Content Warning: This piece discusses childhood exposure to parental alcoholism and violence. The material avoids graphic detail, yet it addresses fear and hypervigilance that some readers may find difficult.
This piece belongs to A Human Geography of the Self, a series that reads my own life through the concepts geographers use to understand how people and places make one another. It draws on my creative doctoral and master’s work on alonetude: intentional, embodied solitude as a healing practice.
“I knew the house the way a sailor knows a coast: where the safe water was, and where the rocks waited.”
I am eight years old, lying very still in my bed, and I am reading the house. The furnace clicks. A floorboard settles in the hall. Somewhere below me a cupboard closes, and from the exact weight of that sound I can tell you what kind of evening this will be. I have a map in my head, drawn in a child’s careful hand, and on it every room carries a colour. The kitchen after a certain hour is red. The space behind the couch is green. The route from my bedroom to the back door, the one that avoids the third stair because the third stair speaks, is a thin safe line I could walk in the dark. I knew the house the way a sailor knows a coast: where the safe water was, and where the rocks waited.
I have spent a good part of my adult life trying to understand that map, and why I have never quite been able to put it down. The vocabulary I needed, it turns out, was waiting in human geography all along. Geographers have a name for the inner picture each of us carries of the places we move through. They call it a mental map or a cognitive map (an internal, personal representation of an environment that we build from experience and then use to find our way and to decide where it is safe to go). The map I drew of my childhood house was a cognitive map of the most urgent kind. I want to tell you about the field that studies such maps, and about what it has helped me understand.
The Maps We Carry Inside
For a while in the middle of the last century, a current within the discipline called behavioural geography set out to study exactly this: how people come to know the environments they live in, and how that knowledge shapes what they do next. Argent and Walmsley (2009), reviewing the rise and quiet fall of this approach, describe its central conviction plainly. Behavioural geography rested on the idea that we could understand people and places better by attending to the psychological processes through which individuals come to know the world around them (Argent & Walmsley, 2009). It held that human beings construct images of the environment in their minds while they move through it, and that these images go on to influence their behaviour (Argent & Walmsley, 2009). My eight-year-old self was doing fieldwork in precisely this sense, building an image of my home and letting that image govern every step I took.
What strikes me, reading Argent and Walmsley (2009), is their insistence that behavioural geography was far from a crude stimulus-and-response model. They take care to separate it from any mechanical account that would reduce a person to a switch tripped by the world. Behaviour, they argue, emerges from a dense weave of attitudes, beliefs, values, perceptions, and images, and from the way people make decisions within the constraints their society imposes (Argent & Walmsley, 2009). I find that distinction tender and true. My vigilance was beyond a reflex. It was an interpretation, a child reading meaning into footsteps and shadows, building a theory of where harm lived and acting on it. That is cognition, beyond instinct. It was the work of a small geographer doing her best to survive her terrain.
The maps people carry are seldom neutral. Thompson (2020), writing about how migrants imagine the places they might move to, describes mental maps as something other than fixed cartographic representations. They are, she writes, the imaginative ways individuals and groups understand spatial meaning in the world (Thompson, 2020). Everyone, she notes, carries around imperfect mental images of place, and recalls them when a decision must be made, using their spatial information to choose, though seldom in a purely rational way (Thompson, 2020). My map was imperfect in exactly her sense. It was saturated with feeling, weighted toward danger, drawn by a nervous system that preferred a hundred false alarms to a single missed one. It was the imaginative work of a child making spatial meaning out of fear.
When Home Is the Place You Map for Danger
Here I have to say the hard thing plainly, because the whole point of this map is that I drew it inside the one place that is supposed to need no map at all. We are taught that home is refuge. The geographers who study this have spent decades showing how often that teaching conceals the opposite.
Warrington (2001), in a study that has stayed with me, describes the geographies of domestic violence as a series of enlarging yet restricted spaces. Although the social construction of home is as a place of safety and support, she writes, in reality it can be a place of violence, where those who live in fear become spatially restricted to the home itself or to its immediate environs (Warrington, 2001). She found that even those who break free and reach a place of refuge continue to live spatially restricted lives, still mapping their world around a danger that follows them (Warrington, 2001). When I read Warrington, I understood that the thin safe line I walked to the back door was geography in her exact sense: a life narrowed and organized by the need to stay out of harm’s way inside my own home.
The philosopher Joshua Price (2002) sharpens this further, and his words gave me language for a feeling I had carried wordlessly for decades. The home, he argues, is ideologically understood as a place of safety and refuge, and that very ideology cloaks the violence that happens within it (Price, 2002). He writes about how a person living with the threat of violence works constantly to arrange the domestic space so as to avoid setting off the one who might harm them, living, as one woman in his study put it, as though walking a tightrope where one small slip brings danger (Price, 2002). That tightrope is a map. It is the same map I drew. To live in such a home is to become a cartographer of another person’s moods, charting the daily weather of a house so that you might survive it.
This is why I name my childhood vigilance as intelligence rather than as damage. I was reading my environment with great accuracy under conditions that demanded it. The map I carried was a rational instrument, a means of moving through dangerous terrain, and giving it that dignity is the beginning of being able, slowly, to set it down.
The Geography Closest In
There is one more turn I want to make, because the map I carried lived beyond my mind. It lived in my body. My shoulders still rise toward my ears at the sound of heavy footsteps. My breath still catches when a door closes hard. The cognitive map of threat was written into a startle, a scanning gaze, a tightened stomach, long before I had any words for it.
Geographers have come to take this seriously too. Bondi (2005), writing on what she and others call emotional geographies (the study of how feeling shapes, and is shaped by, our experience of space and place), traces how feminist geographers challenged the old assumption that women’s fear was irrational, and showed instead that fear is generated by and expressive of wider social relations rather than being merely a private interior state (Bondi, 2005). Fear, in this work, permeates environments as much as it fills a single frightened mind (Bondi, 2005). My map was emotional geography in exactly this sense. The feeling and the floor plan were one thing. The danger I charted was real, structural, and located, beyond a flaw in my imagination.
I went to Loreto, decades later, to begin redrawing this map. Thirty days alone by the Sea of Cortez, learning to let a room be only a room, to let silence be safety rather than the held breath before a storm. The old map has yet to fully fade, and I have made a kind of peace with its persistence. It kept a child alive. I can honour it for that and still, morning by morning, sketch the lighter map beside it, the one where the safe water spreads wider every year, and the rocks draw back toward the far edge of the chart.
I knew the house the way a sailor knows a coast. I am learning, now, to know safety the same way.
References
Argent, N., & Walmsley, D. J. (2009). From the inside looking out and the outside looking in: Whatever happened to “behavioural geography”? Geographical Research, 47(2), 192-203. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1745-5871.2009.00571.x
Bondi, L. (2005). Making connections and thinking through emotions: Between geography and psychotherapy. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 30(4), 433-448. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-5661.2005.00183.x
Price, J. M. (2002). The apotheosis of home and the maintenance of spaces of violence. Hypatia, 17(4), 39-70. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1527-2001.2002.tb01073.x
Thompson, M. (2020). Mental mapping and multinational migrations: A geographical imaginations approach. Geographical Research, 58(4), 388-402. https://doi.org/10.1111/1745-5871.12435
Warrington, M. (2001). “I must get out”: The geographies of domestic violence. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 26(3), 365-382. https://doi.org/10.1111/1475-5661.00028
Academic Lens
This post translates the concept of the cognitive map from behavioural geography into a Scholarly Personal Narrative account of childhood hypervigilance, grounding the personal in peer-reviewed journal scholarship rather than a survey textbook. Argent and Walmsley’s (2009) retrospective supplies the disciplinary foundation, defining behavioural geography as the study of how people build mental images of their environment and act upon them, and crucially distinguishing it from reductive stimulus-response behaviourism, which licenses the reading of childhood vigilance as interpretation rather than mere reflex. Thompson’s (2020) account of mental maps as imaginative, affectively weighted, and imperfect representations extends the concept beyond wayfinding toward the emotionally saturated map this post describes. The argumentative centre draws on feminist geographies of the home: Warrington (2001) reframes domestic violence as a spatial condition of enlarging yet restricted space, and Price (2002) exposes the ideological cloaking by which the home’s reputation as refuge conceals the violence within it, together giving scholarly form to the experience of mapping one’s own house for danger. Bondi (2005) supplies the emotional-geographies frame, situating fear as a spatial and relational phenomenon rather than a private irrationality, which connects this post to the wider Geography of Fear series and to the feminist insistence that the body is the nearest scale at which space is lived. Read through Scholarly Personal Narrative (Nash, 2004), the cartographic metaphor operates as both lived memory and analytic claim: the map is the argument.
