Creativity for the Agoraphobiac Part One

Agoraphobia is the fear of crowds, being in public spaces, being around strangers, people in general, being in unfamiliar places or away from home. It commonly arises alongside Panic Disorder, a debilitating mental condition where the smallest thing can make you freak out and feel as if you’re about to die.

Anxiety / panic attacks are horrific. Anyone who has ever become suddenly aware of the weirdness of a situation and started to sweat because of realising that weirdness, knows what it means to experience anxiety and panic. Long-term sufferers live with that feeling every day, sometimes in that mild form, other times in such an extreme way, medication is required to sedate them.

I am one of the X million people in the UK who live with Panic Disorder and have developed agoraphobia as a result. I’m going to make a list now, one of my favourite things to do. This list outlines my experiences as an agoraphobiac.

Crowds

The thought of three or more people in one place at one time, near me, makes my stomach shrivel. I rarely venture out at the moment, due to a serious relapse, but if I do, I have to plan my outings and set myself time limits for how long I can stay out for. I do not go beyond my village, a mere half-mile up the road. If people start pouring in, I have to leave. Symptoms include:

•  Sweating
• Dry mouth
• Headache
• Nausea
• Dizziness, light-headedness, feeling faint
• Shortness of breath, sometimes a lack of breathing altogether
• Hyperventilation
• Difficulty swallowing
• Palpitations
• Chest pains
• Sudden bowel movements (hilarious fun…)

There are probably more but I can’t recall them and herein resides another element of my mental health that must be explained before I move on to the next experience.

I dissociate. What that means is that under stressful and / or frightening situations, I disconnect from the experience. It’s not an uncommon thing. Dissociation is a psychological device which enables us to survive traumatic experiences. If you’ve ever been in a nasty accident, experienced a bereavement or even seen a film that’s scared the buckets out of you, you might have a hard time remembering the event and feeling any emotions that would naturally be connected to it. This is our brain’s way of protecting us.

My own life experiences have been traumatic in a consistent enough way to make dissociation a regular defence mechanism so that now it happens naturally. I can’t control it and I don’t know or understand all of my triggers yet. What I do know is that when I have a panic attack, I disconnect. I can’t remember everything that goes on.

Public Spaces

They don’t have to be packed full of people to terrify me. For reasons I don’t understand, I experience spatial and visual glitches. I call it ‘Alice in Wonderland Syndrome’ because either I’ve become really small or everything around me has become monolithic. Even the sense of my own physical body becomes warped. The same list of symptoms applies and more often than not, I leg it and try to find somewhere safe to hide. Mostly I don’t go out at all.

Stranger Danger

Meeting strangers is a nightmare. I remember my first day back on the second year of my MA. Not only was I in a small, public space surrounded by a crowd of people, I didn’t know a single one of them. But I was determined to finish my studies and I set myself a target: make a friend.

Having the willies about strangers doesn’t lend itself to making friends, I can tell you that. What if I make a complete tit of myself? I’m a weirdo anyway; I have a habit of staring, I say inappropriate jokes and statements when nervous, and when I get really wound-up, I start ticking.

Ticks are physical twitches, involuntary movements. Mine are mostly facial but at my worst, I roll my shoulders out-of-place and continuously wipe my thumb and index finger over my brow and nose, one after the other. I fidget, jig my legs, twist my fingers and experience sudden spasms that make me turn my head quickly. I try to calm down but it’s not easy. I make odd noises too. All this in front of people I don’t know, who don’t know me, can become too much to handle.

Public Transport

I hate buses. Trains I can just about cope with. Cars are bearable only in cases where I trust the driver. Recently, all have been off the menu. Simply put, I don’t want to be in a confined space with other people and I certainly dot want to be transported to places where there are other people. I refuse to learn to drive too because I’m terrified I’ll end up getting lost or cause an accident because I dissociate and freak out.

Home Alone

I think I can be left to my own devices at home for around fifty minutes before I start to panic. What if my Dad has had an accident? What if he’s unwell? What if I hurt myself? What if I become sick? There’s no one here to help me.

There are days where I experience nothing. What I mean is, I’m so out of my mind and confused, I can’t work out what the kettle is for. I know I want to make a cup of tea but then I realise that I don’t know what tea is, let alone how to make it.

I can’t account for what happened in any precise way, but I remember wanting to cook some scrambled eggs. I’d not been eating properly and for once, I was hungry. With making a cup of tea being hard enough, I think I must have become disenchanted with the eggs and distracted by something else. I remember the TV, which was turned off at the time, being fascinating.

I returned to the kitchen some time later (I’ve no idea how much time had passed) and noticed that it didn’t smell right. It smelt thick and sort of sweet. There was a hushing sound. I’d turned the large gas ring on, intending to cook those eggs, and walked away without realising what I’d done. I could have blown my home to pieces, myself along with it.

Sweet Dreams

All of the above does not make it easy to relax. I have terrible trouble getting to sleep at night and maintaining that sleep, which is why I’m awake at almost 1:30 am writing this.

Exposure

Newspapers are off the agenda, along with news broadcasts. I have to carefully select any TV material (all apocalyptic material is to be avoided, no exceptions), and when viewing a film or episode of something, I have to make sure that I’m physically aware of my safety. Obviously I don’t go to the cinema or the theatre. A rarely watch TV. The films and shows I do watch can’t contain anything too heavy.

I got into Sherlock recently. The second episode scared me so much, I sat in bed crying for an hour. It wasn’t the hound; it was the setting. The open spaces of the moors juxtaposed with the claustrophobic trap of the research facility. And the tourists. God, the tourists…

Reading fiction also requires vigilance. Certain topics can make me throw the book across the room in terror, and I love books. I’m a bibliophile and proud. But I get so involved with the characters, I forget me and begin to experience them, their world and all the people and spaces, their fears and feelings. It spirals and I have to take a break, ground myself.

It helps to have someone who ‘gets me’ close to hand, when engaging in any TV or reading, for reassurance. To stop me from going off the deep end.

A Deeper Understanding 

It’s not just physical effects that panic and agoraphobia inflict. The mental side of living with these things is hellish.

• Wave goodbye to your self-esteem and confidence
• Say hello to increased periods of depression
• Reality becomes implausible
• Embarrassment makes it hard to seek comfort and advice
• Isolation breeds paranoia
• Mistrust strains relationships
• Fear paralyses efforts to break free
• Confusion erases time and memories

You’re probably feeling as miserable about this as I do now, after reading that. I’ve found however, that even if all of the above is going on and blocking my path to a happy, fulfilled life, I can always find a way around it. And if you’re in the same boat as me, so can you.

My next post, Creativity for the Agoraphobiac, Part Two, will be focused on the creative activities I enjoy but because of my mental health, are restricted. It sounds daunting I know, but I’m going to be finding ways to rediscover the pleasure of these activities without aggravating my fears and making myself sick.

Until then, I’m off to get some much-needed sleep.

Patience

It’s not my strongest virtue. At times I have a hidden store of endless patience on which I can meditate but for the time I don’t have access to this treasure trove, I pace, stubborn and indignant. Frustrated. Irritable.

Come on, I say. Hurry up.

Nothing makes me so impatient as having to wait for books. I order them sometimes on a whim, other times in bulk, to satisfy what Lewis Buzbee describes as ‘book lust’ in his memoirs The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop. Lust always demands satisfaction.

I could swallow my agoraphobia, dose myself on chill-pills and descend upon my local book store but my desire for books often extends beyond their catalogue. Then the paradox comes; I have the patience to search out the best possible deal.

(Note: I do love supporting bookstores but I long for the secondhand store that thrives on people as much as it does profit. Online secondhand stores that donate proceeds to charity are my preferred choice even though they lack that physical, human element. Support your local bookshop, corporate or independent. Imagine the world without them… Disgusting, isn’t it?)

So whilst I’m suspended between contemplating prices for days on end and waiting furiously for days on end for the books to arrive, I find myself thinking about my lack/abundance of patience.

It’s application extends beyond books by the way; I have as much patience for waiting for my root vegetables to sprout as I do waiting for the dentists to send me an appointment; both can take as much time as they need, though for different reasons.

I become devoid of my staying power when cravings are involved. Chocolate for instance, is an insistent addiction. It’s said that waiting five to ten minutes when experiencing a chocolate craving is enough to render it mute but after having waited almost two hours last night, I set upon a long forgotten packet of baking chocolate chips and satisfied myself that way. Not as cathartic as a small square of Lindt, but it put me at ease.

(Note: I didn’t eat all of the chips by the way, just a small handful. They were sickly).

My composure disintegrates when there’s a hole to be filled; knowledge (book lust), sweetness (chocolate), loneliness (friends, letters, phone calls). It’s the expectation, the anticipation of the fulfilment of those desires, all of them base desires, that drive me to twisting my fingers about themselves until their joints are so loose, they disconnect from one another with a gentle tug and then slide back into place.

My grit exists when I expect nothing. I’ve answered a few calls to writing submissions and I’m calmer about this than I am about anything else in my life. Part of it is confidence, part is knowing that there will always be someone better. As long as I have done my best at the time of submission, I have nothing to feel anxious about.

And if I fail to catch the attention of the judges this time, I can revise the works and do my best for the next set of submissions, the effort itself being better than my last attempt because I have learnt more, matured, and am comfortable with perseverance.

I’m patient.

Anger vs. Ah, I shouldn’t have said that…

I say some terrible things a lot of the time. I get irritable and snappy. Frustration; disbelief; confusion; fear.

I’m a cocktail of unrealised self-loathing at the best of times, and then I go and lose my temper, and losing your temper can be roughly translated into:

Becoming so overwhelmed by the awesomeness of your shock and sudden idiocy brought about by said shock, you instantly fail to recognise the people around you as people and thus treat them as objects to be abused in various ways that might include but are not exclusive to screaming, swearing, throwing crockery, punching/slapping, threatening divorce/break-up, guilt-tripping, silent treatment, and degradation of the spirit.

A lot of my unleashed fury is projection; not being in control of my emotional life is distressing and who better to take it out on than the one who happens to be in the wrong place at the perfect time?

It’s their fault that I’m frustrated, it’s their fault that I’m so pissed off and they’re the ones who always bring me down. They’re also the ones who can’t cope in the world, are avoiding their issues and are emotionally stunted in some way or another. They’re also the ones with a shoddy memory, and complicated framework of desire, and an insatiable but aimless thirst for knowledge, propped up by a shoddy memory that barely clings to its unhinged home.

The Blame Game is one of the most successful forms of self-annihilating entertainment of our age. Asides from Cluedo, this addictive battle of apathy hasn’t been exploited to its full potential. Perhaps it’s because the reality is too painful to admit: no one is to blame.

I’ve just finished reading Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? by Jeanette Winterson. She has gone through some very difficult times indeed and has dealt with more anger than I can shake a stick at, but she doesn’t really blame anyone; people have certainly been an influence in the outcome of her life thus far, but she doesn’t resent them for it.

She doesn’t blame her biological mother for giving her up

I don’t mind. I certainly don’t blame her. I think she did the only thing she could do. I was her message in a bottle thrown overboard.

Neither does she blame her adoptive mother, the overpowering Mrs Winterson, for the life that she has lead up to this day

And I do know, really know, that Mrs W gave me what she could too – it was a dark gift but not a useless one.

I try to make the conscious effort to stop myself from blaming others, for projecting my own insecurities onto those I love. It’s not an overnight event. This sort of patience, mindfulness and recognition takes years to achieve. Can I be bothered?

I can. I’ve had enough of fighting and hurt feelings. Those things make you sick.

Anger is nothing more than a pallet of difficult, different coloured emotions. The least I can do is paint a pretty picture with it, and bypass the guilt of opening my stupid, uncontrollable mouth at the same time.

Shocking…

I am totally avoiding a body of writing at the moment.

Lordy it’s been a while since I was here; look at all of this dust. But dust is cool because once you get past the yuck-factor of it being mostly composed of your dead skin, you realise you can write in it. Make smiley faces.

I didn’t do too bad last year, did I? I kept up with this blog at least until I got into a serious relationship with my MA and then forgot my password to the account. It’s taken me about a week to get access again.

I did extremely well on my MA by the way. A distinction. Who would have thought!

For someone who was repeatedly told as a child that I was retarded, that I was never going to amount to anything, that I’d spend my life stacking cans of beans at the Co-op, and then being punished and / or ridiculed for the slightest whiff of intelligent thought, I think I’ve done well.

Fucking brilliant I’d say. And I don’t often swear in my blog. That’s how proud I am. That’s how wrong everyone has ever been about me.

Anyway, that’s enough of my triumphant har-har for the moment.

I don’t think I got round to fulfilling all of my tasks for 2011 and considering it’s now 2012, to hell with them; I have a lot more to be getting on with.

With roughly a third of my novel composed as a draft, it’s time to resume our intense love affair. I took a break after finishing in August, intending to start again in October but ended up falling ill. I guess there’s only so many months I can get away with reasonable health before my exhausted body and unhinged mind find a weak spot and bring me tumbling back to earth with a prolonged and painful thud.

I’m still recovering.

Now is the time of the novel. As such, I won’t be on here as often as I was in my glory days last year, but I will be focusing on my tumblr blog instead. I set this up to act as a companion for my novel as I go through the motions, a place to explore the ideas and techniques specific to this project.

I’m thinking of starting another soon to serve the same function for a Novella I’d like to write but this is all still being thought through very carefully. Updates will be included on here if there are any.

I guess I’ll occasionally return here to rant about something, explore a profound moment or feeling, or reflect on the books that I’ve been reading. I hope none of my followers are disappointed. And yes, I know there are quite a few more of you than when I last looked.

Welcome. I hope you are all well.

For those who have ventured from Tiny Buddha, I will also be making more contributions to the site in the near future, but again with less ferocity as before.

Sometimes it’s nice to take a back seat for a while and concentrate on other things so that you can refresh, find yourself, and prevent the inevitable decay of an over-worked ambition or hobby. I know I’ve mentioned it here before, but I’ll say it again: there’s no need to be ‘on’ all the time, neither is there anything to be gained from being so.

Now. Back to the body of writing that I’m avoiding…

Forget I said anything

I thought I was overdue for a winding, miserable post, so here it is.

I’ve probably said it before but there’s only so much smiling and ‘happy-happy’ I can do before I want to drop the facade and do something out-of-character. A lot of people will tout inner peace and personal responsibility, blah-blah, and so they should. Those things are good. My gripe, the cynic that I am, lies in the obvious problem with this type of thinking.

Inner peace is all fine and dandy but why neglect the world outside of that ‘inner-ness’? I think, no wait – I know – that real happiness comes from not just our attitudes but also from our surrounding circumstances. What good is a warm, cosy feeling in the bottom of your gut when you’re in an unhappy relationship? Does serenity alone really negate constant disappointment?

I suppose it could be said that being in a better state of mind when going through those things helps but how long can they hold for? The environment finds its way in eventually.

I try to adapt. I try to change my circumstances where I can. I put up with the things that I can’t do anything about (at the moment). How long do I have to wait for these things to bear me fruit?

And here’s the emo tag.

I’m without a voice, still, despite everything I’ve done to grow one. But you have a voice here, you say.

And who hears it?

Who listens to me when I express concern, anxiety, frustration, or my desire to do things my way?

Only the people who tell me to smile and do it their way.

But having the attitude I have, I’m optimistic that I’ll break free of all this tripe of my own accord.

Writing and Fear (Part 2)

I can see this becoming a waypoint for all the moments when I shit myself because of what I’m doing.

My next task, probably one of the most important (which makes it all the more terrifying because if I mess this up, the novel caves), is to write a book within the book, not to illustrate the act of writing but to illuminate the act of reading.

My fear of writing this book is a form of transference, I think; an act of rebellion to displace the obligation to write a novel and claim it as mine, my own body of work. So in creating a fictional text that will secretly exist, will in all probability never be read, is a covert move.

I keep seeing a shape in my mind that reminds me of a type of screen saver. I want to say it’s doughnut-shaped but it has no centre or hole that would mark the boundaries of a centre that could be plunged into; it’s not a solid shape but a mass which moves and draws out from itself in a constant motion so that the thread at which it pulls creates an endless folding, a flowing of itself over and over, with no end and no beginning.

To write the novel is to write the book within the novel, the book that is a catalyst, a deference, a plot to avoid (a void?), and to keep hidden a personal motive in its writing; the horror of finding my own reading practices numb, devoid? There’s that void again.

Surface anxieties would present the image of an idiot, a bad reader, a poor thinker, a delusional dreamer. Beneath would be the hermit, the arrogant. How far do I want to go? Deeper?

At my subterranean best, I’m famished. I will risk the daylight to eat. Another part of me, one that I’d want to lock away, is waiting with those blank pages and the chance to write that book. Only that part of me knows what to say.

Writing demands that we connect with things that we don’t understand or know, things that are concealed in the everyday, the things we pay least attention to. The things that sit on the periphery.

Why else would the mundane scare us more than the mysterious?

Writing and Fear

I have nothing to say.

This was a stock phrase I dug out whenever I was scared of having my voice rejected, my thoughts and ideas trashed. Writing is not an easy practice. It’s hard on the brain and body but it’s also hard on the nerves. Writing scares the crap out of me. Why?

What if one day I really do have nothing to say?

I’ve got into the habit of calling myself ‘a writer’ which seemed like a great idea to begin with, only now there’s a need to prove it. Even though I’ve written a healthy number of articles for Tiny Buddha and had a piece of flash fiction displayed at The Horsebridge in Whitstable, I’m still considered ‘unpublished’ and few people take unpublished writers seriously. Unless they’re familiar with writing and publishing, people look disappointed when I tell them that I’m yet to be published. Working on my first literary novel isn’t good enough to illustrate how serious I am, it would seem.

I first encountered my fear of writing when I started my undergrad in Social Sciences. The degree needed me to write and I felt confident that I could, on an academic level at least. My grades for my first year were good but the kick in the privates came when I got my first essay back. The tutors agreed that I needed to learn how to ‘write’ an essay.

My A Levels were all exam-based and I’d never been tutored in essays, or any form of writing for that matter, before them. Getting that essay back made me feel a part of something but at the same time, it made me worry that whatever I committed to paper from then on would be judged and scrutinised.

Fast forward a few years to the first year of my MA Creative Writing degree; I took a wild module and chose a creative approach to an academic question. I wrote to the best of my ability at the time and as dreadful as this sounds, I wrote from the heart. I believed that what I was writing was worth reading.

The feedback from the second marker was bordering on cruel. Each criticism felt like they were there, smacking me in the face as I read. I accepted that my grammar wasn’t of a good standard – I’ve never been taught it after all – but their remarks about my own creative explorations of the question and the material I engaged with were heavy blows.

Now I was scared that my ideas were rubbish and not worth writing about.

I’m pleased to say that I’ve come a long way since then but the fear of writing remains with me. Nothing is worse than sitting down and knowing I have to write and not being able to produce anything, or worse, producing crap.

I lie awake at night wondering if I’m doing the right thing, trying to write this novel. I worry about the holes in my plot. I worry about my narrative drive being more of a narrative sleeping pill. I get scared because I’ve been given the thumbs-up and encouraged, and now all I can think of is failing. What if my writing is a mask and behind it is a sea of nothingness?

What if I have nothing to say? What if what I have to say means nothing?

I’m lucky. Forgive me for being a bit smug here but I’m lucky because I love writing and part of me knows that I have an ability to say the right thing to a reader, enough to make them swoon.

I say ‘writing and fear’ because they go hand-in-hand. They’re made for one another and I wouldn’t have it any other way because writing makes me question my fears about it. I learn from other writers like Chekhov and Tolstoy (and my patient tutor) not to run away from my fear but to walk into it and see what happens.

It’s through fear of writing that I come to understand my processes, the things that make me go back again and again to try harder, try something new.

I didn’t want to be too specific about my fears because that in itself is terrifying; I wanted instead to admit that writing scares me and show that … sometimes it’s okay to be jumpy and not know the right words or idea to make something complete.

A bit like this post. I’ll no doubt revisit this topic again in the future when I can find the courage.

Something a bit different

Because I do love a bit of difference…

Wild red roses will bloom in my mouth

David Miller said something at his Canterbury reading last Wednesday that’s now bugging me: writing / writers are not taken seriously in this country.

For anyone who thinks that knocking out a novel and slapping it on Amazon via Kindle Direct Publishing is the easiest thing ever, think again. Actually, just stop thinking.

Writing requires discipline, dedication and a willingness to learn about your process and the craft. It also needs you to face your flaws and be comfortable with them.

I’m a sucker for detail and this is one of the things that makes my writing unique – my attention to small details, like the weight of paper, the smell of dust in the morning, and things heard but unseen.

This novel is asking me to be more attentive than ever before; I can plot a three-act story but without the detail, those acts might as well be cardboard cut-outs of monthly ‘blockbusters’ that you see decorating Odeon cinemas.

I’m not just talking about pretty pictures in your head as you read. What is the point of detail in an image when the details of your character are missing?

Example:

A character named Jules is sitting on a jetty observing the blue of the sea. I don’t need to conjure the images that could be used to describe this ‘blue’ or the movements of the ocean, you can fill in those gaps for yourself, but let’s say that this blue is the most striking blue that you will ever encounter.

It’s lovely, isn’t it?

But why is Jules there? Why this jetty? What time of day is it? Why are they so captivated by that blue? Why the ocean and not the sky? How long have they been there? Will they ever leave? What will they go home to? Do they have a home? Have they lost something? Have they discovered something?

Are they happy, angry, sad, confused, tired, relaxed, frustrated, or insane? What are they wearing and how are they wearing it? Who do they love? What do they want? How do they plan on getting it?

What’s their job? Do they like it? What side of the bed do they sleep on? Do they sleep clothed or nude? What shampoo do they use? How does that shampoo distract them as they’re trying to smell the sea?

I could go on but you get the point.

It’s these details, and all of the details that I haven’t mentioned or thought of, that make writing what it is: a moment in time, a unique observation.

Without detail those moments become the fast-food of writing: momentarily satisfying in the sunshine but ultimately disappointing and bad for your health.

Paying attention to that type of detail in my own writing is the biggest challenge I face as I try to write this novel. There are a bunch missing in some of the most important places which means that I must put the work in.

That’s where writing becomes serious.

On Deleting

It’s funny that I just deleted the first line of this post, isn’t it? Considering that I’m going to talk about the act of deleting. My first line was going to be:

I’m rereading Our Tragic Universe by Scarlett Thomas

That was until I decided the sentence to be worthy of nothing more than a ‘good for you’ response from my readers (hello friends) and my inner critic (hello you). But the point of opening with this mundane statement was to (deletes words again and again) highlight the similarities between myself and Meg, the main protagonist who can’t seem to get her novel onto the page but has deleted thousands and thousands of words already, and rejected multiple ideas.

I know the feeling.

Everything I have written for this novel so far has been, although not physically, effectively erased. The one-and-a-bit chapters for last term? Quite pointless in the grand scheme of things (which as it turns out, is nothing); so how about the 4,000 – 5,000 words I’ve drafted for this term? Equally pointless.

The plot, which was insufficient in the first place, collapsed weeks ago and today, I deleted all but three factors of it: my main character, her job, her complicated relationship. This has essentially left me with a predictable pile of horse poop. It’s a great candidate for Chick lit don’t you think? Except Mum lit appears to be on the rise so nobody would be interested in my flaccid story anyway.

(Sentence deleted)

Cixous tells us to cut, to know when to cut as we’re writing, and I feel confident when I do it in my own work. There’s something delicious about highlighting 200 – 300 words and making them disappear forever.

My problem is that, like Meg, I don’t have anything to replace those deletions with. Having read the book once already, I’m conscious of the changes and processes Meg goes through in order to begin writing her book; it’s not pretty. Can I afford to go through those changes too? I’d love to but I’m short on time. I need to find my fast forward button or take the literary-creative equivalent of speed to develop enough in time for my next due date.

After laying in a graveyard for a few hours (that will never sound normal), I realised that my problem isn’t plotting but my ability to spawn ideas. I know I should be putting my characters in situations where they have to make relevant and necessary choice, but I suck at figuring out what those situations should be.

I know the desires of my characters well enough but lack the imaginative fertiliser to cause those desire to drive forward and develop the narrative. Or do I?

Considering I’m now left with horse poop after today’s massive cull, perhaps I should let it rot for a short while? Do I have time for that? 5 – 6 weeks says that potentially, yes I have.

Deleting isn’t the worse thing I can do when writing. It’s more likely the best thing I can do when the ideas / plot / characters / writing I do have are weak, uninteresting, and pointless. Effacement is breathing space.

 

Note: This post has been deleted repeatedly.