Escape Characters

Drowning

Have I mentioned that I have a problem swimming? It's a weird thing.

I remember swimming as a kid. Then, well... it was swimming: it was fun, it was exciting, it was water (something an Alaskan kid rarely encountered). I remember my sister and I taking a swimming class at one point. My sister was a natural, and I was a little behind, but it was fine. The instructor told me, at one point, "You're a bigger guy like me, so you have to really stretch your arms back," saying that I wasn't pinwheeling my arms quite enough during a breaststroke, slowing me down somewhat in the water. However, I had breathing down. (Slowly exhaling) One, two, three, (turn and inhale) breathe! (Slowly exhaling) One, two, three, (turn and inhale) breathe! If I remember, I was the quickest in the class to get it down, and would just cruise around the pool doing that while the instructor helped out the others sucking water when their rhythm was off. It made me happy.

As I grew older I grew out of practice, I guess. I was in a pool maybe once a year (if that). My family would visit places like Arizona or California and the pools would present a challenge as I was not only out of shape for swimming (I don't think hockey and swimming have any overlapping muscle groups),  but also my lungs were trained around aerobic, sprinting types of activities (though really, I wasn't in great shape for most of my childhood and adolescence, even when I was playing hockey). I would get frustrated, tired, and then embarrassed (nothing like a pool to make a chubby kid feel shame), limiting my time in the pool even further.

There was no one, shocking, dramatic point in which I gained my fear of water. There was no accident or close call. It was gradual, such that at some point I realized that even if I wasn't tired or out of breath I would start to panic if I had my head underwater for more than 15 or so seconds. I would come up, sputtering and gasping to get a breath, even though I was in no real danger. I could sit in the shallow end, put my head underwater, and try to wait until my lungs told me I needed air. Again, despite my absolute no need for panic, I would lose my nerve after a few seconds and be involuntarily forced above water by my own thrashing.

The fun, exciting swimming of my youth at some point became the feared swimming.

Don't get me wrong. I can swim, at least, enough not to drown. I can float to survive. I can frog-kick and move myself forward and backwards. But get my head underwater, and the problem starts, and takes an incredible amount of willpower to overcome.

I've acknowledged this as an adult. I don't seek out occasions to swim if I don't have to, but I'll do so on occasion. I've even investigated and experimented with the phenomena. Going to school in Arizona and having a pool every 20 feet, I tried to figure out if it was maybe something unrelated to the act of swimming. I wondered if it was the fact that I couldn't see very well (after swimming with goggles and contacts, it wasn't the case). I wondered if it was poor lung capacity to begin with (after being able to run for 3 miles straight along the canals, it wasn't the case). I tried a lot of things as I floated around the pool in the backyard.

It all came down to the fact that I had a powerful fear of drowning when my head was put underwater.

Last year, attending my family reunion in Hawaii, I discovered that it wasn't even the lack of air that caused the fear. For the first time in my life I had tried snorkeling, cruising around the shallow waters around the public beaches, looking at the coral and fish. I found that even with my snorkel carefully and securely fitted, the waves calm enough so as to never go above the snorkel tube, and considerably less depth of water between me and the bottom than my own height, I would start hyperventilating. Making matters worse, when you breathe too rapidly and too shallow, you end up rebreathing the air inside the snorkel tube, depleting the oxygen in what little air you are breathing, asphyxiating yourself. Because you can't get decent breaths, you start breathing faster and faster, until you finally panic and turn and rip off the snorkel mask, and then your family looks at you weird when you're thrashing around to get a breath in 4 feet of water.

I had come a long way. I forced myself to see some goddamned coral and fish, as I didn't want to come back saying I hadn't done so. But I was only able to stay out for maybe 20 minutes before the extreme anxiety and physical stress it was putting on my body made me worried about over-extending myself and actually being at risk of drowning. I went back, toweled off, and went in search of mai tais.

I bring this up because maybe you feel this way, even just a little bit. And if not about swimming, then maybe something else. I also have a irrational fear of bees, wasps, and more generally flying buzzing insects. And bears, to some degree, but that's a fairly rational fear... bears are terrifying animals.

If you feel this way about something, then maybe you'll understand when I say that this is the closest feeling I know to what agoraphobia feels like. But still not quite. Like drowning, but you're not drowning.

---

You were probably hoping for a better reveal than that. "He doesn't like crowded public places. That is fairly obvious, and perhaps overstated," you might say. My talent for dramatic flair is a little weak on this one, sorry.

Why go so far as to call it agoraphobia, though? Doesn't that just count as being shy, or introverted, or asocial? Not quite. I've known introversion and anti-social tendencies and speaking difficulties all my life. They're known problems, and old friends. I feel this is different. Of course, agoraphobia has an implied severity, like you can see me barricading myself in my house and refusing to leave, watching Star Trek and collecting my pee in jars. That particular behavior is out, considering I leave the house all the time for work, to see friends, family, for lots of reasons. You don't see me having panic attacks when I'm in crowds or in social situations I don't have a lot of control over. In fact, I can't ever remember having something one would classify as a panic attack.

The reason why I go so far to call this "agoraphobia" is because there is a recent and pronounced change in my behavior when it comes to certain situations, even if it doesn't involve panic attacks or jars. And the situations that trigger this behavior change are almost exactly those that define agoraphobia.

Shiny and new on the battlefield of social interaction is the powerful compulsion to leave, wherever I am. Strange and philosophical as it sounds, I can't be comfortable just "being somewhere." Even in familiar places, I have to be somewhere for a reason, I have to have a purpose. For instance, I can't simply go shopping in a store, I have to know what I'm getting at a place. I don't cite this as a male, "I don't like shopping" trope, I'm being literal: it gives me the shivers thinking about going to a store to see what is on sale. I've started getting in the habit of meeting people to eat or drink exactly on time or two to three minutes after the agreed meeting time, for the reason that I can't stand waiting in lobbies and waiting rooms and hallways. And if it's ever the case that I feel like I've completed my task, my activity, or purpose in being somewhere, I start making up reasons why I need to immediately be somewhere else.

(Pro-tip: I am always doing laundry. You put something in, and there's a clock ticking down until those clothes are going to be wrinkled, people. Wrinkled.)

With less people, the effect is negligible... more negligible. With people I know, it's almost unnoticeable. With people I don't, more noticeable. But manageable, if I have something to do. If I'm buying running shoes, checking sizes, trying them on, lacing them up, etc., I become part of the "scene," and I can go about my merry way. If I'm not, and I'm alone, that is when the problems occur. In my mind, I become the obvious animation cell layered over the painted backdrop (think of every time you knew the statue was going to move in Scooby Doo because it was drawn differently than everything else). When I'm resting at the bench atop the hill at Kincaid Park, I feel like I stand out in my bright yellow jacket and need to keep biking down the trail. If I'm not eating cake at a birthday party, I feel like everyone is asking themselves "Why?"

That is how the feeling starts, anyhow, the niggling, paranoid feeling of being noticed. Not sure where or why I picked that up. Maybe I was picked on. Maybe I'm vain to think people always care what I'm doing. Maybe something else, I don't know.

That is just how it starts. And where it ends... it usually just ends driving home after making an excuse to leave, listening to nothing on the radio, wondering about my place on the world. Or biking for hours, happy to be riding, but not happy with any place in particular to stop and rest. Or freezing in a too-thin coat, walking around dimly lit and vacant neighborhood walking trails, too drunk to drive home, too cold to stop, and too afraid to go back inside. Asking themselves, "Why would he come back?"

And so I have to be nowhere. Vacuum, void, while the brain unsticks its high idle and cools down. While I take a few breaths above the surface after thrashing around. One, two, three, breathe...

---

I'll admit, it is convenient to call my problems getting along with people "agoraphobia." It defers the blame to something that is not just my being socially awkward or not taking the requisite effort to participate reasonably in social situations. I could just as well say I don't like to go out because I'm too depressed. Or that I can't focus on conversations because of my ADHD.

I'm trying to be careful in what I'm saying here. I'm not saying "I have agoraphobia." I'm not a doctor, not a psychologist, nor do I have any inclination to be either. I'm not a fan of doctors, but I'm not stupid enough to try to self-diagnose myself for anything. I freely admit that reading a Wikipedia page doesn't make me an expert.

But it does give me ideas. And names for ideas that I've had for a while. And understanding how similar situations affect other people.

I can deal with being afraid of bees. I can get away from them, behind  screen doors and closed windows. And unless I'm wearing bright colors, they quickly grow bored and leave me alone. And there are only so many bees. And I prefer dark colors, anyhow.

I will never be away from people, no matter how compelled I am. Nor do I necessarily want to be, when I'm thinking rationally. I want to be part of society, strange and silly as it is. The parts of my life that make me the happiest are the parts that have to do with society. I just wish a part of me didn't want to walk in the opposite direction.

I shall have to continue to endeavor to see the goddamned coral.