Depressing musings...

[felis_ultharus]

So I'm going to the NDP conference thing this afternoon. It seems my presence is expected.

It's frustrating. It's been four years since my breakdown, and I'm slowly getting better, but I still have such a hard time dealing with strangers. I had to set aside everything this morning in order to mentally prepare myself for the ordeal. It means losing half a day of writing and schoolwork. I just can't focus when I'm trying to prepare.

Of course, a couple of years ago, I couldn't have left the house at all to deal with anything like a conference. And there are times I can do things like this now -- more and more often -- without risking panic attacks, and sometimes even relaxing.

But I look around, and I notice that my two closest friends from high school have also both developed such severe agoraphobia they don't leave the house anymore unless absolutely necessary.

And we all have our different reasons for it, but it's so strange it should happen to all of us, around the same point in our lives, when we're all so far away from each other. None of us were in contact with the others when it happened to us, so it's not a question of influence.

Is there a common thread? Could we identify a "Post-Esquimalt Stress Syndrome"...?

Comments

[felis-ultharus.livejournal.com]

I've thought of that, too. Nature or nurture might account for it. But the reason I brought it up is that friends of mine were suffering from the same thing -- friends I'm not related to.

So I figure there must be something about the place itself, and given the psychological atmosphere of Esquimalt, it wouldn't be too surprising...

[infinitecomplex.livejournal.com]

From everything I've heard about it from Jen, it sounds like a definite possibility. I suspect growing up in London is similar - I always wondered why more kids there didn't lose it. What really disturbs me is the people who just adapt, and accept those kind of places as normal - what kind of adults do they become?

[felis-ultharus.livejournal.com]

Simple sociopaths, from what I see. A friend of mine refers to it as "survival mode" -- everyone and everything is sized up in what you can use, what you can get out of it.

Spend long enough in that mode, and you don't know how to get out of it. Even when you're not surviving on the edge, you idolize it.

One of the things that frustrate me about my university program is that I'm surrounded by bored, upper-middle-class kids, who've never been out of school, and who idolize that kind of desperate survival mode as "edgy" and "revolutionary." It makes me want to scream at them :/