Agoraphobic Memory
It's hard talking to people who don't have agoraphobia sometimes because they just assume existing in public and going places is all fun and awesome and freeing, while I just took a 4-day trip and I feel like I'm still recovering. I feel sick thinking about having to help plan someone's trip or review any of my past ones.
There's a blocker in my head — perhaps related to how I don't store location data (because the outside is inherently dangerous?) — when thinking about my past trips, especially ones taken with family. I guess the problem of relying on others as anchors for your safety is that you don't feel like you actually have agency, and therefore there's less incentive to remember or think about how you really felt during the whole thing.
Planning and executing a trip by myself (mostly) has made me think more about where I am and what I'm doing, but it was also as anxiety-inducing as expected, and I don't want to do that again for another year if I have to. I feel like most of what I'm going to remember is all the logistics, the stuff that were the biggest factor in whether I felt safe or not, and this is counter to those with the travel-mentality that love going places and experiencing new things.
A friend is asking me for suggestions on where to go in Taiwan. I have been there a handful of times, but every single time was with family. My sister did most of the planning, and if I helped out, I don't remember anymore. Places all blur together, I can't speak or read Mandarin, and there's all sorts of worry about recommending anyone anything due to differences in what people naturally enjoy.
I asked my sister to help, thinking I could maybe offload this onto her since she's the one who actually likes traveling. Naturally, she finds being asked to recommend something to someone she's never met a burden and tells me to do a first pass. "Challenge yourself," she says.
I get unreasonably angry at this because I feel like I just went through a year's worth of challenge given my mental difficulties. Realizing that this anger is unwarranted, I look deeper into what's going on: I don't want to be asked this. I don't want to have to do more logistics of planning. I can't remember where I've been, and every single memory is fraught with being out of language, relying on other people for logistics, a haze of impressions in which I felt like I mostly had fun but can't remember nearly anything about the locations.
Being majorly directionally challenged & socially anxious has resulted in agoraphobia. The number one question for me going anywhere has always been, "Am I supposed to be here?"
Sometimes, I (unreasonably) think people are arrogant for never having to ask this question, for not having to endure the shame and feeling of danger that I do. How do they just walk around knowing that they own the space they move in?? This is also nonsensical because I don't actually know what other people struggle with or whatever things I do that may be easy for me but extremely hard for others.
I feel sick at the idea of having to review photo albums, to see who I've been and where I've floated through, to try to get my disjointed memory to tell me whether an experience was good or bad or if I remember anything about being there at all.
I tried really hard to remember the places we went to in 2023, but in the end the location names and directions escape me. I can really only remember the things that stood out to my interests: a weird museum owned by a rich guy, my dad pointing out the street and house he grew up in in Tainan that is now owned by someone else. Tainan is not on this friend's list — this friend has Kaohsiung and Taipei. I know I've been to both, but gun to my head, you could not make me list a single thing Kaohsiung has. I need to scrounge around in photos and notes to figure out where I've gone to in Taipei that wasn't my dad's academic office.
My memory is just that bad. Or maybe I just feel that dissociated that I can't be coerced to remember anything at all.