Fear Fest: Heights!
OCTOBER 16th, Heights
“I may climb perhaps to no great heights, but I will climb alone.”
-Cyrano de Bergerac
Wow, can you believe we’ve made it half way through the month already? We’ve laughed, we’ve cried, we may have even peed a little. Sorry, I do that when I get excited. Today we’ll be talking about a fear that dates back to man’s first moments on Earth. Heights or acrophobia.
Acrophobia can be cause by a traumatic experience, but for the most it’s an inborn fear. Studies have shown that newborns will exhibit anxiety and stress when brought near a place with a significant drop. In another experiment with toddlers, it was shown that they would not crawl over a glass section of a floor that was placed over a hole.
Acrophobia can range in severity. I for example experience intense anxiety on step ladders. I can’t explain it. I can do fixed ladders, I can do rope ladders, even painter’s ladders, but step ladders scare the shit out of me. I guess I have a bunch of quirks like that. I will go sky diving, but I would never bungee jump. The only roller coasters I will go on are the old wooden ones, and even then, I will still avoid them.
Being weary around heights is a normal reaction. In the interest of self-preservation, we will experience a sort of vertigo or balancing problem. This is pretty much out brain yelling “Hey Fuck-Face. Get some solid ground beneath our feet ASAP or I quit!”
THE ANSWER: I’d like to say that facing your fear is the way to overcome them, but it has never worked for my hatred of step ladders. I made the mistake of telling the guys on a construction crew about this fear. They decided that to break me of the fear, I must be the one to go up the 20 foot ladder every time. The jobs we were doing were setting up large party tents. So there I was, on top of a ladder holding 40lbs of steel while people on either side of me attempted to attach more steel to the one I was holding. Most of the time, I would just concentrate on the casting in my hands. The end result was the ability to climb the ladder, but I still am sure I am going to die every time I do. While I may be able to conquer the fear to the objective viewer, it takes a lot of effort to do so. As far as roller coasters go, I can handle going forward at 90mph, I can handle going up and down, I can’t do both, it makes me nauseous.