If you could have any superpower, what would it be?
Most people in the UK would choose invisibility, according to a foosty HMV study.
Says a lot about the British sensibility, that one – our chronic embarrassment at the state of our lives, and our sleekit wonderings about other people’s.
For me, it would be teleportation. The ability to zap from one point in space to any other desired place, in the blink of an eye.
I decide this while waiting to see Harry Styles at Ibrox on Saturday.
Between the three-hour queue to get into the stadium, the 40-minute queue to get a drink and the hour-long queue to use the toilet, I have a lot of time to narrow down my choice.
There’d be no commuting, I think; no airport security, no delayed trains. Never again would you wait by the side of the road for the AA to arrive. There’d be no such thing as locking yourself out the house.
Most importantly, I muse, as me and 30,000 other sequined dafties stand in the rain, if I could teleport, I might consider doing this again in my lifetime.
Harry’s House – not for homebodies
Because if I could teleport, I wouldn’t spend this entire day feeling panic grip me and release me in waves of chills, dizziness and shakiness as I stand, surrounded by people who miraculously seem to be having a pretty good time soaking up the “pre-show atmosphere”.
I wouldn’t be filled with an over-reactive, white-hot rage over my bodily functions being ruled by a cordon and a man in a hi-vis vest, who is, after all, just doing his job.
And when one of my favourite big-time pop artists finally blazes on to the stage after all those hours of waiting, I wouldn’t find myself withdrawn, fatigued and fighting tears while my friends danced around me.
I would be able to enjoy it, unfazed by the knowledge that I was still 97 minutes (in good traffic) away from my house.
I would know that in the blink of an eye, I could just get home.
Instead, I feel like an elastic band stretched to the point of fraying.
Reading that, you must think I sound like a right misery guts. I’m inclined to agree – what right-minded 20-something can’t have a good time at a Harry Styles concert?
Am I getting curmudgeonly already at 27?
Which is why yesterday I fell down a Google rabbit hole, starting with the question, “Why does queueing make me feel like I’d yeet myself to inevitable death in the icy waves rather than line up for a lifeboat on the Titanic?” and ending with, “Wait, do I have agoraphobia?”
Agoraphobia isn’t what I expect
It’s not a question I’ve ever asked myself before. As far as I (and popular media) was concerned, agoraphobia looked like a frizzy-haired lady in a purple shawl who lived in a dusty house with the curtains drawn and shrieked when she set a toe over the threshold.
But turns out that’s not the whole story.
Agoraphobia isn’t a fear of the world, exactly – it’s a fear of being trapped, helpless or out of control; a fear of being stuck.
And people under 35 are actually the ones most likely to suffer from it.
Standing in that never-ending queue for the toilets on Saturday, when I was overcome with that full-body rage, that was how I felt – stuck.
Stuck in one spot, flanked by folk.
Stuck with the greasy reek of cheap tomato ketchup on cheaper, slimy hotdogs in my nose each time I breathed. And stuck with the heft of my coat on my back and my car stuck outside on a road choked with more people in more queues.
Stuck with no trains I could get on to escape because of the ongoing rail strikes, and no way to get out of here to get to them anyway.
Stuck stuck stuck, with every whim – to eat, to drink, to walk, to pee – all at the mercy of someone else.
I wanted to sit down on the sticky floor and cry. I didn’t understand why I felt like this, all of a sudden.
But then, it’s not actually that sudden. I’ve felt like this before.
The anti-sleepover club
I’ve never struggled with leaving the house, but for as long as I can remember, I’ve hated being away from it for too long.
Love On Tour. Glasgow. June, 2022. pic.twitter.com/aelHLVpc5r
— Harry Styles. (@Harry_Styles) June 12, 2022
As a little kid, I was always the one who got picked up from every sleepover before bed.
Each time, my mum would dutifully pack my wee pink Barbie rucksack with jammies and a toothbrush, “in case you want to stay with your friends”.
But inevitably, after four or five hours, the elastic band inside me would snap.
The initial internal push to be part of things would falter and I’d collapse inward, tired of holding myself up in the outside world. I used to describe it as ‘itchy fingernails’.
I’d find a skirt to tug and ask to just go home.
As a young adult, I still felt that way whenever I was out of the house for long periods – but between the demands of university, work and actually trying to have a life, I got used to operating at the very limit of what I could handle.
The band, fully stretched, all the time.
Nowadays, it’s been such a long time since I felt that familiar strain, I almost didn’t recognise it at first.
I have Covid to thank for that, I suppose.
Agoraphobia: Home is where my… house is
The pandemic (and its lockdowns) levelled my playing field; suddenly everyone had to stay home.
I got used to my world being small enough that I was never out of my home for longer than a few hours at a time, and never further than a short car journey from my front door.
So when that long-dormant, insistent pull towards home took over my body on Saturday, I was completely blindsided.
Even more upsetting was that music, my spiritual home away from home, wasn’t enough to pull me back from the brink.
I don’t know if this feeling is mild agoraphobia, plain anxiety, or, as my mum joked, my ageing millennial intolerance for discomfort. All I know is, the band in my head isn’t as stretchy as it once was.
And honestly, I’m not sure how to fix that.
I guess the lesson is we’re still not “back to normal” post-Covid; it’ll take some time to get there, if we ever do.
Meantime, all we can do is educate ourselves on the weird things our brains do, show up for life, and if it sucks, let it suck. The outing will end. We will, eventually, get back home.
(Or we can invent human teleportation. Either will do.)
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