Drawn to the Edge: A Reflection on My Fear of Heights
A few years ago, I realized that I was afraid of heights. Standing near windows in high buildings, walking and driving on bridges and ramps, looking over balconies. It wasn’t a fear that came on all at once. No, it was a slow simmer that reached boiling point. As a child, I had begged my father to ride rollercoasters with me, leapt from monkey bars.
We drove to Chicago the summer before the pandemic, crossing the Ambassador Bridge between Windsor and Detroit. When I tell friends this story, I turn it into a party trick, linger on my children’s adorable reactions to my panic, on the family sitcom banter that took place. But when I remember it, I remember the sweat dripping from my hairline, down my face. My hands, clammy, barely able to grasp the steering wheel, the lights of oncoming cargo trucks shining into my bleary eyes. In Chicago, still shaken from the Ambassador Bridge, I found my energy pulled to the realization that all the downtown roads had tunnels beneath them. Double decker roads, hollow underneath. Hollow. Not solid.
We walked the streets along the Chicago River, marveling at the architecture. Halfway up a set of stairs that led from a road along the river to a bridge above it, my legs nearly gave way beneath me. Nausea flooded through my veins. I was acutely aware of the thin strip of metal beneath my feet, and the emptiness beneath it. Hollow. Not solid.
Months later, I started to panic at the thought of driving (or riding) on any heightened surface: the low, wide bridges that spanned the Ottawa river, separating Ontario from Quebec; the Gardiner Expressway, rising on stilted pillars above the Toronto roads, between the skyscrapers that loomed around it; the highways dug into the sides of mountains in Turkiye between Bursa and Izmir, impeccably maintained and perfectly paved, but so breathtakingly high my breath would leave my lungs and I would close my eyes as my husband drove, willing the reality of our metres above sea level out of existence; the winding, narrow lanes Pacifica, California, overlooking the ocean with sheer drops of craggy rock.
My catastrophic thinking was at its worst when heights were involved. Every turn was an opportunity to lose control of the speeding vehicle, careening over the too-low railings to our demise. And if the roads were straight, well, who was to say they were properly engineered? What was to stop them collapsing altogether? How could this much concrete be held up with nothing underneath it? Don’t try to convince me of the physics. The physics are no match for my phobia.