My Inconvenient Way to Manage My Fear of Heights While Traveling
Growing up, I loved rollercoasters. Well, maybe “loved” doesn’t quite cut it. “Obsessed” seems more suitable. I can’t say I was as obsessed with rollercoasters as I was Harry Potter, but they were definitely a close second. Perhaps it was my ADHD begging for a thrilling experience to nourish my brain with the dopamine it was naturally and constantly starved of. Thus, every opportunity I had, from Disneyland to Knotts Berry Farm to Six Flags Magic Mountain, I was riding the fastest, largest, and scariest of their rides.
Yet, with, admittedly, a profound sense of irony, how does a girl who loved rollercoasters become afraid of heights?
It would give me no more pleasure than providing you with an answer to this befuddled mystery, but I can’t. I simply don’t know.
Maybe, with all the complex restraints and seatbelts, I felt safe on a rollercoaster, even though I certainly knew they could cause injuries or worse? But climbing a Mayan pyramid as a child? No, I was not safe. With no harness to keep me secure, I could fall. It was not an irrational fear.
But, as my mother has told me many times before, I was never one to allow my fears to hold me back. I only permitted those fears to come along for the ride.
Exposure Therapy. As it’s self-explanatory, it’s an easy treatment to remember for a General Psychology exam. If someone is petrified of spiders, then a psychotherapist would slowly expose them to everything spider-related, until they are eventually able to hold a tarantula in their hand. That doesn’t mean that their fear of spiders is gone, only that they have learned the means to better mitigate that fear.
Indeed, I knew Exposure Therapy was the key to conquering my fear of heights. But if riding rollercoasters with 255 ft drops wasn’t relieving me of that profound sense of doom when I climbed higher than two stories, then what would?
As it turns out, I was skipping the most critical steps, literally, “baby steps”. Like a person with a crippling fear of spiders may start simply by looking at photos of spiders, I had to start with looking up at tall structures from the relative safety of the ground.
This was easy enough, as I spent some of my teens and most of my 20’s living in Europe. I just had to look up at the top of every cathedral tower I had passed.
Unfortunately, this only seemed to make things worse. The lightheadedness, feelings of dread, increased heartrate, and respiration felt the strongest as I gazed up at those towers from the ground.
Go figure.
What was wrong with me? Generations of people and their fears helped by Exposure Therapy, and, yet, I couldn’t handle the first step?
How could I be so lucky!?
So, I went back to square one and was fresh out of brilliant ideas.
Maybe I was looking at all this wrong. Maybe as an oddly brave person, I had to skip imagining what I was afraid of and, instead, tackle it head on? The idea repulsed me and went against every instinct I had, along with throwing the psychology book out the window.
And yet, there I went, marching straight into St. Paul’s Cathedral in London and took my first step… of 528 steps to reach the top of its dome.
This was stupid, very stupid, I thought to myself, but I was committed. “Just don’t look down,” I told myself as I began climbing.
As I reached the Whispering Gallery, which is the inner rim of the dome, it was nearly impossible not to look down. Oh, joy! I was already out of breath and sweating from the climb, but then the shaking began.
Uh, oh.
I took a break by sitting on the stone benches lining the rim. Dumb decision, as it only made it that much easier to do the one thing I told myself not to do… That was the shortest “break” I ever took in my life.
I was about halfway to the top. If I gave in and returned to the ground, I would hate myself, possibly forever. There was really only one option. I was going to scale this cathedral’s dome, even if I had to shake all the way to the top.
And that is exactly what I did. Even the fresh air and stunning views from the top of the dome were unable to refresh me. “Do NOT look down!” I repeated to myself.
It was all I could do to make myself look as relaxed as possible as I had a friend snap a photo of me from the top of the dome.
I can’t recall how long I stayed atop St. Paul’s dome, but I doubt it was long. I had already pushed myself to the brink of breaking. Why push it any further?
A profound sense of pride (and relief) washed over me as I reached the ground floor.
I did it! Take that crippling fear!
And it was the last time I worried my fear of heights may best me.
Since then, I have actively sought out every possible tower or dome I could climb in a European city. And climb them I did, even if it required some shaking along the way.
As time went on, my ever-annoying companion I could never fully shake began to loosen its grip on me bit by bit.
Eventually I progressed to flying in a helicopter, skydiving, and then hot air ballooning in Lithuania and Luxor, Egypt. I learned how to “safely” look down by securing my camera strap around my neck and having my camera or my camera phone perform the terrifying feat of looking down instead of my own eyeballs. This way I could still capture some stunning photography.
If I had waited for textbook psychology to cure me, I’d still be standing on the cobblestones outside St. Paul’s, looking up with a racing heart and a sense of doom. Realizing I needed a head-on, slightly chaotic approach wasn’t just a win over my fear of heights; it was an awakening to and acceptance of how my brain actually works. I don’t navigate life in a tidy, linear progression, so why should I expect my anxiety to follow one? Standard exposure therapy might require baby steps, but sometimes, skipping straight to step 528 is the only way to get off the ground.
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