I was diagnosed with agoraphobia when I was in my early 20’s, which is the fear of open spaces. At the time, I was deeply depressed and unemployable because remote work opportunities were extremely rare. I tried to hold a few low level in-person jobs, but poor attendence led to me being fired each time. In search of some kind of financial relief, I sought disability from the Social Security Administration. Even though I was having panic attacks any time I left my house, the SSA required that I be officially diagnosed to be considered, so I forced myself to go and see a psychologist in town and then I had to attend a hearing with a judge in person. It sucked and I did not get approved, but I did get officially diagnosed. A couple of years later I did actually receive backpay after the disability rules changed enough to include my situation.

I am 44 years old and I haven’t left my house in over a decade. No one aside from my wife, my therapist, and the ocassional single-serving service worker has even seen me in over a decade. None of my co-workers from my last 2 jobs know what I look like physically. I have many online friends and none of them know what I look like.

Of the past 24 years, I have spent 21 of them inside of my house. My agoraphobia is the result of body dysmorphic disorder and an avoidant personality disorder, both of which I had not been diagnosed until speaking with a psychiatrist relatively recently. I feel uncontrollably embarassed of — and hyper focused on — the many flaws that I perceive in my appearance. My brain’s strategy for dealing with those feelings is to avoid them entirely. I avoid other things that I fear as well — sweating, spiders, heights, and most other things that represent any kind of danger.

The fact that I see something grotesque every time I look in the mirror doesn’t mean that my appearance would actually be viewed as flawed by anyone else. This is the same diagnosis that leads to some people getting so much plastic surgery that they become unrecognizable even though they were thought to be handsome or beautiful prior to the procedure(s). If, for example, you think long and hard about using a filter on a photograph you post to social media, you are experiencing a quelled version of the thoughts I would turn up to 11 before suffering through the ensuing and inevitable panic attack if I chose not to use a filter.

I incorrectly assume that everybody else is judging me as harshly as I judge myself. Even though I know its illogical, the negative thought patterns persist nevertheless. It’s not so much that I have a fear of open spaces, but rather that I have a fear of encountering the people that can fill those open spaces. That liminal feeling that most people would feel in an empty sports arena would be unbearable for me, for example. Even when I poke my head out of my front door, I feel deeply anxious about what people are thinking about me from inside of the cars that could be driving by. There is a cacophony of perceived negativity happening in my inner monologue in these moments. I sometimes wonder if I’m experiencing something akin to schizophrenia but with an off switch; the off switch being to close the door.

I have had these kinds of feelings as far back as elementary school but they weren’t as loud and they weren’t generating panic attacks — not ones that I recognized as panic attacks anyway. As I mentioned above, I absolutely hate sweating and I think that is due to a childhood spent being stabled in small areas with lots of other kids in venues that were not adequately climate controlled. The sweat would make my shirt stick to my skin and reveal the form underneath, which would create anxiety that caused me to sweat even more.

The constant anxiety, mixed with an abusive and chaotic home life, mixed with a burgeoning obession with computers, sent a torpedo into the side of my traditional education. I dropped out in lieu of being held back for a third time in the 8th grade. I had to repeat the 2nd and 3rd grades prior to that. It is possible that being 2 years older than the other kids — a relative giant towering above many of them them — provided the initial fuel necessary for my neurodivergence. I have no way of knowing.

In spite of it all, I am currently employed by a prestigious American unviersity as a fully remote DevOps engineer, which is a type of developer that specializes in automation and acts as a force multiplyer for a team of engineers. I love my job and the people I work with. I grew up as a tech-obsessed hacker kid with a deep interest in telephone and computer networking and that all translated nicely into a career as an IT professional, much like many of the other hacker kids from the early Internet. I have worked as a a customer service rep, a front end web developer, a back end web deveoper, a graphic designer, an IT manager for a medical clinic (the 3 years I was back out in the world), and a support engineer promoted to a cloud infrastructure engineer within an enterprise EduTech company.

I never earned a high school diploma or a college degree. I can’t obtain certifications due their proctoring requirements because webcams make me too anxious to think. I did receive a GED a couple of years after dropping out of middle school so that my mother didn’t have to continue lying to convince the state of Virginia that she was home schooling me every day. She tried to follow a cirriculum but I was a wholly unwilling participant. I didn’t study for the GED but nearly got a perfect score. I’m not sure if that’s a humblebrag or an indictment of the the system — probably a little bit of column A, a lotta bit of column B.

I am an autodidact and I have built a career based solely on my ability to empathize with others, identify and solve for inefficiencies in their workflows, seek and soak knowledge on the cutting edge of technology, then apply that knowledge via critical thinking and computer programming. The majority of my colleagues have been degreed, some with doctorates, and I — successfully thus far — endeavour to never be the weakest link on any team that I am a part of. At times I feel like the subject of this joke.

My lack of a formal education was a source of shame until I had enough opportunities to accrue some self confidence. Every performance review that I have ever received, in any position, has been glowing. These days, I tend to wear my weird path to professional success as a badge of honor. I’m sure that many of us have worked with people who have impressive degrees but no proof of the skill or determination that those degrees are supposed to represent. I am living proof the information age makes it possible — with the appropriate level of obsession and determination — to work and thrive as an intellectual without participating in traditional education. That’s pretty cool if you ask me, but I also don’t discount the amount of work and preserverence it takes to obtain any kind of a degree. I respect every person who has done it.

I decided to write this blog because a friend of mine will be interviewing me soon about how I live my life and I wanted to not only freshen up my memory, but think of some questions I get asked regularly, and perhaps also help to reduce the stigma around people like me who choose to live comfortably in physical anonymity while also positively contributing to society and to the economy. I feel fully capable of living a good and productive life as a part of our society. That wasn’t as easy for shut-ins in the past, so I understand why the stigma persists.

I will try to remember update this blog post with that interview link whenever it gets posted.

The Pros of my Lifestyle

I recognize that some of these pros are handcuffed with obvious cons, but I will list them anyway.

• I have very low levels of daily stress.
• I don’t wait in lines.
• I don’t pay for haircuts.
• I don’t have to get ready to go out or worry about being late.
• I don’t pay for a car, car insurance, car maintenance, or ride shares.
• My wardobe is Jobsian and rarely needs refreshing.
• I never wear uncomfortable clothes.
• I don’t have to buy shoes at all, although I keep a pair just in case. I don’t even know what they look like off the top of my head.
• I never encounter rude people in the wild.
• I don’t worry about pick-pockets or thieves.
• Palantir probably doesn’t have an up to date photo of me in their database.
• I don’t spend money on overpriced events or theater tickets.
• I don’t get pressured to attend voluntary social events like birthday parties, weddings, or work functions.
• I am automatically waived from jury duty due to my disability status. (This kind of sucks because I would be great at it, but still.)
• I will probably never get into a car accident.
• I will probably not die in a mass shooting. (Sorry. Dark but true. USA! USA!)
• I get sick less often than most people.
• I don’t get sun burns and I will likely not die of skin cancer.
• I will probably never be struck by lightning.
• I will probably never drown.
• I don’t encounter pollution and nearly all of the air I breathe is filtered.
• All of the water I drink is filtered and from the same source.
• I only feel uncomfortably hot or cold when our heat pump is broken.

Frequently Asked Questions

Here are the questions that friends and colleagues tend ask me when they find out that they will never know what I look like. I will to try to list them in order.

Q: Do you ever miss the outside world?

Not really, no. I miss movie theaters sometimes but it’s only because I have to duck spoilers until stuff comes out on streaming and I am a cinephile, so missing out on the IMAX experience sucks once or twice a year. Go figure the only place I miss is a dark room.

When I say this life suits me, it’s not just copium. I don’t really have a truly happy memory of any event I attended in the past. Raves, parties, concerts, amusement parks, fairs, carnivals — whatever. I was just kind of there and usually a little uncomfortable to deeply uncomfortable. I was always happiest when I got back home and sat down in front of a computer.

I have been using and loving computers since the late 80’s as a little kid. I have been on the Internet since 1995 and for two years before that when I was 12 years old, I was chatting on a BBS. I always felt more comfortable online than I ever did in the physical world. The Internet feels like my home.

Q: What if I just show up at your house one day?

If you happened to somehow see me inside of my house through a window, because I wouldn’t open the door, I would have panic attacks, lose sleep thinking about it, and immediately cut off contact with you forever. If you are a co-worker, I would do the same thing and then start looking for another job.

Q: What if I was blind folded? Could we be in the same room?

No, it doesn’t work like that. My brain is doing gymnastics and it will rifle through an internal index card of possibilities to find the scenario in which the blindfold comes off, or you graze against my face somehow and create a mental image of me. I would be more comfortable than if you weren’t blind folded, but I think that it would still cause an anxiety attack.

Q: Could you travel in a car if nobody could see you?

Nope. I used to be able to travel to see friends back when the anxiety wasn’t as bad but then I started getting anxious about having to use the bathroom while on the road. It got to the point that the negative thought spirals would cause me to have to use the bathroom by thinking about it, regardless of going when I left the house, and the result was a couple of hours-long anxiety attacks before I stopped traveling.

Q: Could you travel in a car if you were drugged and incapacitated?

I mean, creepy, but probably? Whatever is on the other side of that car ride is still likely to be nothing I want any part of, though. If I ever have to move for some reason, this is likely going to be put to the test.

Q: How do you have friends?

Pretty easily. We play video games together several times per week and we talk every day. I watch movies with three of my friends almost every night and that’s not an exhaggeration. If you look at my Letterboxd profile, I watch a ton of stuff and almost never alone. We either watch them steaming over Discord or we meet in VR using the Bigscreen VR app to watch stuff in a virtual theater. We have a big movie night every Tuesday that usually has somewhere between 8 and 12 friends in attendence.

I’m willing to bet that my social life is far more active than most people in my age range.

Q: Where do you get groceries?

I use delivery apps for most things because having my wife do all of the shopping gives me a 1950’s brand of “the ick”. We also have completely different diets, so it works out. I order food once per week, usually the same stuff, and I always tip well. I don’t really order things outside of what’s on my regular weekly grocery list.

Q: What if there is a fire?

I honestly don’t know and I hope I never find out. In the event of a fire, I would likely be dealing with dueling survival instincts and I probably wouldn’t leave my house until the last possible moment. It’s not fun to think about.

Q: What if you need medical assistance?

This is also a problem. I am working with a therapist to be able to travel in the event of an emergency, but otherwise, there are services that provide healthcare for homebound folks. For example, an EMT traveled to my home to provide me with a COVID-19 vaccine and a nurse practioner visited one time for another temporary medical issue. I can’t afford preventative medicine anyway. USA! USA!

Q: Why did you need a COVID-19 vaccine if you don't leave your house?

My wife is a medical professional and regularly works around a lot of sick people and their families.

She has had COVID-19 multiple times and quarantining worked for all but one infection. Luckily it happened after the vaccine was developed. I had a cough and a sore throat for a couple of months but that’s as serious as it got. Yeah! Science, bitch!

Q: Wife? How do you have a wife?

I met her before I stopped leaving my house when I was 19 and we didn’t get married until several years after I discovered that being around other people was causing my anxiety and panic attacks. She still loved me when I stopped going places and she has stuck with me. I did make sure that she understood what she was getting into before the big commitment. We got married around 5 years after we met.

I will say that she is an introvert herself and I’m not sure that it would work otherwise, but maybe so. She rules. She’s also the proof that exposure therapy works because she’s the only human being in the world that I am comfortable enough to be around on a daily basis. My wife truly feels like an extension of me.

Q: Would you feel anxious around your wife if you didn't see her for 2 years?

Hopefully this never happens and I don’t know.

Q: Do you have a driver's license?

Yes I do. I have been renewing it without a photo update for awhile. I’m not sure how I will handle it when I need to renew the photo, but I will likely have to just grin and bare it because it’s a requirement for employment, voting, and several other adult-coded things.

In Closing

If you have questions that aren’t covered here, feel free to ask them in the comments below and I’ll answer them and update this post. I’m pretty open about all of this.