Took the train to nip to the office the other day. Fully hated it. You know what’s safe? My flat and my wife. You know what feels not safe now? Everything else.
Used to be impossible for me to be cooped up for even 24 hours, now I’m feeling like bursting out of my own skin when i’m in public. I’m aware this is due to the pandemic but it’s fucking me up. Anyone else feeling like this? This is kind of a MH thread but a specific one to sudden feelings of… almost agoraphobia?
Hope you feel better about stuff soon mate.
It’s been a lot easier down here x
Agoraphobia is a sneaky fucker. I thought I was fine because I could go to work and go to the shop round the corner, it was just everything else that felt impossible.
Turns out that still counts if you’re avoiding everything other than the routine/familiar.
Still laugh about when I called my GP to discuss this and he said “ok, can you pop round to the surgery this morning then?” and it’s like m8 what did I just say
Hmm, we did this on Sunday night and it was very odd but also nice. Torn between staying in and supporting people’s livelihood. Probably won’t do it again any time soon.
Especially as they’re locking down postcodes again here due to outbreaks including one right next door.
The normal advice would be to try to dig down into what’s bothering you about it and rationalise it away, but I suspect it’s not going to take too much digging to find “pandemic” in there.
Agoraphobia is based on irrational fear, but im not very helpful o it’s not particularly irrational to want to stick to safe places at the moment, even though things are slowly improving.
I haven’t even attempted going anywhere other than the local shop since lockdown started (still not allowed to go further than 5 miles in Wales anyhow). The general idea of things opening up again is giving me anxiety and I’m not sure if that’s just because the virus is still around or because I’m too used to my bubble. I’ve been told my uni will be insisting on us we all work from home for the whole of the 20/21 academic year which is a help in the short term but christ knows where I’ll be mentally by the end of that.
I had planned to head up north to see my folks as soon as the lockdown here eases but both my place and theirs are Covid hotspots so it wouldn’t be sensible. I’m simultaneously relieved I don’t have to do a stressful 4 hour drive or of my comfort zone and desperately sad I can’t see the people I love for a while longer.
Sorry, just rambling here.
Haven’t been to any shops since mid March. Trying to support local businesses from home, found out the local sandwich shop does free delivery which was a nice treat the other day. So basically finding ways to avoid going anywhere apart from local walks. Don’t have a car, don’t want to use public transport. Keep having nightmares I have gone into town and I’m surrounded by people. Work is allowing us to wfh for the forseeable so no change likely for a while.
Leicester is a special case though. If you’ve got Kasabian walking around, no-one’s truly safe from the outside elements
i tell you what, this is driving me up the wall. just so bored of not going anywhere or doing anything. talking to my boss the other day and he was like, i dont think you’ll be back in the office this year. and i was like wo what, and he said well we’re not going to start bringing people back into the office til the end of july ish, and then it’ll be essential people who need to be there, then they’ll start phasing people in at a reduced capacity, like 25% or somethign, maybe rotating people coming in on different days or whatever, so that’ll take me to august. baby’s due in october, so i guess we’ll want to be shielding by september coz theres not going to be a vaccine. then a couple of weeks pat leave, about a month of annual leave saved up and we’re at christmas. fuuuuuuuuuuuuuucccccccccccckkkkkkk
just really really miss chatting to people without arranging it beforehand you know? going to @anon45164313’s on saturday was absolute bliss 
I always feel like this anyway 
Realising I haven’t left the small area of Gateshead I live in except for a funeral in three months was intense. But as you say xylo, I find myself anxious every time I go further than the corner shop two minutes away. Managed to find a walking route that no else ever seems to be on.
I am getting more socially insular though, I’ve always been quiet but it is nice just to have general chit chat in the day. I went to the bakery yesterday and it was nice to just chat for a few minutes about wallpapering, inane but made me feel good.
for me I think the going out is OK, much reduced as I’m wfh full time but if I needed something from the shop I’d happily go down to the shop to get it.
the thing that’s getting to me is that i’m getting really angry when I see people taking the piss with just ignoring any attempts at distancing, and feeling like I’m the only one making any attempt to do this. like yesterday there was a family in front behind us on the pavement. kids decided to run past us, fine, they’re kids, not going to get angry about that, but then the mum runs past us, dad cycles past us and then they just stop on the pavement in front of us for a chat, leaving us to walk into the road round them. literally a minute later they did the exact same thing. then at the shop I was basically queueing to get some breaded chicken because someone was taking a while, needed to phone their mum to figure out what to get so I backed off to wait. some guy then slots in between the two of us, initially figured he wanted something on the shelf but nah, just slotted into the gap so he could get to the breaded chicken quicker (and being a chump I obviously just let this happen), and obviously proceeded to take forever to choose what to have.
was fuming about both all the way home, feel like before i’d have found this sort of thing annoying but then dealt with it, now it annoys me for far longer which isn’t good.
my flatmate has had a couple of full blown panic attacks just from being in the car being driven somewhere (local) or after coming back from the shops if it’s been busy. Feel really really bad for her
I’m nowhere near that level of course but … I have noticed that my theoretical desire to see friends again and be social isn’t matching up at all to how my body feels. Not ready at all for things to start going back to normal, just wanted to stay cocooned in this world forever (despite all the issues I’m having with it too)
… for an hour
Yeah, finding this quite hard. In many ways I’m up for getting out and about again, but on the basis of some of the behaviour I’ve seen in actual proper lockdown, I’m a bit sceptical that everything’s not just going to go to shit on Saturday.
Wife works in a school and some of her colleagues are meeting on Saturday to go out on the piss. Just feels a bit like… really?
We’re not really locked down much in Sweden but I hear you with the creeping dread - in some ways some of the flippancy I see makes the anxiety worse.
Hope you all feel better about all this soon though - make sure you are all kind to yourselves 
(re)welcome to the community!
I’m definitely feeling things in the same space as what you’ve said. It’s odd, because hypothetically, I’d like to go to the pub, or go to restaurants, or see friends, but I’m still mentally in full lockdown mode and those things don’t even occur to me as possible, and I feel very anxious about doing them. Same with going on public transport, although I have zero desire to do that at all, either theoretical or actual.
Well any arbitrary line is still arbitrary.