Okay. So yesterday my wife and I were invited to an old dive bar we used to frequent. The invitation came from a dear friend who we only see infrequently. The moment it was extended, my body seized up. My thinking collapsed on me. And not one impulse of mine announced, “Be there in a few hours!”

Thank goodness my wife had a big-time remote recording session the next day and couldn’t sacrifice her lungs or liver to the dive bar gods.

And there it was: relief. Not disappointment that I wouldn’t see my friend. Relief that circumstances had made the decision for me.

Granted, I wasn’t always this way. I think the newness of life carried me through my high school years. When I hit my 20s, I started hitting the bottle. Any and all socializing now came with a drink and a cigarette. These would be my weapons against debilitating anxiety. An anxiety that would only grow and repurpose itself for many occasions to come.

My 20s were a rough-and-tumble affair. The only constant social outing in my life was attending Dave Matthews Band shows with my sister every year. Needless to say, they were spent intoxicated. But year after year, I felt less and less like tailgating with the masses and instead stayed longer and longer in my car until the show was about to begin.

What was inside me, slowly making socializing harder, was a mystery. One no therapist or round of AA meetings could solve.

Still, for all my retreating, I hadn’t stopped going out. Not yet. But they were boozy, blurry experiences. Shovel on top of that the nasty drug habit I’d picked up. It had been building quietly below the surface. Now, it had broken through.

Funny enough, the drugs induced anxiety. Here’s the thing, though: at least that anxiety had a name. I knew where it was coming from… a small plastic baggie.

What I was experiencing otherwise didn’t have a name. It was a stranger who caught a ride with my physiology sometime when I was a kid. Did this stranger find me in the closet of childhood trauma? That very well could be.

Then one day, my hard drive crashed.

Fortunately, a few things happened. One, I went to a dope facility and cleaned up a bit. Two, I got a new job at a post-production studio directing and voice acting. Three, I met my future wife there.

By then I had kicked the cigs, the booze, and the drugs. I started running. A solitary effort. I stopped really hanging out. I was on a mission: clean up and slim down. I think I started retreating even further then.

But it was also around then that I met my wife, and she took my world from black and white to Technicolor.

A Cinco de Mayo margarita was both my undoing and a liberation. Soon we were gallivanting around the Florida coasts, becoming beach bums, dive-bar bunnies, and out-and-about social climbers. I think I did more in the first year we were dating than I had in the entire decade before her. She was also a burgeoning comedian, and I don’t think I missed one show that first year.

Now, there were cracks in my armor growing larger, but the brightness of falling in love blinded us to them.

And then, in the space of a few years, the world got very small. It started with the sudden passing of my father. The air around me thinned and the ground below gave way. The final years of my father’s life were spent mainly around home. He’d run his daily errands, but that was about it. I think part of me adopted that lifestyle. Home was where my father’s heart beat. And all I wanted was to be close to him.

In a strange way, I certainly got my wish. Only a few months later, the world was in the throes of a global pandemic.

The pandemic didn’t merely keep people home for a couple years. For some people, it broke the habit of leaving. We learned that work could happen here, movies could happen here, food could arrive here, friendships could live on phones, and pants with buttons were apparently optional. Then society reopened and basically said, Okay! Everybody go back to normal!

Some people’s brains went:…why?

Somewhere in there, the Mrs. and I separated. I’d become someone I didn’t recognize. My grief fueled my anger, and my anger scared away my anxiety. But at the cost of my marriage.

Medication and therapy soon followed. Nothing was really working until I found the right therapist and the right medication. I’d been searching most of my life for the right combo. I suppose even the wrong therapists and the wrong medications kept me alive. Why? Because at least I was taking action.

My quest for normalcy brought my wife back. My therapist and meds brought my life back. And not too long ago, after the strangest hangover I’ve ever had, I decided booze was indefinitely off the table.

Now I’m left without any of the social lubricants that make a night on the town go down much smoother. I still smoke pot, and yes, it can make me anxious, but again, I know its name. And sadly, you can’t pull out a joint at most bars, so there’s that. Vapes don’t really do it for me.

So here I am, wondering if there’s finally a name for any of this.

So what the fuck is agoraphobia, and do I actually have it? The classic definition involves intense fear or avoidance of places or situations where escape might feel difficult, or where help might not be available if something goes wrong. In all my therapy appointments throughout the years, that term has never announced itself.

For one thing, I don’t panic about escape. I can Irish-goodbye with the best of them. And I have people I can always reach out to. So by that definition alone, agoraphobia doesn’t quite seem to describe what I’m experiencing.

What I seem to have resists a neat clinical explanation. I’ve got a lot of live wires crackling away throughout my nervous system, each one braided into the next until you have a flux capacitor of anxious circuitry.

To further the Back to the Future metaphor, I carry different versions of myself from different times. All I can keep trying to do is settle into the present and hope the next invitation is opened by the best version of me.

Okay. So I guess the goal isn’t becoming the guy who never says no. It’s making sure anxiety isn’t always the guy who gets to answer first.