| AGORAPHOBIA, or WHAT IF EMILY DICKINSON HAD BEEN HOMELESS? |
ISSUE #29, May 1996 I'm so sick of feeling like I live in such an unfriendly world! What would it be like not to feel at odds with my environment? To not always feel like I'm riding out into battle when I go out to face another day? It's unfriendly to me in several different ways. There are the ones who hate me just because I'm homeless or just because I'm on food stamps. And the ones who hate me because I dare to criticize the system that makes people live that way. Then of course there are the countless men who hate me just because I'm female, and the women who hate me because I'm prettier than they are (and therefore get more attention from the woman-hating males.) What would it be like to connect with someone who's a supportive friend instead of a challenging enemy? To have him already in here with me instead of having to go out into hostile territory and battle the elements to find my way to him? I've forgotten. I'm lonely and I'm NOT a go-getter. I get so sick of having to be aggressive and defiant all the time to get my needs met! Why can't it ever happen naturally and harmoniously? There's always that moment of panic when I'm about to make a connection with somebody and I don't yet know what state of mind I'm going to find them in. Always bracing myself when I've just dialed the phone number and I can hear it ringing on the other end, telling my heart to quit pounding so loudly, praying I'll get an answering machine instead of a live person. This "neurosis" is not necessarily something one outgrows or should outgrow. People should be scared and shy and agoraphobic when they live in such a violent, hostile and dangerous world. Not to be this way is to have something wrong with you! Emily Dickinson had the right idea--and the world she had to live in and hide from was much less hostile than this present-day one. Why should it be surprising that there are days when I just don't feel strong enough to go out and face the battle again? That I just can't face it any more? When there isn't necessarily any connection between the bold efforts I make and the results I get? When I could get shot down anytime, anywhere, even though I'm not doing anything wrong?! Yet if I give in to this feeling and stay in my camper and hide, it's like the old childhood guilt of playing "hooky" from school. We're expected to keep right ongiving it the Old College Try every day of our lives, no matter how unfairly we get treated out there. We're supposed to shake ourselves out of our fear and see that it's a nice, bright day outside; everyone is supposedly out there participating in the business world, playing the roles they're expected to play to get their needs met. That place called the "Mainstream". There are supposedly many rewards for participating in it and many penalties for shrinking from it. You go out and do battle for so many hours a day, then you come home and make your dinner and collapse with a clear conscience, knowing you've done what you could to keep the demons away from your doorstep for yet another day. That's how life is supposed to be, right? And there is a logic to it on a certain level. Then why does it feel to so many people like a never-ending treadmill, that it's torture with no respite, let alone any rewards? People think I'm so bold and aggressive because I write all that bold stuff on paper. They picture some six-foot Amazon with fangs and claws. Then they're shocked when they meet me and see this little tiny scared shy person. "But you CAN'T be the person who wrote that stuff!!" Why not? Don't they see--it's easy to address a piece of paper because the paper is not a defiant enemy; it doesn't talk back. It's easy to drop a stack of newsletters on a rack and run, so that people don't read my defiant words till after I'm long gone. That way I keep the confrontation at arm's length, carry it on in absentia. I can have it both ways: have my say without putting myself in the direct line of fire. Writers do that all the time. And people think I'm being confrontational with the things I write. What a joke! This no doubt a new and puzzling concept to many: that a homeless person can be agoraphobic! How can a person afford the luxury of being terrified to go out of the house when they don't have a house to go out of? Yet I'm telling you it can be so. Homeless people are entitled to have all the same neuroses that anyone else can have. Bit it's like all those other things that don't seem to apply if you're homeless. Like what I wrote about homeless battered women a year ago. How ludicrous it sounds to us when they talk about all the options that are supposedly available to victims of "domestic" violence: "Well, you could get a restraining order to keep him out of the house..." "Uh--excuse me--WHAT house?!" "Well, you could call the police and have him arrested..." "Oh, right--when we're camping illegally in a public park and both hiding out from the cops! Would you please say something to me that makes sense?!" "Well, you could go to Womanspace..." Sigh. It always comes back to that. Being channeled back into the shelter system where there's no privacy, and they try to help you find some stupid job working for some other patriarchal asshole who also beats his wife or molests his daughter, to send us right back into that same old vicious woman-hating patriarchal mainstream as a way of escaping our violent husbands. Because there is supposedly nothing else. So the ones like me, who don't see that patriarchal mainstream as holding any answers for our lives, opt to hide out in the bushes and nurse our agoraphobia there. Unless we have a camper that our patriarchal father paid for, as I have now. What if Emily Dickinson had been homeless? (click here for next page) . |