some notes on what it has cost me to open it. I wanted a record of that; the reflections, the reminders, the days that were only honest and nothing more. I believe that we need to face the worst of life head-on, no flinching, no exaggerating, no glamorizing. But, equally as important, we need community to give us the strength to do this. I am hoping that Living Beyond the Door can be both of those things. I am hoping that it helps me deal with my struggles. And, finally, I hope that my five minutes can make your easier to endure.
Welcome. I truly mean that.
I’ll meet you back here soon.
— Your Agoraphobic Friend