Closed doors

I think I’m socially claustrophobic. Nothing scares me more than the feeling of being trapped in social demands. Something about moving, the opportunity to overcome and blow past the past gives me comfort. For the last few years, I’ve felt like my life was accelerating. I was reaching physical and intellectual spaces that brought me farther and farther from home, at faster speeds. During this time, I became attached to the feeling of movement, of ever expanding boundaries of experience and self. Something about ever moving away from a settled social reality gives me hope in myself- that if I kept going then I would be able to find the essence that defines me, absent my immediate surroundings- finding the stability at the center of everything else by moving through existence as far away from home as possible. I could assemble myself from the remainder of different lives subtracted from each other, and discover some security in that. Deciding what to carry with me when moving somewhere becomes a roleplaying game to becoming alive as me. The ultimate end comes when I find myself melting into my surroundings, becoming just one more element in what has come before. Being totalized by my surroundings is the feeling of claustrophobia I want to escape.

Duncan