I honestly have no idea where my gigantic fear of heights came from. To my knowledge, I’ve never fallen from a really high place, nor do I know anyone who has fallen from a really high place. That I remember, I’ve never had any kind of bad experience involving heights—and yet, I’m still terrified of them.
I think it all started while hiking in the Adirondacks. Don’t get me wrong, I love hiking, but walking up to the edge of a cliff just doesn’t sit well with me. On the mountains in the Adirondacks there are also a lot of fire towers that you can climb, and some are higher than others. It gets pretty windy on the top of a 3,000ft mountain, so the fire towers sometimes sway in the wind and sometimes feel like they’re going to fall over.
Those hikes are always the worst; I hike mostly with my cousins and brothers, and they all love to reach the top of the mountain and continue climbing up the fire towers. I stay at the bottom, looking up as they climb higher, wishing that I could go with them but knowing if I did that I’d probably cry. This past summer, we climbed two mountains that had fire towers on them—one 30-foot tower and one 60-foot tower—and I managed to make it to the top of both. But both climbs took me an obscene amount of time to climb; my cousins and brothers made it up in a matter of a minute, and I lagged behind and practically crawled up the splintery wooden stairs.
But it’s not just fire towers that scare me. Ladders, buildings, balconies, bridges—all of them scare me to death. I spent a week shadowing a reporter at the Philadelphia Inquirer, and she took me to an interview she was conducting in Philadelphia’s Comcast building… on the 54th floor. I didn’t think that I could be that terrified of a building that looks like a giant USB drive, but to this day I shudder just thinking about going up in that elevator and looking down on buildings I’ve looked up at all my life. I constantly felt like I was falling over backwards, and I couldn’t breathe fully until we were safely on the ground floor.
I have to close my eyes whenever I drive over a bridge, and the few times I’ve had to walk across them I’ve run faster than I ever had in my life. My heart starts racing just by climbing a simple, 6-foot ladder. Lighthouses are a strict, “No.” And I haven’t flown in an airplane since I was 3 years old, and I cringe to think what my next flying experience will be like.
I really have no logical reason to be afraid of heights, other than that that’s just how I am. It’s unfortunate and a drag, but there’s nothing I can really do about it except try to get over it.
And avoid the Grand Canyon at all costs.
