Anime is riddled with tales about overcoming obstacles. From action-packed quests of defeating malicious monsters to slice-of-life stories about learning new things, the medium is full of works where characters pursue their goals. What’s more, it can give us an intimate look at what people feel, think, and do when facing adversity. Conditions, disorders, and disabilities are becoming less marginalized and stigmatized, finding their footing in culture and art, including anime. And with this visibility comes the courage for us to persist through the struggles life presents. RELATED: How Disability Awareness in Anime Taught Me to Embrace My Own Conditions I live with several mental health comorbidities. One of them is agoraphobia, an anxiety disorder characterized by intense fear of situations that trigger panic or feelings of being trapped. This leads to avoidant behavior, such as not going to open or crowded spaces, taking public transportation, or even leaving the house. Today, on World Mental Health Day , I’m going to examine my relationship with agoraphobia, take a close look at anime characters living with the disorder, and reflect on how they inspire us to conquer the condition. After college, my friends and I naturally drifted apart, rarely keeping in touch. It’s not like we did so deliberately: People get busy. Things happen. Life moves so quickly that it can be hard to interact without a reason to do so. So nowadays, most of my friends are people I’ve met online. These have been some of the most genuine relationships of my life, and for someone who gets anxious in social situations, it’s been a way for me to satiate my need for connection. Overall, it’s pretty great. RELATED: What Watching Anime Taught Me About My Social Anxiety So, socially, I didn’t really need to leave my home to hang out with other people. Then, about three years ago, I started working for a fully remote company. Around the same time, I began getting groceries delivered for the sake of convenience. Two years ago, the same thing, but with my prescriptions. Gradually, without noticing, my world began to get smaller and smaller until one day I realized I hadn’t left my apartment in two whole months. I hadn’t seen someone physically in three. My life became confined to 630 square feet, all without a definitive reason why. And once I noticed, it became harder and harder to leave. It got so bad that I would only leave the property to take my cat to the vet or go to a doctor’s appointment. Simple things like getting the mail or taking out the trash became huge hurdles. And even when I wanted to go outside, I felt paralyzed to do so. I’d open and close the door five times before giving up and locking myself in the safety of my home. But this wasn’t the first time I had known about agoraphobia. There were several anime that had exposed me to the topic, though I didn’t give it much thought initially. The first time I watched Welcome to the NHK was before I struggled with the disorder and it struck me as such a sad, lonesome, and pitiable existence. Upon my second watchthrough, though, it became a painful reminder of what I now live with daily. The uncontrollable worrying, the excusing and avoiding, the refusal to dare change because the fear is just that insurmountable. It made me come to terms with the fact that my life had changed so much in the few years between watchthroughs, and what had previously been such a distant concept became a very real emotional experience. While I don’t necessarily follow the same logic as Sato Tatsuhiro, nor do I have the same hallucinations, the fact remains that we both are a little (or a lot) paranoid. We’re both terrified of the outside world: he from his conspiracy theories about the nefarious NHK and their quest to turn outcasts into recluses, and me from my fear that something awful will undoubtedly happen if I step out the front door. Sato, like me, lives alone (though I have two cats who keep me company). Watching his story a second time had me asking myself things like, “If my job weren’t remote, would I even be able to have one?” Seeing his world and how he interacts with it felt like intense foreshadowing. I began to question how many more steps I had left before I, too, would view things as completely impossible. When would I start refusing to take my trash and recycling out at all, letting them pile up? My agoraphobia already had me leading a less fulfilling life. Surely, all it would need would be a small push to send me over the edge and lose what little independence I still had. At this point, it wasn’t a show anymore. It was an intervention. But it isn’t just 20-something-year-old adult shut-ins like Sato that struggle with agoraphobia. The fact is, it can happen to anyone at any time. Another example is Kaede Azusagawa from Rascal Does Not Dream of Bunny Girl Senpai . Her condition stems from the intense online bullying she experienced in middle school, which also caused her Puberty Syndrome. She was a victim of insults and even death threats, and it isn’t hard to see why she would close herself off from the world. She logged off social media and stopped going to school… actually, she stopped going outside entirely. RELATED: How Bunny Girl Senpai Captured My Battle With Social Anxiety Similarly, I’ve experienced my fair share of harassment, most notably severe stalking that lasted for well over five years. While I remain pretty skeptical that this is the direct cause of my agoraphobia, I think it’s undeniable that it is a contributing factor to how I view the world, how safe it is, and how I can interact with it. These incidents leave scars, and it can take many years for them to manifest. Kaede’s story captures the very raw despair and genuine terror that we diagnosed with the disorder experience. Will we be able to keep ourselves safe? What happens if we get hurt again? When faced with questions like these, it makes so much sense that we’d want to protect ourselves from the pain and panic, even if it means living an isolated life. However, while Kaede is truly terrified of going outside, there is one thing that outweighs it on the fear scale: staying the same forever, or remaining stagnant. For me, too, the thing that scares me the most is not being able to return to where I used to be and grow even farther past that. The thought of never being able to do things I love — attending an anime convention, performing at an open mic, or just taking my cats to view cherry blossoms at the local park — fills me with a kind of mourning. It’s letting go of a future that I want more desperately than anything else. RELATED: How Watching Anime Became a Way to Explore My Mental Health But the key point I want to make here is that I’m not resigned to a life of isolation, and like Kaede, I can change. I have agency; I have choice. Even when things happen that are outside of our control and we’re exposed to such traumatic cruelties, we have the power to move forward and choose how we want to live despite them. Kaede shows us it doesn’t matter how long it takes or what it looks like. Her relationship with agoraphobia and her recovery are not linear. There are setbacks. But even then, she’s still making progress. It’s a thought that brings me a lot of comfort, especially in moments when I feel like I’ve failed. The fact that she persists rather than submitting to agoraphobia’s overbearing crush gives me the push I need to try something new. I get curious about what is possible, and it’s this curiosity that has helped me envision a different future. What makes conditions like these so challenging is the extent to which they make us feel isolated. I know for me, more than the feelings of shame and embarrassment that I was afraid to leave the house or concern over what others might think about me, what I struggled with most was the thought that my condition would burden the people I cared about. I didn’t want them to worry; I didn’t want them to go out of their way for me. And ultimately, it was this kind of thinking that made my agoraphobia worse, not better. RELATED: How Sports Anime Helps Me Take Care of My Mental Health However, both Kaede and Sato's stories demonstrate the importance of connection when we're doing something that requires courage. They don’t get better on their own. Yes, they’re the people putting in the work, but they have support from others to enable them to do so. And having watched how they handled their struggles, I made an attempt at mimicking their strategies. Most recently, I've been letting people into my world a bit more, trying to explain how hard things are unapologetically. While none of my IRL connections know of my agoraphobia yet, all of my online friends do. One of them offered to go on a small, 30-minute walk at the same time as me. We took pictures of what we saw and reported back on how things went. It struck me how much more bearable going outside was when I felt like someone was with me, even when I was physically alone. Ultimately, these anime offer intimate looks at agoraphobia and the kind of characters who struggle with it. Watching can be uncomfortable and overwhelming — just like how it feels to experience the condition first-hand. However, these characters’ stories offer a path forward, even when we lock our doors and bar ourselves in. They provide potential answers to those hard questions of how we can overcome, change, and grow into the people we want to be and lead the lives we want to live. I won’t lie, most of the time I’m still terrified of going outside. I still struggle with doing the things I want to do just because I want to do them. I’m still using that “have to” crutch to get out and about. But because of anime, I’m able to imagine a future where I’m not so trapped; I’m able to see that other people are fighting against the fear and putting in the work — and they’re succeeding. Moment by moment and piece by piece, we’re expanding our worlds, proving that the human spirit is far more radiant and resilient than we can imagine. All it takes is opening the door and a willingness to take those steps to move forward.
