Can you write about depression and anxiety in the style of Jacob Geller - can you weave personal reflection, historical and artistic analysis, and philosophical inquiry into a narrative structure that is emotionally engaging and intellectually stimulating and give the piece an interesting and quirky title?
"A Room Made of Fog: Wandering the Mind’s Dark Hallways"
I once spent an afternoon staring at a clock that didn’t move. It wasn’t broken. Time, I suppose, was passing just fine, but I felt no connection to it. The second hand crawled, or maybe it stopped altogether; I couldn’t be sure. This is one of the things depression does. It turns even certainty—time, progress, life—into something distant and unreal. Moments collapse into a single, suffocating present, a room with no windows and no exit.
Imagine standing in a room that’s too dim to fully make out the details. You know the walls are there, but you can’t quite see them; there’s a kind of oppressive weight in the air that makes breathing harder, as though the atmosphere itself is dense with uncertainty. You don’t know how long you’ve been there, or how long you’ll stay. It’s the sensation of time stretching on without resolution—an unending present that pulls you in but offers no clear way forward. This room is where depression and anxiety meet. We live in a world that tends to divide emotions into neat categories—sadness, fear, worry, joy—but the mind rarely obeys such tidy rules. Depression and anxiety, often seen as distinct, are in many ways two sides of the same coin. They bleed into one another, creating a haze of distress that is difficult to untangle. For some, depression is the pervasive fog, while anxiety is the panic that pulses in the background; for others, it’s a cycle of back-and-forth—feeling utterly exhausted and overwhelmed by the weight of existence, only to be jolted awake by waves of fearful anticipation.
Depression, like anxiety, warps experience. It takes something so vast and elemental—time, fear, hope—and makes it feel unbearably small, pressing it into the mind until it’s heavy, jagged, and inescapable. Woolf, Styron, Mainländer, Munch—they’ve all stood in this room. Each of them has tried to sketch its outlines, to make sense of its walls. And I have often found myself wandering among their words and images, looking for a map.
The Fog of the Everyday: When the Familiar Becomes Strange
Depression is often described as a fog, but it’s not the kind that drifts gently through a forest. It’s the London smog of 1952, when soot and smoke grew so thick that people couldn’t see their own feet. In less than a week, thousands died of suffocation. Depression suffocates in a similar way—not by attacking outright, but by dulling, darkening, and filling the mind until the world is unrecognizable. You still exist in it, but it’s as though you’re seeing life through warped glass, each shape distorted, every light dimmed.
William Styron’s memoir Darkness Visible offers a harrowing portrayal of depression as a collapse of selfhood, where “the gray drizzle of horror” becomes inescapable. Depression isn’t just a feeling—it’s a state where light, meaning, and sensation drain from existence. The future is not bleak; it’s nonexistent. Styron recounts how the most ordinary things—sunlight, a beloved piece of music—became unbearable weights when he fell into a deep depression.
It’s a common experience: the familiar becoming alien. I remember standing in my kitchen once, staring at the steam rising from a cup of tea, feeling as though I’d never seen anything so strange, so empty, so vacant. The familiar becoming alien in this way is less common. How often do we really see the objects around us? The walls of our rooms, the texture of the ceiling, the corners of a mirror. Not in the casual, passing glance of habit, but with the intensity of a first encounter. Moments like these are fleeting, uninvited, and deeply unsettling. I wonder if it’s a form of dissociation or if it’s something stranger — a glimpse into a deeper reality we’re not meant to linger in.
Art, paradoxically, can illuminate the most desperate forms that this kind of vacancy can take: Edvard Munch’s The Scream isn’t just about terror in the face of some external horror; it’s about the terror that lives within—a figure trapped in the abyss of their own mind. The swirling sky above is a chaos that mirrors anxiety’s endless possibilities, while the bridge and figure below are fixed, unable to escape the soundless howl.
Heidegger spoke of unheimlich, the uncanny — a feeling of something being not quite right. But this isn’t just an abstract philosophical notion. It’s visceral. It’s like walking through a doorway and feeling, just for a second, as though you’ve stepped into someone else’s life, or perhaps your own life, viewed through an impossibly distant lens. Perhaps this sensation of the familiar becoming alien is so unsettling because it's a reminder that the world we move through, the one we build with patterns and routines, is not as stable as it seems. The kitchen, the cup of tea — these are constructs. We give them meaning, imbue them with purpose. But strip that away, even for an instant, and we’re left with the truth: an incomprehensible universe dressed in the illusion of order.
Anxiety as Architecture: The Mind in Overdrive
If depression is fog, anxiety is architecture. It constructs elaborate cathedrals of fear, every pillar a “what if,” every arch a possible disaster — what if I go mad, what if I become bad, or poverty-stricken, what if I do nothing at all — it’s a house of cards built entirely from worst-case scenarios, and even as you try to shore up its walls with logic, you feel it trembling. It’s exhausting. You’re always rebuilding, always running calculations about things that will probably never happen, but might.In The Lonely City, Olivia Laing writes of how isolation feeds this architecture of anxiety. Living alone in New York, she found herself consumed by her own thoughts, each one reinforcing the next, until even the smallest interactions—buying groceries, making eye contact with a stranger—felt monumental, she describes anxiety as a constant hum of dread that transforms even mundane interactions into trials of survival. Anxiety is sticky, persistent. The harder I push, the deeper it sinks its claws. It is a thief of ease. It steals the simple pleasures of the everyday, replacing them with constant vigilance.
Loneliness, she writes, “grows from the outside in,” wrapping itself around your thoughts until it becomes impossible to separate fear from reality.
Anxiety plays with perception itself. Research shows that it impacts working memory, the part of your brain responsible for holding and manipulating information in the short term. It’s why you might find yourself obsessively checking and rechecking the same facts—whether you locked the door, sent the right email, or said the wrong thing three weeks ago. To live with an anxiety disorder is to feel like you might, at any moment, lose your head—misplace your personal belongings, your thoughts, your focus, or even your sense of self. Anxiety gnaws at you from the inside, a slow unravelling of the threads that hold your mind together.
Laing’s reflections are echoed in Munch’s lesser-known painting Anxiety, where a crowd of distorted, hollow-eyed figures huddles together. They stand on the same bridge as The Scream's solitary figure, but their presence doesn’t ease the fear. Anxiety, like depression, is profoundly isolating even in a crowd. It convinces you that connection is dangerous, that reaching out will bring judgment or rejection.
The more you try to not think about something, the more it grips you. The harder you try to control your thoughts, the more they resist. This paradox is captured in the psychological concept of thought suppression. If I tell you not to think of a pink elephant, it’s the first image that springs to mind. For someone with anxiety, the entire world is filled with pink elephants—worries and fears that grow stronger the more you try to push them away.
Time Warped: Depression and the Philosophy of the Absurd
Albert Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus famously explores the absurdity of human existence—the tension between our desire for meaning and a universe that offers none. Yet Camus insists that Sisyphus can be imagined as happy. In his rebellion against the absurd, in his continued pushing despite its futility, there is a kind of defiant freedom. Depression amplifies this absurdity until it becomes unbearable. Sisyphus, condemned to roll his boulder up a hill for eternity, at least has a clear task. Depression steals even that. The boulder becomes a weight you cannot lift, and the hill disappears altogether, leaving you stuck at the bottom with no reason to move. It is Sisyphean, but without even the tragic dignity of the myth; there is no boulder to push, no mountain to climb—only a vast plain where every step sinks us deeper into the ground.
This is where anxiety complicates things. It fills the empty spaces that depression creates, convincing you that you’re not doing enough, that if you just think harder or plan better, you can avoid catastrophe. But there’s no winning against the absurd. It exists beyond strategy.
Time, in depression, is not just repetitive — it becomes untrustworthy. Moments that should feel distinct blur together, and memories dissolve into fog. Psychologists refer to this phenomenon as "temporal distortion," where subjective time slows or stretches in ways that defy the clock. Days feel endless in their monotony, but weeks pass unnoticed.
Time, which once felt linear — a series of moments building toward something — begins to warp. The days stretch endlessly and yet disappear without warning. Hours slip through your fingers like sand, but the weight of each second presses down as though it might last forever. Life becomes a loop, a repetition where each morning feels like waking into the same grey haze, as if existence itself were caught in a perpetual, meaningless cycle. Each loop brings new knowledge, new fragments of understanding, but the loop itself is inescapable. This is the horror and beauty of the absurd: to see the patterns, to know that change is both impossible and inevitable.
Finding Dark in the Light and Light in the Dark: Glimmers of Escape
Why are we so afraid of the dark? It’s a question that has haunted humanity for millennia. The simple answer, of course, is survival. Our ancestors feared what they could not see — the predators lurking just beyond the campfire’s glow. But this explanation, while evolutionarily sound, feels inadequate. What’s in the dark? Is it something? Is it nothing? Darkness is the unknown that cannot be known, the abyss that gazes back. To fear the dark is to fear the limits of our perception, the boundaries of our understanding. It is to confront the fragility of our world — a world we illuminate with light, with knowledge, but one that remains surrounded by an endless, encroaching night. So we keep our lights on. We fill our homes with the hum of electricity, pushing the darkness back. But it waits for us, just beyond the edge of vision. And sometimes when we, metaphorically or in fact, turn off the lights, in that brief, breathless moment before our eyes adjust, we feel it again — the ancient, inescapable fear of dark.
Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar describes depression as living beneath a glass dome, where the air is stale and thoughts are suffocating. But even Plath’s bell jar lifts, however briefly. In moments of clarity, the world reappears—not suddenly bright and perfect, but recognizably alive.
Mary Oliver, in her poem Wild Geese, writes:
“You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.”
Her words are a quiet defiance against the self-punishment anxiety demands. They offer permission to exist as you are, flawed and frightened, but alive nonetheless.
When I read Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, I recognized my own thoughts mirrored in its pages. Woolf’s characters move through bustling city streets, but their minds are consumed by memories, fears, and half-formed ideas. Septimus Warren Smith, a veteran haunted by trauma, feels as though life is slipping away from him even as it surrounds him. His anguish is raw, his mind a battlefield where silence and terror collide. Beneath the weight of his suffering, Woolf’s words remind us how fragile the mind is and how literature can give form to experiences we struggle to express, making us feel a little less alone.
Woolf, who herself battled lifelong mental illness, described her own experience of depression as heavy, impossible to escape, yet horrifyingly mundane, a darkness lying in a spoon. The waves of her prose often reflect how depression blurs time into a single, continuous moment, while anxiety fractures it into infinite, catastrophic possibilities. David Foster Wallace, in his famous Kenyon College commencement speech, described the mind as “an excellent servant but a terrible master.” In Infinite Jest, his depiction of “predator grade depression” as “the Great White Shark of pain” is as visceral as it is inescapable. The novel is filled with characters who loop endlessly through their thoughts, caught in a feedback system where every attempt to think their way out only deepens the trap. This is the cruel trick of both depression and anxiety: they masquerade as rational processes, convincing you that if you just analyze enough, you can find a way through.
But the labyrinth has no exit. Depression tells you there’s no point in trying. Anxiety insists you haven’t tried hard enough.
Philipp Mainländer occupies a distinctive place in the history of philosophy as one of the most radical pessimists. Building on the works of Arthur Schopenhauer, Mainländer offered a vision of existence driven by suffering and decline, culminating in his concept of the will to death and a unique blend of metaphysical pessimism and ethical compassion. His philosophy, characterized by a tragic cosmology and a commitment to solidarity among individuals, provides a compelling yet sombre perspective on life’s meaning.
Philosophically, depression aligns with what Mainländer described as the truth of existence’s tragic core. Yet where he saw metaphysical redemption in the return to nothingness, depression offers no such resolution. It is instead an unfinished story, a narrative in which the protagonist remains trapped, unable to escape the looping script of failure, fatigue, and futile longing for escape.
Mainländer spoke of compassion as the highest ethical response to suffering—an act of solidarity that acknowledges the shared weight of existence. Depression, too, demands solidarity, but not the superficial gestures of comfort that attempt to fix or explain away the pain. True solidarity with those in the grip of depression is to sit in the darkness with them—to resist the impulse to offer light prematurely, and instead to recognize the vast, empty space they inhabit. This is not the hope of easy answers or happy endings, but the quiet, persistent hope that moments of connection, however fleeting, matter. Mainländer’s philosophy ends with the dissolution of existence itself, but we do not live in metaphysical abstractions.
In a culture that values productivity, progress, and self-sufficiency, depression and anxiety thrive in the cracks. There’s the silence of depression, which isolates you in a world where everything feels out of reach, and the silence of anxiety, which keeps you from connection and compassion, afraid that revealing your inner turmoil will make it worse. Both create a sense of disconnection, as though you are not quite part of the world around you. Depression makes you feel invisible, while anxiety makes you afraid of being seen at all.
This is compounded by the way our culture tends to romanticize the idea of mental illness. “The tortured artist,” the “deep thinker” who struggles with existential darkness—these images make it easier to internalize suffering, to believe that there is something noble or even productive in your pain. But it also distorts the reality of depression and anxiety, suggesting that the pain is something to be endured in silence or even celebrated. This dichotomy between social narratives and lived experience creates a subtle tension, where the person suffering is expected to function as they once did, even when the very tools of functionality—motivation, clarity of thought, focus—seem beyond their grasp.
And yet, although art doesn’t offer easy solutions to depression and anxiety—it can’t fix the mind’s labyrinth or clear the fog—it does offer reminders that the human experience is vast and varied, these creations reflect the complexities of the inner world, offering a sense of resonance, of solidarity in the shared struggle. It does offer a kind of companionship, a reminder that the room you’re trapped in isn’t entirely yours. Others have been there. Others have mapped its contours. And sometimes, in their words, their paintings, their music, you find a crack in the wall, a sliver of light that reminds you the fog isn’t always forever.
It’s strange, isn’t it? How we can be so utterly alone and yet so profoundly connected by our loneliness. In this way, knowledge and art becomes a lifeline, not by pulling us out of the dark, but by teaching us how to sit with it—how to feel its weight without being crushed. It offers an acknowledgment that there is meaning in the struggle itself, that there is a glimmer of connection, of understanding. The clock still ticks, whether we see it or not. And sometimes, as circumstances dictate, even in the stillest moments, that sound carries us forward.
ChatGPT said:
Yes, I must clarify: the attribution of the metaphor "a darkness…lying in a spoon" to Virginia Woolf is not a genuine quotation from her works. If I used such a phrase without verification, it would be inaccurate and should not be presented as a real quote.
Panic: The Body’s Betrayal
When a panic attack strikes, it often arrives as a tidal wave without warning, flooding every corner of the mind. It is not just a rush of fear; it is a biological mutiny where adrenaline forces the heart into a gallop, breath turns shallow, and the body tightens in preparation for a threat that seems to exist nowhere except within the mind’s storm. The brain, in its desperate attempt to protect, ignites a fire that consumes rationality.
There’s a moment in panic—a terrible, shattering moment—where the world becomes too loud and too quiet at once. The air seems thinner, and the ground beneath your feet feels unstable, as if it might dissolve. And then, as if someone flicked a switch, you’re not quite here anymore. Or rather, you are, but the “you” observing the moment isn’t the same “you” experiencing it.
This is derealisation and depersonalisation: two sides of a coin minted in the the same dreadful forge. For some, it lasts only a moment; for others, it stretches into a strange eternity. The world looks wrong, as though you’re peering at it through glass that’s warped ever so slightly. Familiar faces seem like uncanny imitations, and your own reflection feels like a stranger locked in a staring contest with you. It’s panic’s most cunning trick—a vanishing act, but you’re both the magician and the disappearing object.
The Invisible Prison of Perception
Perhaps the most unsettling aspect is the awareness of the condition itself—unlike a psychotic break, derealisation and depersonalisation do not involve a complete loss of insight. Those experiencing it often know, logically, that nothing is truly wrong with the external world—and yet they cannot shake the visceral certainty that everything is wrong. The paradox of being both aware and powerless is uniquely cruel, leaving sufferers trapped in a liminal space between reality and illusion.
I experienced it for the first time in a brightly lit grocery aisle. I was a young child, holding a box of something in my hand, when it happened. One moment, I was preoccupied with a trivial thought; the next, it was as though the space around me peeled away, leaving me suspended in a realm that was almost—but not quite—real. I stared at the item in my hand, aware that I was holding it but unable to convince myself it belonged to my reality. I wanted to scream but wasn’t entirely sure if my voice would make it out of my throat.
Years later, I learned that the philosopher Martin Heidegger had a term for this: unheimlich, or “uncanny.” It’s that bone-deep discomfort when the familiar becomes estranged, when the objects and experiences that ground us suddenly seem hostile in their indifference. Heidegger tied this to the human condition, to the constant undercurrent of anxiety we feel when confronted with the raw fact of existence. But to a panicked child gripping a box of cereal, this philosophical framing would not have been much comfort.
Yet the uncanniness wasn’t new. I had glimpsed its shadow in art, in films that linger in the fissures of your mind. Consider the paintings of René Magritte, where ordinary objects—an apple, a man in a bowler hat—become impossibly alien. Or David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive, which turns familiar streets into fever dreams. The protagonist, Betty Elms, wanders through a Hollywood dreamscape where time loses its meaning, identity becomes fluid, and the boundaries between memory and fantasy are porous. The town seems to shift, parts of it feel almost too real, while others are cold and clinical, like a set. This duality—at once present and distant—evokes the feeling of being trapped in a world that is simultaneously yours and not yours. The self feels absent, lost, a fleeting shadow that may not even be real.
This feeling is echoed in the feverish, spiralling narratives of writers like Haruki Murakami, whose characters often find themselves in increasingly strange and alienating situations. In The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, the protagonist, Toru Okada, searches for his missing wife, Kumiko, only to find himself drawn deeper into a labyrinthine world where time, space, and identity lose all meaning. Like the disorienting shifts in reality that accompany depersonalization, his journey is one of endless uncertainty, where the ordinary becomes unreal, and the boundaries between the self and the world fall apart. As his search goes on, the panic he feels is not just emotional—it’s also undeniably philosophical. The fear is not of what is unknown, but of what has been known and is no longer familiar.
What these works capture, I think, is the emotional geography of derealisation: a place where everything looks real enough to fool your eyes but feels utterly wrong at the level of affect.
It begins with a flutter—a small, inexplicable shift deep in your chest. A thrum, a quiver, as though some unseen mechanism has just started to spin wildly out of control. You feel it before you can name it. The world remains unchanged, but something inside—your heartbeat, your breath, your sense of self—has been knocked askew. This is how a panic attack arrives: quietly, suddenly, and all at once. A sensation without warning that quickly blossoms into something monstrous.
What makes a panic attack so terrifying is its betrayal of trust. For example, the trust that your body knows how to breathe. That the air around you is safe and plentiful. And yet, in the midst of a panic attack, these certainties do not feel real. Breathing becomes a labour. Your chest constricts into a prison of flesh and bone. Time itself seems to break apart into disjointed fragments—seconds stretching into infinity, a perpetual now where relief feels impossible.
The threat is invisible, but it is everywhere—in your breath, your heart, your body. And perhaps that’s what makes panic so uniquely horrifying: it turns the most intimate parts of ourselves into something alien. It is not simply fear. It is a rupture in the foundation of being, where the very mechanisms that sustain life become the source of terror. And you, the inhabitant of this fragile body, are left adrift—gasping for breath, waiting for the storm to pass, hoping that, this time, it will.
The unnamed protagonist of H.P. Lovecraft’s The Shadow Over Innsmouth experiences mounting dread as he finds himself hunted by grotesque, amphibious creatures in a decaying seaside town. The suffocating weight of claustrophobia grows with every paragraph as he scrambles through darkened corridors and narrow alleys, his breath quickening, his chest tightening, his mind racing toward the inevitable. The true terror here isn’t just the creatures themselves—it’s the sensation that there is no escape, no air, no way to calm the body’s frantic descent into chaos.
Panic builds in layers: fear of the unknown, fear of repetition, fear of your own helplessness, this disorienting collapse of control is rendered with eerie precision in Lars von Trier’s Melancholia. Early in the film, Justine stumbles through her own wedding, suffocating under the weight of expectations and joy that she cannot inhabit. The world around her is bright and beautiful, full of life and warmth and yet, she is drowning. The camera lingers on her empty stares, her trembling hands—possible signs of a panic attacks onset—and on her slow, almost imperceptible retreat from reality. Panic, in this moment, isn’t loud or explosive—it’s suffocatingly quiet. Von Trier captures the horror of feeling disconnected from your own life, watching yourself from a distance as though you were a ghost haunting your own body. Her depression becomes increasingly evident, a black hole of feeling that pulls her inward until there is nothing left but a numb, hollow centre.
The Horror of Uncertainty
There is a haunting quality to derealisation and depersonalisation that goes beyond mere anxiety or fear—a feeling that something foundational has cracked. We rely on a consistent, intuitive sense of reality to navigate our lives, but these experiences shatter that trust. They introduce doubt into the most basic assumption: that what we see and feel feels real.
Panic sharpens the experience, transforms it into something almost mythic. The body’s fight-or-flight response triggers a cascade of adrenaline, but when there’s no tiger to outrun, the mind turns inward. The result is a feedback loop: panic feeds derealisation, which in turn deepens the panic. The world retreats further into abstraction, and you begin to question whether you’ve ever really been present at all.
This question—the one about presence, about reality—is where depersonalisation enters. If derealisation is the sense that the world has become unreal, depersonalisation is the creeping suspicion that you have. In this state, your own thoughts can feel distant, like echoes in an empty cavern. It’s both deeply unsettling and oddly profound—a confrontation with the sheer strangeness of being alive.
In exploring this strangeness, I often return to the works of writers like Franz Kafka. His characters move through worlds that are uncaring, arbitrary, and dreamlike—worlds that mirror the experience of a mind unmoored. In The Metamorphosis, Gregor Samsa wakes to find himself transformed into a giant insect, but what’s most horrifying isn’t his physical change; it’s his family’s cold, pragmatic detachment. Kafka captures the terror of being both subject and observer, of seeing yourself and your life from the outside and finding it alien.
But there’s another side to this. What if derealisation and depersonalisation aren’t merely symptoms of disorder but clues to something deeper? What if these experiences strip away the comforting illusions we construct about the self and the world. In their place, we are left with a raw, less filtered truth: these moments remind me that the world is a fragile construction, a theatre of light and sound that we agree to call “real.” They urge me to pay attention, to anchor myself in the sensations of the present—whether it’s the texture of fabric between my fingers, the scent of rain on pavement, or the rhythm of my own breath.
Conclusion: Living in the Echo
To live with derealisation, depersonalisation, and panic is to inhabit a world of echoes. The echoes are distorted versions of familiar sounds: joy, safety, connection. When these conditions arise, they obscure the simple act of being. And yet, there is something profoundly human in the attempt to describe these experiences—in giving language to the unspeakable and meaning to the disappearance of meaning. So perhaps derealisation isn’t just a symptom of panic but a window. A window through which we glimpse the strangeness of existence, the slipperiness of identity, and the infinite, ungraspable complexity of being. It’s terrifying, yes, but it’s also a kind of marvel. After all, how often do we get to stand on the edge of the known and peer into the endless unknown?
Agoraphobia: A Quiet War Between the Self and the World
There’s a peculiar, silent battle that takes place within the mind, where the world outside becomes an enemy, or at least, a place of immense discomfort. Agoraphobia is often misunderstood, casually reduced to a simple fear of open spaces or crowded places. But it is much more than that; it is a collapse of the self in relation to the world. It is not simply the dread of stepping outside, but the existential weight of stepping into a space that seems alien, unreachable, and indifferent to one's own being.
I have often wondered about the paradox of agoraphobia, how it can arise in a world so vast, so full of potential for freedom and exploration, yet feel more like a prison than an open field. The very act of leaving the threshold of safety, can feel like a breach of some internal agreement—an unspoken promise to remain within familiar borders. But these borders, once comforting, begin to asphyxiate. The room that once served as sanctuary becomes a tomb of sorts, and stepping out of it feels not like liberation, but like betrayal.
What is it about the outside world that becomes so terrifying? It's not just the people, the noise, the unpredictability—it’s the sense of being unmoored, detached from any solid ground. The world becomes a vast, sprawling expanse that seems indifferent to the individual. It is a world of endless movement, a world that demands constant participation, constant engagement, a world that is ever-changing, yet somehow indifferent. To step out into it is to encounter a kind of exposure, not just to physical elements, but to something deeper, a vulnerability of being that extends beyond the realm of the physical.
Panic at the Edge of the World
There is a moment, just before it happens, when you can feel the panic begin to uncoil inside you. It starts as something small, almost imperceptible—a flicker in the nervous system, a premonition. The body is alert before the mind understands why. And then, suddenly, it is everywhere. The heart slams against the ribs. The world tilts. The walls stretch and warp, or if you are outside, the horizon rushes away from you, the sky suddenly impossibly vast, a drowning space. The body is no longer your own.
To live with agoraphobia is to know this moment too well. It is to live in fear of the spaces where panic has struck before, where it might strike again. It is to fear not just the space itself, but the unbearable knowledge that there might be no easy escape. The grocery store aisle that suddenly seems endless, the highway that stretches on without an exit, the movie theater seat in the middle of the row, where you’d have to squeeze past all those strangers if you needed to leave. The world becomes a map of potential traps, each street and building annotated not by its function or beauty, but by the silent, desperate question: How would I get out?
Agoraphobia is often mischaracterized as a fear of open spaces, but it is not space itself that terrifies. It is the potential for being stuck within it, for being consumed by it, for being trapped inside a body that has already betrayed you. It is the memory of past panic layered onto the present, thickening the air with a sense of impending collapse. The person with agoraphobia is not necessarily afraid of the mall, the bus, the concert hall, the park—but they are afraid of what might happen to them there, of what has happened before.
Agoraphobia does not merely shrink one's movements; it redraws the geography of one's existence. The mind builds invisible walls around the body, marking boundaries that must not be crossed. First, the far-off places become impossible—the long drives, the unfamiliar cities. Then the places that were once routine: the store, the café, the friend’s house. Eventually, even stepping outside becomes an act of negotiation. The front door itself becomes a threshold not easily crossed, because what lies beyond it is an ungovernable world, a world with no exit.
Agoraphobia, in this sense, is not merely a psychological condition; it is a profound crisis of selfhood. It forces us to confront the limits of our control, our ability to define our own space within the world. It’s a quiet kind of revolt, a refusal to engage with the world on its own terms. In a culture that prizes movement, progress, and engagement, agoraphobia becomes a form of resistance—an unwillingness to submit to the incessant pull of an external world that demands more than the self is willing to give.
But this resistance is not empowering. It is not liberating. It is isolating. The refusal to step out into the world only deepens the sense of alienation, drawing the self further inward, until the boundaries of the home—the walls, the floor, the ceiling—become the only known constants, the only things that offer a sense of security. And yet, there is no true peace here, either. The mind, once freed from the external chaos, begins to spiral inward, turning against itself. The walls of the room are no longer protective; they are confining, suffocating. The very act of containment becomes a form of violence, a restriction of the self that can never be undone.
This tension between the desire for freedom and the need for safety is reflected in art. So often, artists explore themes of isolation, the space between the self and the world, and the fragility of the human condition. Take, for instance, the works of Edward Hopper. His paintings, with their stark isolation and vacant spaces, capture the sense of detachment that pervades modern life. In paintings like Nighthawks, the figures are boxed in, framed by the cold, sterile windows of a diner. There is no escape, no movement. The characters in his work appear as if they have been frozen in time, stuck in a moment that has no resolution. The spaces they inhabit—quiet, lonely, and empty—speak to the psychological isolation that so many people feel, and perhaps, to the crushing weight of agoraphobia itself.
But unlike Hopper’s characters, the person with agoraphobia does not find themselves comfortably inside those spaces. Instead, they feel trapped within them. The walls, the windows, the doorways—all these elements that would normally represent boundaries between safety and danger, between the known and the unknown, become insurmountable obstacles. The outside world, once an endless array of potential, becomes a source of anxiety. It no longer represents freedom; it is a vast, unknowable entity, constantly shifting and threatening to overwhelm.
This shrinking, this slow retreat inward, is not a conscious choice. It is a war between the rational and the animal. The rational mind knows that the café, the movie theater, the grocery store are not dangerous. The rational mind knows that panic, though it feels like dying, is not actually dying. But the body has its own memory, its own logic. Once panic has attached itself to a place, the body does not forget. It keeps a record of every disaster, every moment of breathlessness and vertigo, every time the walls closed in or the sky became too large.
And so, the world becomes smaller. The geography of safety shrinks until, in the worst moments, the only safe place left is home. Or, more precisely, the only safe place is a room within the home, a corner within the room, the space where one can press their back against the wall and feel something solid, something unmoving. But home, too, begins to suffocate. The same walls that protect also imprison. There is no true peace in avoidance—only a different kind of panic, a quiet, slow-burning dread that comes from knowing that the walls are closing in, that there is less and less space left to retreat to.
This is why the experience of agoraphobia is not just about fear; it is about paradox. It is the need for escape coupled with the terror of leaving. It is a body that demands both distance and safety, both retreat and motion. It is the mind’s desperate attempt to reconcile the irreconcilable.
We see echoes of this in art. Hopper’s figures, forever staring out windows, forever frozen in the quiet agony of separation. Francis Bacon’s twisted, screaming forms, bodies trapped within invisible boxes of torment. In many ways, agoraphobia mirrors the broader cultural malaise of our time. We live in a world that increasingly demands more of us: more productivity, more engagement, more presence. The external world presses upon us from all directions, and it is easy to become overwhelmed. We are expected to be everywhere, to be constantly performing, to be connected. The noise of modern life—social media, the 24-hour news cycle, the relentless march of capitalism—makes it nearly impossible to find space for oneself. There is no quiet, no solitude, no time to simply be.
Agoraphobia, then, can be seen as a rejection of this relentless demand. It is not a retreat from life, but a withdrawal into oneself in response to the overwhelming noise of the world. In this way, it is a symptom of something larger: the fragility of the modern self in an age of constant exposure. It is a manifestation of a deeper inability to step outside of the self, to engage with a world that no longer feels like home.
And yet, this withdrawal into oneself is not a solution. It is a dead end. The mind, trapped in its own labyrinth, begins to deteriorate, unraveling in the absence of external engagement. It becomes a cycle, a feedback loop that deepens the isolation and anxiety, creating a barrier that feels as insurmountable as any physical wall.
These are not works about agoraphobia, specifically, but they are works about the uneasy relationship between self and space, about the ways in which our internal states shape the world around us. They remind us that entrapment is not always physical. Sometimes, the cage is the body. Sometimes, the bars are the nervous system.
To live with agoraphobia is to exist at the edge of the world, not in the geographical sense, but in the existential one. It is to wake up every day and ask: How far can I go today? It is to know that the answer might change without warning. Some days, the world is wide enough. Other days, it is the size of a single room.
Finding a Way to Move Even When Fear Says, Stay Still
And yet, despite all this, there is something profound about the way agoraphobia forces us to reckon with space, with our relationship to it, with the ways in which the world moves through us as much as we move through it. It asks us to consider not just how we move through the world, but why some spaces feel open while others feel impossibly closed. It asks us to confront the limits of control, to sit with the knowledge that certainty is an illusion, that panic is a teacher as much as it is a tormentor. Perhaps the most tragic aspect of agoraphobia is that it forces us to confront the limits of our own existence.
It reminds us of the fragility of being, the tenuous nature of our relationship with the world around us. To step outside, to engage with the world, requires not just courage, but the ability to accept the uncertainty and vulnerability that comes with it. It is an act of surrender—not to the world itself, but to the process of living. The world outside may be vast and unforgiving, but it is also where we find meaning, where we make contact with the other, where we move from the confines of the self into something greater.
The challenge, then, is to find a way to reconcile the world outside with the world inside. It is not about escaping, but about returning to life, despite the overwhelming noise, the chaos, the uncertainty. It is about learning to live in the tension between self and world, between safety and exposure, between the familiar and the unknown, in this way, agoraphobia is not just a psychological condition—it is a meditation on the human condition itself.
Here’s an essay inspired by the reflective, thoughtful style of Jacob Geller, titled Fear of Pinecones.
Fear of Pinecones
Pinecones are everywhere — innocuous, familiar objects that we pass without a second thought. They litter forest floors, roll into the gutters of suburban streets, and decorate wreaths in December. We think of them as harmless emblems of nature’s bounty, symbols of trees and growth and time. And yet, for some, there is something unsettling about them, a quiet, gnawing discomfort that defies explanation.
There’s even a name for it: pteronophobia, an irrational fear of objects that resemble the texture of pinecones. It’s not widely discussed. Unlike the terror inspired by spiders or heights, the fear of pinecones seems strange, absurd. But that absurdity is part of its power. Pinecones — textured, symmetrical, rigid yet organic — occupy an uncanny space between the familiar and the alien. They feel wrong.
Look closely at a pinecone. Really look. Its structure is fractal-like, repeating patterns that spiral into complexity. The scales, layered upon one another in Fibonacci perfection, are sharp-edged, like teeth or claws. The more you stare, the less it resembles the comforting object you once thought you knew. It begins to feel like something ancient, something alive — not a seed-bearing vessel, but a mouth, a clawed hand, or an eye.
This kind of fear — a fear rooted in form, texture, and biological memory — is connected to trypophobia, the fear of clustered holes or repetitive patterns. There’s no immediate threat. No predator lurks behind the pinecone’s scales. But still, your skin crawls. It’s the kind of fear that bypasses rationality, the deep and wordless response of a brain that senses danger without knowing why.
What is it about certain patterns that disturbs us? Why do the symmetrical ridges of a pinecone, or the clustered seeds of a lotus pod, evoke such visceral discomfort? Some theories suggest an evolutionary origin — that these patterns mimic warning signs found in venomous creatures or diseased skin. Others point to the dissonance between regularity and chaos, the way that perfectly repeating forms can feel almost too orderly, too constructed, too inhuman.
In art and media, this kind of discomfort is a powerful tool. The works of H.R. Giger — whose designs for Alien made terror into flesh — are filled with forms that echo organic repetition. The creature’s exoskeleton, its nested jaws, and its textured ridges are unsettling not because of their size or strength, but because they are almost recognisable. The alien is terrifying precisely because it feels like something we’ve seen before, somewhere deep in the shadows of memory.
Pinecones, too, evoke a kind of ancient memory. They are among the oldest reproductive structures in nature, predating flowers by millions of years. The spiral pattern of their scales follows the same mathematical principles that govern the arrangement of galaxies and hurricanes. In this way, a pinecone is a microcosm of the universe itself — a reminder that the smallest things contain echoes of the vast and unknowable.
And perhaps that’s why they can feel so unsettling. To hold a pinecone is to hold something ancient, something that stretches back beyond human history. Its rigid scales hide secrets, its spirals draw your gaze inward, and suddenly, it’s no longer just an object. It’s a symbol of time, growth, and entropy. A reminder that nature, for all its beauty, is also strange and indifferent.
So, fear the pinecone if you must. Fear its texture, its spirals, its claw-like symmetry. Fear it as an emblem of the uncanny, the unknowable, the absurd. Because even in its stillness, a pinecone reminds us that nature is far stranger — and far more frightening — than we dare to imagine.
Social anxiety feels like being sealed off from the world inside an invisible pressurized suit, observing from a distance but never quite participating. It’s an estrangement that becomes self-reinforcing, where every human interaction carries the weight of potential misstep, failure, or worse—embarrassment so acute it might as well be mortal. You’re in the room, but you’re not in the room.
When people talk about social anxiety, they tend to focus on fear. The quivering voice, the sweaty palms, the way your pulse quickens when you think about saying the wrong thing at a party or misreading someone’s expression in a work meeting. But fear is just the surface. The deeper, weirder truth about social anxiety is that it’s a split. You’re never fully yourself. There’s you—what people see, the words that come out of your mouth, the gestures you perform—and then there’s the other you, the one watching all of this from somewhere off to the side, dissecting every moment in real time.
This disconnection is a kind of science fiction in itself. Imagine walking into a room and splitting into two versions of yourself: one flesh and blood, smiling awkwardly, introducing themselves; the other floating above the scene, a ghost made of doubt and overanalysis. I think of China Miéville’s Embassytown, a novel about an alien species called the Ariekei who cannot lie—or rather, cannot use language in any way that doesn’t exactly correspond to immediate reality. They speak with two voices at once, each complementing the other, their meaning a synthesis of sound and intent. When humans introduce lies into the Ariekei’s language, it breaks them. They begin to fracture, their dual voices splitting apart. That’s what social anxiety feels like: trying to speak in two voices, trying to maintain an impossible unity between the self you present and the self you feel, and failing.
What’s fascinating—and horrifying—about this split is how it erodes the boundaries of identity. When I’m in a crowded room and the anxiety flares up, I start thinking less about what I’m saying and more about what they think I’m saying. My own thoughts dissolve into this secondhand version of myself that lives entirely in the heads of others. I become not a person but a projection, an idea shaped by social cues, judgments, and assumptions I can never fully control. It’s a hall of mirrors: their perception of me, my perception of their perception, infinitely recursive.
In John Brunner’s The Shockwave Rider, there’s a subplot about a computer virus so subtle that its effects are psychological, rather than technological. It doesn’t crash systems or erase data; instead, it causes paranoia, forcing people to question whether their thoughts and actions are still their own. Social anxiety is like that. It’s not just a feeling of unease—it’s the slow, creeping suspicion that the very act of being yourself in public is somehow fraudulent, that everyone else knows the script and you’re just fumbling through the stage directions.
And yet, there’s a strange intimacy in anxiety. It’s isolating, yes, but it’s also a constant reminder that you are visible. Sometimes this awareness is crushing, like trying to breathe underwater. Other times, it feels almost… tender. Because buried inside the fear is the undeniable fact that you are not invisible. There’s something profoundly human about wanting so badly to get it right, to connect, to be seen and understood—even when the process of trying feels like walking a tightrope over a pit of your own insecurities.
I think about Octavia Butler’s Dawn, where the protagonist Lilith is tasked with introducing humanity to a new species—the Oankali, alien beings who manipulate genetic material the way we manipulate language. Lilith’s role is inherently social: to mediate, to explain, to bridge the gap between the alien and the human. But the cost is her own alienation. The more she interacts with the Oankali, the less human she feels. Social anxiety often works this way. The act of interacting pulls you out of yourself. You become fluent in the language of others, but only by erasing pieces of your own identity in the process.
So what’s the solution? How do you learn to breathe in an atmosphere that feels hostile to your very being? Maybe the way forward is to learn to live inside it, to accept that the ghost is part of you. To have social anxiety is to be constantly split between the self you are and the self you fear you’ll be. But maybe this split is not a flaw. Maybe it’s a form of survival. After all, to navigate a world built on performance and perception is to constantly adapt, to shift, to split and re-split as necessary. And maybe, just maybe, those of us who speak in two voices, who watch from the sidelines even as we participate, are better equipped to notice what others miss.
In the style of Jacob Geller can you continue writing the following paragraph: "It’s a common experience: the familiar becoming alien. I remember standing in my kitchen once, staring at the steam rising from a cup of tea, feeling as though I’d never seen anything so strange, so empty, so vacant. The familiar becoming alien in this way is less common."
ChatGPT said:
Certainly! Here's a continuation inspired by Jacob Geller's thoughtful, reflective style:
It’s a common experience: the familiar becoming alien. I remember standing in my kitchen once, staring at the steam rising from a cup of tea, feeling as though I’d never seen anything so strange, so empty, so vacant. The familiar becoming alien in this way is less common. But when it happens, it’s as though the mundane, the everyday, is suddenly peeled back to reveal its hollowness, its absurdity.Think about it — how often do we really see the objects around us? The walls of our rooms, the texture of the ceiling, the corners of a mirror. Not in the casual, passing glance of habit, but with the intensity of a first encounter. Moments like these are fleeting, uninvited, and deeply unsettling. They creep in when we least expect them: in the stillness of late-night solitude, in the pause between one breath and the next.
I wonder if it’s a form of dissociation or if it’s something stranger — a glimpse into a deeper reality we’re not meant to linger in. Heidegger spoke of unheimlich, the uncanny — a feeling of something being not quite right. But this isn’t just an abstract philosophical notion. It’s visceral. It’s like walking through a doorway and feeling, just for a second, as though you’ve stepped into someone else’s life, or perhaps your own life, viewed through an impossibly distant lens.
These moments remind me of video games — particularly the kind where you find yourself in a world that seems familiar at first, only for its logic to dissolve as you explore. Games like Control or Antichamber, where the architecture bends in ways that defy expectation, turning hallways into loops and doors into impossibilities. They exploit that same feeling: the horror and fascination of a world that is almost, but not quite, your own.
And perhaps that’s why this sensation of the familiar becoming alien is so powerful. It’s a reminder that the world we move through, the one we build with patterns and routines, is not as stable as it seems. The kitchen, the cup of tea — these are constructs. We give them meaning, imbue them with purpose. But strip that away, even for an instant, and we’re left with the truth: an incomprehensible universe dressed in the illusion of order.
No comments:
Post a Comment