Interview with Maya Burris, author of "This is Agoraphobia"

Interview with Maya Burris, author of This is Agoraphobia

---

• Question: Could we start off by having you tell me a bit about yourself and your piece?

"I’m Maya, 17 years old, 5”9, virgo, self proclaimed writer and overall badass. I am also a gardener, a painter, a lover and a fighter, a baker, and candlestick-maker (not really although that’d be kind of cool). I write to lay to rest the thoughts that stick in my head and feel important, and to try and communicate those ideas with other people in a way that resonates.
The piece I submitted to Pufferfish is an excerpt from a much larger story I’ve been writing for about 4 years. The story is about the general theory of relativity, as I see it apply to people. As Stephen Hawking says in his book, A Brief History of Time, the general theory of relativity is the idea that,  'Space and time are now dynamic quantities: when a body moves, or a force acts, it affects the curvature of space and time- and in turn the structure of spacetime affects the way in which bodies move and forces act. Space and time not only affect but also are affected by everything that happens in the universe' (38). To me, this applies to the universe at large, but also to the worlds that exist in every person, made up of all the people they interact with and all the influence they have on what happens. I think that a lot of people believe that they don't matter in the world. My story, which I currently call ‘Rollerblades’ is about a boy named Lincoln who suffers from agoraphobia and OCD. He experiences the world through the window in his room, and he thinks that he doesn't matter beyond that space. In the story, there’s a girl who rollerblades around the court in front of his house every evening, and eventually Lincoln sees her enough to have her appearance incorporated into his OCD routines. He sees her everyday, and although they never speak, she knows he’s there and quietly acknowledges his presence. One day she stops showing up, and his desire to know what happened to her builds over time until it overcomes his crippling fear to leave his house. He slowly starts his quest to find her, and he meets different people along the way, all of which he’d seen from his window before but never known. The story is told from the perspective of five different characters, and you can see as it progresses all the ways they unwittingly influence each others lives. How the littlest kindness can save someone’s day, or the most nonchalant thoughtlessness can hurt someone deeply. I want people to read my story and to know that they’re an important part of the world. That everything they are, and everything they do affects everything around them.
The chapter I submitted of this story is called ‘This is Agoraphobia’ it describes Lincoln’s first experience with mortality when he’s in middle school, and how frightening the uncertainty of random death is to him. This triggers his fear of leaving his home, the only place where he feels he knows exactly what’s going to happen, and that desire for control is what continues to push his anxiety to form OCD habits to try and make a routine for his life where he’ll never have to guess what’s going to happen next. I chose this piece to submit because I felt that it stood alone as a strong piece on irrational fears and how they develop. I liked that it kept the narrator’s gender and name unknown, because if felt like it gave a more general relatability to the story."

• Question: A lot of the dangers you describe in your piece are things which hint at a physical accident, a death caused by some other force: ice, cars, trees, stairs. You didn’t describe harm which could come from other people. Did you find yourself afraid of people outside your home as well? Or do you think there is something about the nature of natural accidents which is especially scary to you?

​The reason I chose to focus on natural causes of death is because I think there's something very frightening about the idea that death can be random. Danger from other people is typically more targeted, there's a reason behind it. But there's no grudge in a tree branch falling from the sky. There's no way to predict or avoid that sort of thing. The fear of unknown my narrator feels overtake his life is something I think everyone experiences in some way. It’s seeings the fact that anything could happen through a lense of anxiety, and fearing that that ‘anything’ could be something bad. 

• Writing is often something people use to process or work through things. Why did you decide to write this piece/has it done anything for you?

This story in it’s entirety is the love child of many different epiphanies I’ve had in my life. I started writing it after struggling with my own first experience with loss and the aftermath of feeling that people didn't matter. I felt like it was unfair that the world just went on after someone died, they still showed the same dumb tv shows, the sun still rose and set, and people continued on with their lives. I believed that we as individuals didn't matter to the world, that our lives and deaths didn't make a difference. It made it very difficult to care about how I affected things. But eventually I came to see things differently, I saw how one person can change a life, change the world, or just change a mind. I started to see how important that impact is. I wanted to write about it. This story has absolutely helped me process through a thousand things. All of my characters are extensions of myself, and writing out the ways they deal with the problems and difficulties that I’ve had in my life has always helped me find my own solutions.

• How did you end up getting over your fears of the unknown?
  1. Was writing this part of it?
  2. Is publishing it a part of it?
  3. What does being published mean to you?
  4. Is there any advice you can give to those who struggle with irrational fears?

I don't have agoraphobia, I’m not afraid to leave my house, but the deep rooted fear that that phobia stems from is something that I think is inside everyone. It’s the fear of not knowing what’s next, the fear of change, and loss of control in our lives. It took going through a multitude of unexpected and uncontrollable changes in my life for me to finally overcome my fear (to some extent because I don't think I’ll ever not be a little apprehensive). Now I know change in a different light, I can see the stability and safety in it’s constance. Writing about Lincoln’s fears definitely helped me to see how to overcome my own. As the story continued I wrote more and more beginnings and endings within it, and I saw the comfort that could be gained from that. The knowledge that everything ends and changes. That every bad thing in your life will one day be gone, so you just have to soldier through as best you can, and keep your eye on the light at the end. And also the knowledge that everything good ends, that you have to appreciate things while you have them.
I might not communicate all that in the story I put into Pufferfish, but I hope that the people who read it at least feel a solidarity with Lincoln. Those who know how it feels to be afraid of what comes next, who’ve had panic attacks and not known what to do, who’ve sometimes wanted to lock themselves away. I think the best way to understand your own problems is to see the other people who have them. To know you’re not alone. Once you’re someone else’s support in helping them see that they’ll be okay, it’s a lot easier to believe that the same is true for you.

• I like your answers. I also read some of Stephen Hawking's books that changed my perception of a lot of things. The Grand Design's chapter on Alternative Histories fucked me up enough that I ended up talking about it to someone I cared about,  but who frankly didn't give a fuck, in the quiet halls of The Union. I also appreciate the fighter/lover part. We definitely test  our relationships every day. Its sometimes difficult to keep in mind that everyone battles for the love that consumes them. There is a short fiction piece I think you might appreciate from Shira Erlichman, (poet & songwriter and author of Be/live and co-author of Bull Gouging the Matador, also featured poet in both editions of  Un-common Core) she wrote it last summer at the Summer Institute Writing Workshops at The Neutral Zone "It is not so much to say I loved her as to say I was the patron to her breathing."

​"The Grand Design is a permanent fixture on my bedside table, and I was also completely fucked up by the alternate histories chapter, not to mention the one titled, 'What is Reality' pretty much made me reconsider everything I know. Science, cosmology and the philosophies that can be drawn from them are things I have to constantly restrain myself from going off on tangents about. Most of my friends don’t appreciate a thirty minute lecture on Feynman's sum as much as I would expect them to. "

---

To learn more about Maya, This is Agoraphobia, and her writing, join us at the release of The First Edition of Pufferfish Magazine, in which she is featured, Saturday, April 30th at 310 E. Washington St. ​(see Facebook event for more details)