Boundaries and Barriers
by Anonymous
The membrane of a cell acts as its boundary. It isolates the cell from the outside world; it offers the cell some degree of protection; it restricts what can enter the cell and what can’t. A cell membrane is a barrier that defames the cell itself.
As a human being, an imperfect life-form blessed and cursed with sapience, I have many boundaries and barriers to contend with in my own life. My personal boundaries are primarily psychological, but certainly no less restrictive than the physical.
I suffer from agoraphobia, a manifestation of my genetically-gifted anxiety disorder (thanks, Mom!). The agoraphobic--literally meaning “afraid of the marketplace”--is often terrified and avoidant of situations that may present unexpected challenges or uncomfortable scenarios. The name is apt; malls, grocery stores, and crowded places in general send me shivering, scared of many everyday situations because of their potential to bring the unforeseen.
It is a self-compounding fear, a largely irrational anxiety of being presented with situations that will result in anxiety. My anxiety results in panic attacks, and panic attacks in public places are embarrassing, and they feed back into my initial fear.
This enormous mental barrier also presents me with a very real physical barrier: the walls of my own home. Many days, despite my love of the outdoors--of rock climbing, of hiking, of watching the sun rise from the top of Mars Hill--I’m rendered incapable of overcoming my fear of the unpredictable and uncontrollable, and stepping off of my front porch into the world beyond. I often feel trapped, bound physically by fear over anxiety, by anxiety over panic. The human mind is very powerful. I face a daily struggle against the power my own anxiety exerts over me. I do my best to conquer my fear, but I am sometimes not powerful enough to fight -myself in this regard. Like the walls of a cell, my anxiety isolates me as it tries to protect me from the outside world.
I face many more mental barriers in my lifelong struggle with attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder. One of the more restrictive symptoms of this disorder is my effective lack of a short-term memory. Many details slip through the sieve. This represents a social barrier for me; I am usually unable to remember names and faces until I have met a person a half-dozen times. It limits me academically, too, by restricting me to conceptual learning. If I cannot understand an underlying concept well enough to derive the answers on my own, I am often left unable to recall the finer points. I cannot do well in memorization-based courses without tremendous effort.
ADHD erects further barriers for me to overcome academically in its deep-reaching effects on my attention span, and my work ethic. As in most women with this disorder, my hyperactivity presents itself mentally, not physically: my mind is perpetually racing, flitting from idea to idea; it is never at rest. The constant stream-of-consciousness narrative that I endure takes my transient attention span and runs with it, flowing through distant and foreign cerebral terra, dumping my consciousness into a sea of thoughts miles from the source. This gives me the traits of impulsivity and susceptibility to whim, and I can lose precious hours at a time without ever accomplishing anything I intended to do. Now, if I could just remember what I was trying to do in the first place. What’s this paper about again, now?