Stuck in the lift yesterday, briefly. We managed to get out pretty soon, but for a few moments it seemed we wouldn’t. It’s a reasonably small box, but it had never even occurred to me to worry about that, even when it’s been a bit unreliable over the years.
More or less the instant it wasn’t moving or responding, doors firmly shut, implacable and unyielding, that blasé confidence vaporised, replaced by sheer chest-tightening panic. I think I might have started screaming if we were in there two more minutes.
This sort of thing has happened to me once or twice before over the years, and the aftershocks last a while. It’s not exactly fear of enclosed spaces, although it is that; but much more the dread of being trapped, the loss of agency maybe.
Each time afterwards it seems to me that it really boils down to a kind of existential claustrophobia, and the terror is not just of the cave or tunnel but of the constraints of physical reality itself. In bed at night, it’s a big bed in a big room, plenty of space to stretch out in, but the darkness presses in close, suffocating, the darkness of the grave, and the terror is of being trapped not just in the room and the bed but in this body, inside this skull, a very tightly enclosed space indeed, from which there is absolutely no escape, ever.
I generally try not to think about this at all, of course, like everyone, because it is quite unhelpful. But sometimes in a broken lift, in a darkened room, there it is.
And here it is.
And here it is again.
