I'm afraid of closed-in spaces. I'm afraid of the sensation of free-falling. I'm therefore really afraid of rollercoasters. I'm afraid of medical procedures being performed on me that I can't watch, and after getting my first tattoo I don't even know how cool I'd be with getting a tattoo somewhere I couldn't watch, and have adjusted my future tattoo plans accordingly. I'm more afraid of spiders and insects than anyone I've ever met, and I'm actually equally afraid of dead ones, so killing them doesn't resolve the issue. When I once had to call a friend to extract a centipede from my apartment, my instructions were clear that he did not squish it, but if he had to squish it, then please tell me that he did not squish it but gently took it outside, setting it free and whispering soothingly to never, ever set one of its billion feet in my apartment again or it would immediately die of bug plague. (Interesting random memory: when I was a little kid, I remember praying every night before going to sleep, "God, if there are any bugs in my room, please do not let me ever see them." Even as a small child who believed in His infinite powers, I still felt like asking for my room to already be free of bugs would be too tall of an order.) I'm so afraid of bees that I do a frantic dance whenever they are around, causing people to ask if I'm allergic, to which I respond, "No, I've been stung multiple times over the years, it just pinches a little" and then continue to frantically thrash around and cause other people to evacuate my vicinity as quickly as they can.
But most of all, I'm afraid of heights.
Having grown up in Illinois, I didn't realize how afraid I was until I was on a work trip to California in the summer of 2016. I had a couple free weekends, and since this was at the beginning of one of my many hopelessly failed initiatives to get super fit, I decided I was gonna do a SERIOUS MOUNTAIN HIKE. I Googled serious mountain hikes around Pasadena, found one on a hiking website (there are people who are really all about hiking, who knew), tried to write down directions, realized there were more than two turns so I was screwed anyway, and decided I'd just take an Uber to that mountain and, hike up it, or whatever.
So, my Uber driver takes me up some curvy roads right around the edge of the mountain where you can't see anything in front of you because there's ALWAYS a curve right in front of you, and I was already kind of thinking this mountain life is insane and how do people do this and the edge is like RIGHT THERE and if even a ... mountain squirrel (I don't know much about California wildlife) jumps in front of the car we could very easily plummet to our deaths. But, I had already paid for this Uber so I tried not to think about the possible imminent death to my immediate right.
Then, he drops me off at a little parking lot and drives off. I look down at my phone and realize - hey - I don't have a signal up here. My phone doesn't work. I have absolutely no way of getting back to the hotel. Walking to civilization was not an option because that narrow curvy death road was not walk-on-able, so I was just going to have to wait until someone got back to one of the cars in the parking lot, give them an ocular patdown to assess how murdery they looked, and depending on my assessment, ask them to give me a ride all the way back to my hotel in Pasadena.
But ... I'd paid to come out here to do a SERIOUS MOUNTAIN HIKE and I was gonna do one. Hell, maybe I'd meet someone in the estimated 7 hours it would take me to hike up the mountain and back and we could become carpool buddies.
Maybe fifteen minutes into my hike, I made the mistake of looking down. There wasn't a whole lot between me and the edge. And that would be a steep fall, and you know how I feel about the sensation of falling. As soon as you envision something bad that could easily happen to you, you start to completely distrust your ability to prevent that bad thing from happening, and the bad thing is all you can see. Or maybe just I'm like that. That's why when I get off the blue line at Damen and the train is whizzing away and the walkway to the exit is extremely narrow, all I can see is me getting jostled or falling and getting run over by the train and hence sometimes I just freeze up and just stand there motionless until the train has passed, which is the PERFECT way to make friends with other commuters on a narrow walkway.
So, I stopped trusting my legs, and as soon as I stopped trusting them, they turned into jelly. I realized I had jelly legs that didn't work and I was fifteen minutes up the mountain and I couldn't keep going up so I'd have to go back but going back I was also still going to be close to the edge and I couldn't do it. I began to feel symptoms of panic and sat there in this place of terror, far away from the edge as I could squeeze myself, hugging my knees to my chest.
I sat there for quite some time as it was my only option. During this time, another group of hikers came back from the other direction and had to maneuver around me, which they did with no signs of terror or unease. They had a dog and a boy who looked about 12 with them. They also had what looked like serious hiking gear. Some people are really into hiking. It's a thing. You'd think that would make me think I could get up and go back down too, trailing them, but I just reasoned this corn-fed Midwesterner lacked the natural abilities of these Pacific superhumans and therefore was still just as likely to fall to my death as I'd initially imagined.
Finally, I crab walked back to the parking lot, having shed my pride as well as any illusions that I was ever going to be able to do a serious mountain hike. I ended up just jogging around that immediate area on some flat paths and finally found a nice couple who happened to be Pasadena-bound themselves and could give me a ride.
Fast forward to spring 2017. I joined a Ragnar team. As part of yet another one of my many failed initiatives to become superfit. If you don't know what a Ragnar is, it's a relay that is essentially a two-day experience of extreme teamwork, exercise, sleep deprivation, dehydration, and foam rolling that basically results in you soul-bonding with the other 11 people on your team from sharing the aforementioned experiences and being together in a van for a really long time. The soul-bond lasts for maybe a few weeks to a month after the race, with pretty constant activity on the text thread between all the teammates and dreaming up what our next awesome adventure together will be. Then, you know. people got lives, and those of us who don't actually have lives and continue to bother the rest of the team start to be confronted with restraining orders or the less confrontational and extreme "new phone who dis."
But, when we were still coming off the high of our last race in October, people were shouting out race ideas with the enthusiasm of a third-grade class who'd just been asked if anyone had any stories to share about something embarrassing their sibling had done. The only race that people really jumped on board for was one that's taking place this June in Glacier Bay, Montana. I didn't really know anything about Montana except I think John Denver liked its sky or something, and I like skies, but not flying in them because that's another phobia I have. Possessed by the post-Ragnar soul bond and also within the powerful grip of FOMO, I signed up for the race.
Recently I did a Google image search for Glacier Bay. And I realized this might not be the smartest vacation idea for someone who had to put her hands over her eyes for some parts of The Last Jedi because good god those hills are STEEP, how did you survive on this island this long, Luke?
But I'm still gonna do it. I'm so gonna do it. It's going to be beautiful and my legs are not going to turn to jelly.
So, I have until June to get over my fear of heights.
...but how the heck do you do that in Illinois?
I think it would be good to start out just by finding something I can walk along the edge of (NOT the blue line). But I'm not even sure what that would be. Realizing I can trust my legs to not fail me would be key.
Other things I've thought of or have been recommended:
- Indoor rock climbing walls
- Going to the top of a tall building with a glass observational area
- There's this skydiving simulation thing?
1,000 Mollie points for John Denver references.
ReplyDeleteExperimenting on my most recent mountain hike, I found that listening to the Fellowship of the Ring soundtrack replaced all fear impressions with a purposeful sense of adventure.