What are your fears? Spiders? The dark? Heights? I do not fear any of these but what I do fear is the stairs. It is also called bathmophobia, according to a website called “verywell”. I cannot for the life of me go up or down the stairs without fearing for my life. This fear started when I was very young, around 5 or 6 years old. I was at my grandma’s house and I had wrapped my mom’s long scarf around myself and thought it was a great idea to go run down the stairs. You can probably imagine what happened next. I tumbled down the stairs, which by the way were not carpeted. I have a scar near my eye, which looks like the percentage sign to prove that I survived that fall. You would guess that I would have learned my lesson, but no I did not. I tumbled down the stairs again and I got a scar on my chin, which looks like a pen mark. I have two scars to prove what an idiot I was when I was young. My idiocy caused a fear of stairs.

My school has stairs everywhere, which scare the bejeezus out of me. I tend to run to the escalators but if they are full I have to use the stairs. I have been told to not look down at the stairs when I am walking up or down but I cannot stop myself from looking down. I actually had an incident a few weeks ago when I was walking up the stairs and forgot to look down, I ended up slipping and fell while walking up. I wanted to crawl into a hole and die! It was another thing falling when I was six but being twenty-three and falling is downright humiliating. The people around me were nice enough to ask if I was okay and help me up. I said my quick thanks and ran to my class. Now, you can see why I look down whenever I walk up and down the stairs.

I am afraid of the regular stairs but forget about the spiral staircase. There was only once in my lifetime I ever went down a spiral staircase, and I was praying to every god while walking down and telling myself that I will be fine. They were pretty but disguised as death! Never again did I use a spiral staircase. One would think that the bus staircase is pretty easy enough to go up and down, it only has two or three stairs. But, not for me. Those are even scary because there are close to each other, so it is easy to miss a step and tumble down and out of the bus. I am always careful of every type of staircase because who knows I can fall down and die. It is a stretch but it can happen.

I do not know if my fear will ever go away but I am learning to control my fear and take precautions whenever I approach a set of staircases. I have looked up several ways to conquer this fear. One of the tips is taking a deep breath before I start my journey up or down the stairs. If I had not wrapped my mom's scarf around and walked down the stairs, maybe I would be not deathly afraid of walking up or down the stairs.