TOO CLOSE

My claustrophobia – or my adult awareness of it, anyway – began on a summer day in 1989. I had started a speech and debate team in my first year of teaching at Logan-Rogersville High School. We had a good year. By the end of the spring semester, I had been hired to replace the retiring legend and National Forensic League Hall of Famer, Bob Bilyeu, at Parkview High School in Springfield. Bob convinced the school board to let me accompany his team to Nationals to help with coaching duties, get to know some of the students, and acclimate myself to the world of big-time high school forensics.

The week-long tournament was held on the campus of The Colorado School of Mines, in a suburb of Denver. I met coaches from all over the country and judged debaters from New York to Texas to Guam. My head was spinning with new relationships, experiences, and plans for my future coaching as we entered the last day of competition. The finals rounds were held in Bunker Auditorium in front of a large panel of esteemed judges, professional camera crews, and around a thousand spectators. It had been a long week, and I was pretty tired, so I started off my morning with several cups of coffee. As I took my seat for the first event, I realized I needed to visit the restroom, but the round was getting ready to start. “I’ll get up and go between performances,” I thought. The director of the tournament took the stage and asked the ushers to shut all the doors. He firmly instructed everyone in the audience to remain in their seats until the round was over and the judges had submitted their ballots. That meant I was trapped for about an hour and a half. A wave of concern washed over me, but I shrugged it off. I was 24 years old, with a metabolism that burned calories like a brush fire, and a bladder with the strength and plasticity of an inflatable bounce house. No worries.

There were six contestants in the round, each speaking for about 10 minutes. By the third speaker, my legs were crossed, and I was sweating. By the fifth speaker, the world ceased to exist, and my shiny new legal pad portfolio was laying across my lap. I was holding myself. By the time we were officially released, I had tears in my eyes. I ran to the bathroom like George Costanza fleeing a house fire. Now, of course, I could have gotten up and discreetly made my exit earlier without being put in forensic jail, but I was the new kid in town. I didn’t want to draw the attention and scorn of my colleagues. If that situation happened today, I wouldn’t care… wait, it wouldn’t happen today because I would have peed four times before I sat down!

That moment changed me forever. A simmering anxiety causes me to stay on the edges, to avoid crowds, to keep an eye on the exits, and to always know where the bathrooms are. But it’s more than just bladder panic; I am often governed by a fear of being trapped.

I took each of my daughters to an Obama inauguration. When Carsen and I went in 2013, it was crowded, but not like it was when Cassidy and I were there in ’09. It was the largest inauguration crowd in American history. It’s impossible to describe what it feels like to be amidst millions of humans. Cassidy wanted to dive down into the middle of the crowd, but I made us stay out on the edge. There were a couple of crushing moments where we were glad we weren’t in the scrum. We saw a few people succumb to claustrophobic panic, and several celebrities who were ushered through the crowd surrounded by aggressive teams of bodyguards.

The National Mall was lined with temporary fencing to contain and organize the crowd. We were at the fence but being pushed firmly against it. After the event had been over for quite some time, we were still standing in an unmoving line, next to the National Museum of the American Indian. Someone near us reached up and undid one of the wire twists holding the chain link panels to the tubular fence frames. Then he undid a couple more. Then I undid a couple. Before long, we were able to gently lay a panel down and help our fellow crowd members through the hole in the fence. Hoping we wouldn’t be deemed a threat by snipers on rooftops, we streamed through the surrounding woods and onto a street. The streets were full, so we tried to find emptier streets. At one point, we were redirected back toward the crowd by a police officer who said, “If you keep going down that street, you might die.” I’m not exactly sure what he meant, but I didn’t question his advice. Eventually, we made it back to our friend Stephanie’s apartment, away from the masses. Relief.

I think I’m often looking for a way around, a way out, a way through the fence. It’s caused me to develop unique problem-solving skills. I will be useful when the apocalypse hits and we need to get out. But the impulse to escape doesn’t always put me in the best position for finding a way into a situation, to embrace opportunities positively.

When I was narrating my history in therapy a couple of years ago, I was describing my childhood hip injury and being in a plaster cast from my toes to my hips, with bars holding my feet about four feet apart. From the age of six until I was nine, I was at the mercy of others for my mobility. You might say I was trapped. All of a sudden, my therapist interrupted, “Hello! What? And you wonder where your claustrophobia comes from?” She went on to describe that period of my life as an elongated trauma. It’s weird how we have no objectivity about our own stories. It hadn’t occurred to me that my childhood incapacitation might have significantly affected me mentally and emotionally.

All of this set me thinking about ways my particular form of claustrophobia might have shaped me. After the trauma of the 2016 Presidential Election, maybe it prompted me to escape – to leave my career, house, cars, and stuff to travel the country listening to people. Maybe it has affected my teaching, my songwriting, my relationships. Maybe it’s why I’m long on critiques and short on solutions.

Whenever someone is creating cognitive dissonance for me because they’re not behaving the way I prefer or expect, I try to take a moment and consider the fact that I don’t know their whole story. Often I think I do. But it’s impossible for me to know the trauma, abuse, neglect, or challenges in someone else’s life. I should also keep trying to have more compassion for myself. 

But right now I have to pee.