Melissa Murphy shares her experience of agoraphobia – and beating it – in The Guardian Weekend magazine.

Her brave, honest account had me speed-reading to the end: was there a happy ending? Yes. Like me, although once crippled by the disease, she’s now a fully functioning member of society. I’ve never met Melissa Murphy, but I was immediately, intensely proud of her.

Then I read that she’d published a book about her experiences – a book to help other agoraphobics recover – and I hated her.

Funny how quickly that sisterhood stuff can fall away.

How dare she? I seethed. That’s MY thing. I was going to write that book!

When I was in the grip of agoraphobia, six stone and dropping, and fighting every day to inch along the long, uncharted road back to normality, the one thought that spurred me on was this:

If nothing else, I know I can write. When I’m better I’ll write a book about this so that no one else has to feel as alone as I feel now.

Now, six years post-recovery, I’m all lattes and Oyster cards and over-spending and complacency. And I haven’t written a word about it yet.

Why?

Well, partly because the very business of getting on with life takes so much effort. It took me four years and one relapse to recover from agoraphobia. There’s no culture shock like being thrust into a world of careers and mortgages when, for the last four years, the scariest thing you’ve had to do every day is walk to the bus stop.

Also there’s the fear that talking about it might bring it back.

Agoraphobia came for me out of the blue. One day I was a wry, happy-go-lucky twenty year old with a boyfriend, a band and a rather extreme social life. The next day I couldn’t get on a bus or go in a shop without swooning.

I’ve never fully understood where it came from, what triggered it or, most worryingly, what facilitated my recovery. Back then, despite everything, I fashioned myself into a cold streak of willpower, throwing everything I had at the disease for a chance at a better life.

Now I have that better life – the lattes and Oyster cards and so on – and it’s softened me.

If agoraphobia came knocking tomorrow I’d stand to lose a good job, a great boyfriend (well, probably not him. It might put a dent in his nice life though), a nice house, a decent social life. It’d be like the fall of Rome. I’d be as unprepared as Nero – all muscle run to fat, sedentary living, the fight bred out of me.

I couldn’t do it.

So best not to think about it, right?

Well, wrong. That whole not-thinking-about-things-because-they’re-irksome business is a breeding ground for the kind of neuroses that lead to agoraphobia in the first place.

What agoraphobia ISN’T:

  1. A fear of open spaces. At my worst point, I was A-OK with open spaces. The trouble was enclosed spaces away from home – buses, offices, cinemas. Even then, it wasn’t fear of those places – it was fear of having a panic attack in those places. If I keeled over in a shop, it would be a Big Deal. There would be questions, witnesses. I might vomit. People might think I was mad. How mortifying. Whereas, if an agoraphobic falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, would it even have happened in the first place?

  2. A simple phobia. Arachnophobia is a simple phobia: spider + phobic = wig out. It’s not nice, but it is simple. Agoraphobia is a complex phobia; a prison your subconscious creates to keep you safe from all those pesky panic attacks. My particular prison was pretty cosy. It had five bedrooms and looked out over a forest. It had a friendly dog, a piano, lots of books, the internet. It was the address the government sent my incapacity cheques to. The problem is, the longer you stay in the prison, the less able you are to venture out. The very act of not facing your fears strengthens them.

Agoraphobia is the prison, not the panic.

Which is interesting now I am thinking about it.

One of the hardest pills I had to swallow during recovery was the fact that agoraphobia was something my brain did to me. It was (and is) almost impossible to accept.

Panic attacks, for me at least, were totally physiological phenomena. As un-psychological as a twisted ankle.

I wouldn’t even have to think anxious thoughts. I could be plodding round Sainsbury’s pondering turkey twizzlers when suddenly I’d be awash with the kind of wooziness that strikes you when you’ve had about five pints too many, the room spins and throbs, and you have an urgent need to be sick in a hedge.

You know that feeling. Now stretch it out for an hour and have it ambush you on a plane, in the middle of a meeting, at a picnic. Now imagine that all you had to do to stop this feeling is go home.

It was all bewildering, external nonsense as far as I was concerned.

But recently I’ve thought a little about what was going on when I fell ill. That whole boyfriend/band/social life thing. I was actually quite unhappy. Not in an ‘oh my god, I’m so unhappy!’ sort of way – I don’t do that. What I do is go ‘la la la, oh look a flower’, let the unhappiness flood me in a pervasive subconscious sort of way, and get on with things.

So when it all got too much, and my brain noticed that I was too busy ‘getting on with things’ to do anything about it, it threw a bunch of panic attacks at me and closeted me away from life.

Agoraphobia is the prison, not the panic.

Today you’d be hard-pressed to tell I have anxiety issues. I have ‘bubbly and outgoing’ down to an art form. I have lots of friends and I’m always making more. I’m always on the go.

I’ve just been to Vegas, for fuck’s sake.

But there are little tells, little signs. Melissa Murphy would probably get my number in a minute.

I have lots of friends, but it’s a 50/50 chance whether I’ll respond to their emails or phonecalls, or see them. In fact, one reason I keep making new friends is because – in my flaky, unexplained absences – many of my old n’ gold friendships have dwindled to nodding acquaintanceships.

I have lots of stuff, but I don’t use it. I live in one of the most vibrant cities on the planet, but I mostly confine myself (in that subconscious, oh-I’m-tired-today-I’ll-go-to-the-exhibition-tomorrow sort of way) to my home, my office, my local pub, my local Pret.

Sometimes I become aware that I’m only living about 3% of the life I have, and I make big changes. But I never get them to stick, and I fall back into the rut. I have the world at my fingertips and I’m still wishing my life away.

Agoraphobia is the prison, not the panic.

Agoraphobia is the symptom, not the cause.

A harder pill to swallow is the fact that, after all that hard graft to beat the symptoms, the cause of agoraphobia might still be affecting me in invisible but powerful ways.

I mean, I did all that work and now I don’t even get to rest on my laurels? I have to do more work? You’re joking, The Universe, yeah? You’re having a fucking laugh, right?

But then I think of Rome and Nero. And I think about that old me; that cold-streak-of-willpower me, and how disappointed she’d be to find she’d beat her head against a brick wall for four long years only to pretend to live a full life.

Maybe that’s why I haven’t written the book. Because I still am the fucking book. If it’s taken me six years to realise this, it may take me another six to do something about it.

But all the same, thank you, Melissa Murphy. I didn’t write your book. But I will buy it.

[UPDATE]
A serendipitous link.