Let me out!

by: Kate Carraway

November 04, 2009 9:09 PM

Comments: (1)

How’s this for irony? I’m trapped in a fear of being trapped

I spent most of last week in golden-fall New York City, my holiday’s ne plus ultra, as usual, being a long, slow walk (this one, the 70-block stretch down Madison between Harlem and midtown) propelled by a hot coffee and my abiding love of the city. I feel good in New York: tough, secure, almost (but not quite) native.

My trip was marked, though, by fear. Not of terrorism or muggers or cooler-than-me Lower East Side types, but a stifling, myopic fear of the airplane there and back; the train that shoots through an underwater tunnel from the New Jersey airport into the city; those old-timey death-trap elevators; and the rammed New York City subway.

I’m not entirely claustrophobic, but sometimes I become very scared of having no way out, no view of the sky. Getting to and around New York scares me far more than anything about the city itself. In Toronto, elevators and subways are a daily, tolerable happenstance. Mostly, I play with my bangs for distraction; on bad days, I repeat slogans and give myself pep talks anytime I feel the walls getting closer.

Once I actively loved flying and was neutral underground and in elevators. I trusted the electrical and mechanical ways of escape that I’m now suspicious of. I don’t have one solid reason that explains the random claustrophobia, which emerges as icy skin, dry nausea and a systemic shutdown of thinking that doesn’t leave room for my mantras. It’s possible that my fear of enclosure is about the five hours (or hour and a half, whateversies) that I once spent trapped in an elevator with five other drunk idiots. (On our way from Doug’s apartment to the bar, Steve said something to the effect of “I wonder if this will stop the elevator” and jumped, hard. It did. The boys peed into empty Corona bottles and covered the tops with bunches of plastic wrap that we were all drunkenly and idiotically wearing as hats and belts.)

Or it could be owing to the time I was stuck on the subway for 20 minutes while crossing town. (Just before High Park station, the train shuddered and stopped; when we got there, I sprinted upstairs and walked the rest of the way.) Or it could somehow be related to one night a decade ago when I was canoeing in Quebec with 30 other girls on a character-building adventure and had a dark-tent-related panic attack. (Hyperventilating between dormant, brace-face teenagers, I grasped for the zipper on the door flap, eventually tumbling out and onto some wet Kipawa sand, relieved.)

My fear is definitely irrational, and embarrassingly unsophisticated. Enclosure is symptomatic of city life: we’re necessarily folded into the infrastructure (traffic, escalators, sidewalks, crowds), our animal instincts subsumed by the collective need to move and exist. I love the city’s pace, culture, art, cute boys and opportunity for anonymity, but lately I feel more physically (if not psychically) comfortable in the flat suburbs, and especially in the country, where I remit control to weather and wildlife rather than the noxious subway cars; hateful, taunting elevators and the anxiety-factory airports that are an inalienable part of my city-existence of doing things and going places.

If this fear is mostly illogical, so are my other, lesser ones: mice and rocking chairs terrify me, and I wouldn’t touch my own eyeball for a wad of 20s. My non-fears are appreciably more stupid: while I’m afraid of plane crashes, I am wholly unafraid to drive unknown rural back roads, fast and alone in the dark, where I will much more likely die. I’m afraid of being one of many on a stalled subway, but can travel for months by myself. Why is it that I’m fine with tempting failure, enjoying success, enduring heartache (big-ticket scary shit, all of it) but can barely focus on what my friend is saying while we’re trundling underground between Bathurst and Spadina? I don’t see the purpose or value of my fear, the way that I do see the value of fearing, say, sharks (of which I remain gleefully unafraid, at least in the abstract, as I charge deep into the ocean at every opportunity).

Maybe the worst part is that I have to claim such a pedestrian, useless and tenuously traceable thing to be afraid of. It’s not even something I can be a pussy about and avoid, like my deal with rocking chairs. (Wretched, unknowable devil-furniture!) I resent my claustrophobia and how much space it’s been occupying, especially lately, especially on a vacation in New York. I resent that it’s changed something I used to savour as an occasion to wear impractical heels and read tabloids. As a friend and kid and girlfriend and writer, I’ve rejected shame and fear over and over again to become closer to who I want to be, but this last, suffocating thing remains, immovably and ironically, in my way.

» What scares you? Email kcarraway@eyeweekly.com or Tweet @katecarraway.

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My Life, My Fault

Let me out!

Kate Carraway