Snow has returned and the world has ground to a halt with it so not a lot doing. I will thought however talk of one incident in particular which I have probably mentioned before in another guise but my memory is not great so here goes anyway. It relates to panic which is after all why I started this blog so I might as well get into it now and again. It started first thing in the morning on this particular day. Guilt gets me up too early to take out the dog at the weekend so I never really get the sleep I need. I got up, dressed and took the dog downstairs only to find no keys. Not a problem. A short note here is that the girls play up sometimes and so my wife hides her keys fearing they may disappear during the night to spite her. I have though told her not to hide mine and I keep them either in my trouser or jacket pocket as a result. This morning they were not there. No keys were there. Panic.
My wife doesn't understand it but she is not alone and I very much doubt many if any do. A good few months ago the same thing happened and my wife could not remember where she had hid both sets of keys. This was a problem. There are two sides to my panic disorder- or possibly three since starting to read that book but I will come to that another day. One part is agoraphobia. I panic far from home and the further from home I go the more I panic. This is the part I had overcome. I had gone well over a couple of hundred miles and stayed away up north for a week a few times. I went from struggling to put the bins out the back in 2006 to doing to Dornoch a couple of years ago which Google Maps tells me is a 4 hour drive 211 miles up the way from home. In doing that I had declared myself cured of agoraphobia as I had no fear of going anywhere. Well sort of. In the car I could have went the length of the country. Not by any other means though because of the other aspect. This other aspect I find hard to describe. This actually developed after the agoraphobia. Its more akin to claustrophobia than anything else but is not that. Its not a fear of small spaces but a fear of being trapped- not being able to leave a situation of my own accord. So this affects lots of things and in that list is public transport so although I could go in the car 211 miles away I could not got go 5 miles away on the bus. I should point out right now the agoraphobia is as bad as ever and I cannot even go 2 miles away in the car. Only by firstly increasing the walks can I overcome this. That is why 2 years ago I could be over 200 miles away with no fear but a few weeks later sitting 2 miles away at the Job Centre trying to contain full blown panic every time I had to sign on which got so bad I had to stop going.
Anyway back to that time before my wife hid the keys and forgot where. I was OK to begin with. The door was chapped and I looked out the window to find a man delivering a parcel. I told him to just leave the parcel on the doorstep. Meanwhile we looked for the keys and could not find them. My wife called a neighbour who thankfully popped out and took the parcel in. Somewhere among all that I started to panic and then it was full blown panic and I was walking from room to room trying to get my head straight. It was horrible. I was in no danger but that feeling of being trapped developed quickly into panic. It was not new. Starting out on the drives it happened every time we came to a stop. I used to dread traffic jams because I knew I would get this with no escape. I cannot describe just what a horrendous feeling this is. So that is why I keept my keys on me at all times and tell my wife to leave my keys alone. This time though she had taken my keys again, hidden them and forgot where. So panic. I had no choice but to wake her and although she could not remember where my keys were she remembered where her own were and with that the panic subsided quickly. I did get my keys back later.
This is the hardest part. This was secondary but has not become the hardest part to shift. When I overcome my agoraphobia a few years ago I did not lay a glove on this aspect. I should explain how that came about. In 2006 I had to drive my wife to hospital. It was just a few miles away but in the next town which I did not know well so was apprehensive about getting lost. The upshot was she went into hospital and out the blue I had a full blown panic attack which scared the life out of me. It was so bad I was severely agoraphobic from that point on. Not only could I not return to pick her up but for the next week I struggled to leave home. Next up it was my parents visiting which should not have been a problem but for whatever reason out the blue indoors I had a big panic attack again. It was so bad I had to make excuses, go to the bedroom, lie on the bed and I basically conked out. It was their voiced in the car park leaving that woke me but I got up groggy and feeling really shaky and weak- it took so much out of me. The same thing happened when they visited and it happened any time anyone visited. It was always the same- I felt trapped. Even when I was able to go out further from home it would happen when stopped talking to someone. It still does.
