OK, so I'm not agoraphobic. I go to work, go to my book group, etc. But I'm worried I'm developing agoraphobic traits. Last weekend I didn't go out at all. I told my partner I had a headache, but the real reason was that I couldn't face the world 'out there'.
I live in a small town in the south east. When we moved here in the 1990s, it was still pretty quiet, but the population has massively increased in the last twenty years. It's now a market town with the population of a small city. And they just never stop building. My local woods have been hacked into to make way for a new estate, including blocks of flats, and at the other end of the village they are building a massive new estate that, frankly, is more like a new town. They seem to jam these horrible hobbit homes onto every available bit of land. The town has changed as well. There is a nasty undercurrent or edge to it.
Also, the traffic is so bad I dread going to the shops, and at night I'm often woken up by the screeching and exploding of car engines. I feel like I'm being squeezed or suffocated. I keep having this weird sense that I can't breathe. We have fields behind us and I dread the day a developer gets his hands on it. No matter how many houses they build it's never enough.
Is that how agoraphobia starts? I mean, can it build slowly? I worry that I'm going to start having panic attacks in public and that that will drive me indoors for good. If I lived somewhere quiet and empty I know I wouldn't be feeling this way.