Nora Ray
Trigger: This piece utilizes language that conflates body size with fear. In the author’s defense, Ms. Ray’s piece is clearly written from the premeditated vantage point of an agoraphobic attack. This denotes deficient logic about socially acceptable terminologies involving the body. The value of this piece, also, can be found in its vantage point due to the rarity of the condition and, even rarer, the writing around it. Taking mental health narratives into account means the viewer is challenged with tasks towards justifying art that offends. Articulating disability risks the artist and reader’s comfort. Publicly supporting damaged and damaging art is something that Libre attempts with curiosity towards establishing better future discourse around. Thank you for your continued tolerance.
Freud claimed agoraphobic women suffered from the suppressed desire to sleep with strangers they encountered on the streets. If I ever had a dinner with Freud, I would argue, flooding him with a list of the injustices the spiteful outside heaped upon us. Smoking his scandalous cigarette and compulsively mispronouncing ‘coke,’ he would probably dismiss my worries.
We’re expected to wear socks outside. Please, stop your chatter about sandals and flip-flops. These are terrible. Leather straps chafe our ankles, slick insoles make our poor feet sweat; then we slip, then we fall, then everyone fusses around us, then they slip, then they fall. Summer, right? We’re allowed to spill drinks down our shirts only a couple times in a decade. If we have a pretty privilege card, we can be a slob maybe one more time. Playing the card is tricky, though. It’s painfully futile if we need to pee every 10 minutes. The list goes on…
My therapist told me the fun fact about Freud, having a very long laugh over it. She has this questionable method of talking non-stop instead of listening to me. She calls it “sending insights.” A week ago, she interrupted me in the middle of my rant about spilling coke—and yes, I mispronounced the word. She said agoraphobics had artsy reasons to lock themselves home. Artsy. Interesting. One of her patients walked outside only with her spouse to avoid panic attacks. Every single time they encountered a young brunette in a polka dot dress standing at the bus stop. When the client’s spouse picked up the stomach flu, she braced up to leave the house alone. The brunette smiled at her with teeth the size of bowling pins, drumming her fingers on a double-decker bus roof. She was enormous, the size of a two-story building. Have you ever feared going outside because women around you grew gigantic*? My therapist asked. I shook my head as she doodled, pretending to take a note. I think she romanticizes this whole thing. Does my therapist want to be agoraphobic? Well, I get it. I find the idea of never leaving home fantastic. Oops.
Do you stay home because you’re in love with your new chinoiserie sideboard or because you’re scared to be brutally murdered? A friend of mine once asked me. This particular question made me a loner. I enjoy parasocial relationships with celebrities, though.
I often imagine my loud neighbors standing at their windows, soothed by sun, pacified by rain, assuaged by crowds. They will never discover what Freud said about agoraphobic women. And I will stare at the whimsical landscape on my sideboard, wondering if strangers tempted me, if gigantic* women disturbed me, if my mother loved me the wrong way, if I ever experienced alienation, if that incident on the subway caused me PTSD.
You’re suffocating underwater, drilling the base of the iceberg, stubbornly ignoring the tip, my therapist said. What’s the tip? I asked. Take me seriously at least once and step out on the balcony, she replied.
losing our grip on purpose 