Safe

Imagine someone offered you a place where you would be around 95 per cent safe. A place where you would feel warm, safe and protected with several rooms and serenity to read and maybe relax. You would probably at least consider it no? Imagine you take this offer and you are in a place where you feel most safe but you start to realise that this safety comes at a price – your ordinary life. At first it seems like a reasonable trade; a feeling of safety and calm in place of the anxiety you feel outside, you can still communicate with people over the phone or online, you can still have friends even though it is tricky when you can’t go out and about, you can still work online. It all seems a good solution.

Now imagine you start to worry about being misunderstood, that you might lead people on accidentally, that you might offend people, that people may start to dislike you so you only communicate through text, email and Facebook so that you can read and reread your text over and over and over again to make sure that you are clear and non offensive. You start to feel lonely but see this as a side effect of only communicating through text rather than verbally. You start to lose friendships and slowly people start to forget you, to care less and less about you so you start to feel lonelier.

When it comes to shopping for food, you can’t leave your place of safety – that would be unsafe – so someone has to bring food to you. You need to trust this person literally with your life, to keep you both safe so that person ends up being your eyes and ears in the outside world, a source of knowledge that you lap up, desperately asking for morsels of life until they are tired and weary. If you do absolutely have to leave the safe place you want to leave it with as much safety as possible so you go out with the person you trust the most; waiting outside of shops that you are too afraid to go into like a dog being taken for a walk. 

Then, after a while of living in your safe space you start to believe that some areas are unsafe, untouchable and ‘dirty’ so you avoid them. Your safe space gets smaller and smaller until you stay in one place, everyday, communicating online when you can actually pluck up the courage to touch gadgets for communication or get up the courage to talk. Eventually depression takes over; the helplessness you feel is immense and the person that you love is doing everything they can to help while having to see you suffer. Suddenly, this safe place, this haven of safety becomes a prison in which you are bound with fear of no reprieve.

This is precisely what has happened to me and the thing that is my jailor is my own mind. My own brain has created this smaller and smaller space for me to dwell, terrified of the outside world and so unable to remember what I used to be like that I don’t feel that I can go back to myself again. This is my OCD and agoraphobia working deviously with depression to crush my spirit, to remove any kind of hope that I may dare to feel. I have to tell you that it feels like the worst feeling in the world.

If it were someone oppressing me, keeping me down then I could fight back; tell them no, I’m not staying in anymore! But the battle is in my own mind so no matter how much one part of my brain fights for freedom and survival, there is a stronger, darker part of my mind pushing me further and further into despair. It sounds melodramatic but I assure you that this constant struggle in my brain is throttling the life out of my freedom, stopping me from being brave enough to be me again even though I don’t know what ‘me’ is anymore.

It is little surprise that this feeling has built up over years of happiness with my wonderful loving husband as I now have so much to lose. I want to keep what we have safe, to keep him safe to have a chance at joy and happiness. Afraid that anything could remove that chance of happiness from me has ironically robbed me of living a life with him happily. Now our lives revolve around ritual, safety precaution and my constant need for reassurance. So afraid am I that I could ruin such a loving union that I want to freeze time, not allow anything to permeate our happiness. My need to preserve and maintain our happiness is the one thing that is making us miserable.

So how do I fight this? At the moment I am having therapy and doing what I can to minimise the intrusive thoughts from my OCD. Part of me wants to fling the door wide and venture out into the world unencumbered by my brain but it’s not the type of thing I can leave behind so I have only been able to go out with my husband and just three or four times a month. The rest of the time I try and exit my safe place, still hiding behind curtains and doors but for the most part I am still stuck in the dungeon of my OCD addled agoraphobic brain. I worry that I’m losing friends, more and more I find my inbox empty or with few mails other than the usual junk telling me I should buy various things that I don’t need. I worry that if I meet new friends that my friendliness will be mistaken for advances and that the person will be hurt unintentionally and the one thing I can’t bear to do is hurt anyone. I can barely focus on anything for the worry and intrusive thoughts but somewhere beneath it all I am still putting up a fight. 

What is life without risk and possibility of things going wrong? Probably much worse than you thought huh? Barely any life at all. But it is still life and a life that I want to be better. I want safety and no anxiety but life can’t offer that completely and I have to make peace with that. I want a life with my husband and whatever it brings. I just have to get the anxiety sodden part of my brain to see how good it can be.