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The Psychological Effects of Living in a Small Space – Liza Achilles
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What’s it like to have your world confined to a small space? I think most of us know, having lived through the past year. As I mentioned in a previous blog post, I read the book Solitary, by Albert Woodfox, out of curiosity as to whether there were any lessons to be learned in looking at the pandemic experience through the lens of the solitary confinement experience. Obviously, the solitary confinement experience is equivalent to torture, whereas living through a pandemic could be, depending on your circumstances, merely stressful. So these are two very different things. Still, today I want to write on the psychological effects of living in a small space. I would like to look at this from three diverse perspectives: (1) a tiny prison cell, (2) a tiny house, and (3) a bedroom that you don’t leave as often as you used to. Then I’d like to compare these three different situations. The Psychological Effects of Living in a Small Space in Prison Closed Cell Restricted, or CCR, is the name of one of the solitary confinement blocks where Albert Woodfox spent a large portion of his life. He was first put in solitary confinement after a white man was murdered, and the prison authorities were preparing to falsely accuse him of the crime. They wanted to frame him because he was a Black Panther activist who was striving for more humane treatment for all prisoners. But in the eyes of the authorities, of course, he was a troublemaker for attempting to organize other prisoners and encouraging them to take action. Woodfox was placed in solitary confinement and remained in various solitary confinement cells for over 40 years. It took only a month for the severe psychological effects of living in a small space to reveal themselves: “After about a month in CCR I was sitting on my bunk when I started sweating, and the walls of my cell started to move toward me at the same time. My clothes tightened around my body. I took off my shirt and pants but still felt like I was being squeezed, strangled. The ceiling was pressing down on me. It was hard to breathe, hard to think, hard to see. I forced myself to stand. I took a few steps, trying not to fall. At the end of my cell I turned and walked back to the cell door. I turned and continued, pacing back and forth for several minutes, maybe an hour. Eventually I was so tired I lay on the bunk and fell asleep. After the first couple of times this happened I started recognizing when it was coming on; my clothes tightened and I started to sweat. The atmosphere pressed down on me. Sometimes it lasted five or ten minutes, other times it lasted for hours. The only thing that helped was to pace back and forth. Usually it didn’t end until I was so exhausted from walking back and forth that I could lie down. I continued having episodes like this one, which I later learned was claustrophobia, the whole time I was in prison. For about three years I slept sitting up, propped up against the wall, believing it helped prevent claustrophobic attacks. It seemed to lesson them but they never stopped.” Woodfox goes on to describe experiencing similar symptoms throughout his time in prison, even—perhaps surprisingly, or perhaps not—after he was released from prison and was living in a regular house that he could leave at any time. He did not experience these severe claustrophobic symptoms when he was in the regular prison population. It was only when he was locked down in a 6 by 9 foot cell for 23 hours a day that he began experiencing the horrors of claustrophobia. It sounds just awful. I can’t imagine. (Actually, I can, in a very small way. . . . I used to have claustrophobic nightmares regularly. I suppose I could psychoanalyze myself to try to figure out why. But, instead, why don’t I end this tangent for now. . . .) I give Woodfox so much credit for learning how to manage his symptoms. He found techniques that worked, and he used them. And he did this all on his own, without the benefit of help from a psychologist or other professional. The penalty for not learning to manage his claustrophobic symptoms, he knew, was as harsh as can be: “Every morning in CCR I woke up with the same thought: Will this be the day? Will this be the day I lose my sanity and discipline? Will I start screaming and never stop? Will I curl up into a ball and become a baby, which was an early sign of going insane? Every day I pushed insanity away. Every day I had to find that strength. I had to find within me the will and determination not to break.” Inhumane treatment forced him to either fight to stay sane, or lose his sanity. That was his choice: quite literally. The Psychological Effects of Living in a Small Space That You’ve Chosen for Yourself Let’s turn to a happy story. Things are completely different when you live in a small space because you have chosen to go minimalist. Things are completely different, also, when you have the freedom to leave your small space anytime you want. . . . However, during the pandemic, those who chose minimalism for their housing are perhaps in a tougher situation than others, given that it’s now dangerous to leave home. But let’s look at one person’s minimalist experience. A friend of mine lives in a tiny house in Maryland. It’s one of those adorable tiny houses that you’ve heard about. (It looks somewhat similar to this. This is not, that I know of, the company that made her house. I’m just giving an example of what her tiny house sort of looks like, outside and inside.) I’ve been inside of it, and the space is
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