The girl was eleven years old. She was in her bedroom with her mother, who was sewing her a dress. When a mouse appeared and ran across the bedroom floor, and then across the girl’s bare feet, she wasn’t upset at first; she’d never been afraid of mice. But her mother reacted with raw panic, and the girl, witness to her mother’s sudden display of fear, was shocked and distressed.
As the girl grew up, she dated her new-found fear of mice to that day in her bedroom. Years passed, and her fear worsened. She turned twenty, then thirty. She paid obsessive care to preventing mice from entering her home, laying out traps and poison. She tried to avoid places where she had seen mice in the past. At night, she kept a tall pair of boots by her bed, the tops covered to prevent any mice from climbing up the sides and getting in, and if she had to get up in the night, she slipped her feet into the boots and stomped around the house to let the mice know she was coming. When her husband planned a business trip, she made arrangements to stay elsewhere—someplace safe, someplace mouse-free. Her mother’s fear had become her own.
In her thirties, she attempted cognitive therapy. As she entered her forties, she gave EMDR a try. Still, her fear of mice—known as musophobia—persisted, hanging over her, hemming her in.
Three years after her effort with EMDR, the woman approached Dr. Merel Kindt and her associates, in Amsterdam, to ask if they could help her. They agreed to try.
They brought the woman in for just one treatment session: exposure to a mouse, lasting for two minutes and fifteen seconds, and then a single pill. That was all it took. Within a month of the treatment, the woman could get up in the night and walk barefoot around her darkened house. Within three months, she was able to hold a mouse in her hands and even let it run across her bare feet. She was cured of her phobia. She was free.
This story, documented in a 2017 article in the journal Learning & Memory, seems far-fetched, too simplistic even to make compelling science fiction. But it’s true. Kindt’s team cured a woman’s three-decades-old fear of mice with a single pill: a forty-milligram dose of propranolol, a common beta-blocker often used to treat high blood pressure, migraines, and performance anxiety. And the banishment of the woman’s musophobia was not an isolated case. Kindt has worked her apparent miracle on people with a fear of spiders, a fear of snakes, and an array of other specific phobias.
After years of denial punctuated by occasional meltdowns, after identifying my fear and trying to force my way through it, after my homespun attempt at exposure therapy, I had, in the end, settled for negotiating a truce with my fear of heights, a compromise that I could live with. But when I heard about Merel Kindt’s single pill, I wondered, Could I be truly cured?
Now and then, when I was a little kid, I used to pass by stretches of sidewalk where fresh concrete had just been laid down. There would be a sheet of plastic stretched over the smooth, wet surface of each new length, and I would always be tempted to lift a corner and carve my initials with the end of a twig. I’d seen the evidence in other sidewalks over the years that this was something kids did, if they were bold enough to make their move before the concrete hardened.
Just before we left Saskatoon, before the move to Ottawa, I saw a fresh patch of sidewalk not far from our house. I remember being especially tempted then, wanting to leave my mark behind as I said goodbye to my home. I don’t remember if I actually went through with it or not, but I sort of doubt it. I was, after all, a cautious and inhibited child. I was terrified of being caught and getting into trouble.
The scientific consensus used to hold that our fear memories were like that sidewalk pavement: once formed, once fear memories had transitioned from short-term to long-term storage, they were fixed, set hard. They could degrade over time, but their basic nature was stable. It turns out, though, that under certain conditions, they can be reopened, becoming labile, or malleable, again. That discovery would eventually form the basis of Merel Kindt’s cure.
In the late 1990s, Karim Nader was a neuroscience post-doc working at New York University, under the fear-focused researcher Joseph LeDoux (of the Amygdaloids fame). Nader already knew that our newly formed memories go through an initial period of malleability before what’s known as consolidation, the transition to stable, long-term memory storage. He also knew that a large body of research showed that there was a window during which the consolidation process could be interrupted; for instance, that injection of a drug, or the application of electroshock therapy, soon after a round of fear conditioning could disrupt the conditioning process, while the same treatment even just hours or days later had no effect. “One of the most commonly used drug manipulations,” he wrote later in an article in Nature, “involves the administration of drugs that block the translation of RNA into protein.” Disruption of protein synthesis, it seemed, offered a way to sabotage the memory consolidation process. That meant there was a way to stop our fear memories from being internalized.
Nader had also seen research that suggested that those same interventions—drug injections or electroshock therapy—could, if applied when a memory was being retrieved from long-term storage, create a limited form of amnesia; the original piece of learning being accessed would be erased. He theorized that just as memories were consolidated via protein synthesis, memory retrieval might require a similar reconsolidation process, also involving protein synthesis, in order for the retrieved memory to remain intact. There might, he thought, be an opportunity for revision of our fear memories. There might be times when a hard patch of sidewalk became wet again.
He decided to test his theory on rats. He started out with some classical fear conditioning: the rats received an auditory stimulus—a tone—paired with a brief shock to the foot. The next day, each rat was exposed to a single tone and then immediately given an injection to their amygdala. One group received anisomycin, a drug known to block protein synthesis, and the other received artificial cerebrospinal fluid, or ACSF, a neutral, inactive substance.
During that initial presentation of the tone without the shock, both groups exhibited the same freezing behaviour, a fear response in anticipation of a shock. But when Nader and his colleagues tested the rats again twenty-four hours later, the freezing response in the anisomycin group had decreased significantly. It was as though the conditioning had been at least partially unravelled.
It didn’t work, though, unless the memory of the conditioning had been actively retrieved: a control group of fear-conditioned rats that received the anisomycin without first hearing the tone was unaffected by the injection, and their conditioning remained intact. The results suggested, as Nader had suspected, that protein synthesis was required not just for initial memory consolidation but for reconsolidation after memory activation too.
In follow-up experiments, Nader and his team found that delaying the injection by six hours after the stimulus nullified its effects; there was a limited window in which to alter the retrieved fear memory. Then, instead of waiting just twenty-four hours after the fear conditioning before administering the tone and the injections, they tried waiting fourteen days. The effect of the anisomycin remained. Here was evidence that, at least in rats, fear memories could not just be overcome by cognitive or behavioural training; they could be fundamentally altered.
Merel Kindt is trained as a clinical psychologist, not a neuroscientist, and she immediately saw the potential applications of Nader’s research. “When I read this paper,” she told me, when we first spoke by phone, “I thought, this is really fantastic news for clinical psychology and for psychotherapy.” If the process could be adapted for human use, the implications—for people who suffered from fearful memories in all sorts of different ways—could be enormous.
One obstacle: anisomycin is toxic and can’t be used on human research subjects. So Kindt decided to try out Nader’s discovery using propranolol; the beta-blocker seemed to have similar properties and was generally safe to use on humans. Propranolol, she knew, had been used by other researchers to alter memories during the initial consolidation process. It was the clear choice.
Kindt and her colleagues started out with a carefully controlled study. “We tested the hypotheses that the fear response can be weakened by disrupting the reconsolidation process,” they wrote in a short article in Nature Neuroscience, in 2009, “and that disrupting the reconsolidation of the fear memory will prevent the return of fear.”
The team used classical fear conditioning techniques to create heightened fear in the study participants where previously there had been none. In this case, they used a loud noise, measuring its effect on the startle reflex by monitoring the muscles in their subjects’ right eyes. The next day, they administered a dose of propranolol to one randomly selected group, then they reactivated their subjects’ memories of the events of the day before, aiming to open up the fear memories, as Nader and his team had shown to be possible. Another group received a placebo before reactivation, and the third group received just the propranolol without any memory reactivation at all. (Later, Kindt would change the protocol, administering the dose after reactivation.)
The results were encouraging. “In contrast with the pill placebo condition,” they wrote, “the administration of propranolol significantly decreased the differential startle response forty-eight hours later.”
“Propranolol strongly reduced the expression of fear memory,” they went on. “The conditioned fear response was not only reduced but even eliminated.” The placebo group did not see anything like the same improvement. The group that received propranolol without the memory reactivation component similarly showed “normal fear responses.”
Kindt and her colleagues emphasized in their report that their protocol left intact the memory of the fear conditioning and of their subsequent acquired fear. But, they wrote, “this knowledge no longer produced emotional effects.” Kindt’s work has sometimes been compared to the movie Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, about a man who receives a treatment to erase the memories of his ex-girlfriend. But the procedure is not about erasing memories. Instead, it’s as though it unmoors them so they can no longer trigger our fear responses in the present—a ship untied from a dock, an engine unhitched from a train. In theory, the result is the same as what EMDR did for me, unhitching my memories of past car accidents from my reaction to driving in the present day, freeing me from the fear without erasing it.
Freedom in a single pill is a powerful idea, but it wasn’t proven out yet. Next up was testing the method on more powerful, enduring fears rather than on a fear response created in a laboratory just the day before. Kindt and her colleague Marieke Soeter designed another experiment and published the results in 2015.
This time around, their research subjects were forty-five individuals with arachnophobia (as determined by their results on a standardized psychological questionnaire). Once again, the subjects were divided into three groups: one would receive propranolol with memory reactivation; one would receive a placebo with memory reactivation; and one would receive propranolol without memory reactivation.
There was no need for a phase-one fear conditioning this time; these participants were already afraid of spiders. But the team did lay some groundwork. Before receiving their treatment, each research subject was asked to enter a room at the far end of which was a jar on a table containing a baby tarantula. Subjects were asked to approach the jar and to complete, within three minutes, as much as they could of an eight-step standardized behavioural assessment test. They were allowed to stop the test at any time.
First, they were asked to sit in front of the closed jar, just eight inches away. Then they were asked to place the palm of their hand on the side of the closed jar for ten seconds. (If you have a fear of spiders, at this point I expect you’re already horrified.) Next, they were asked to open the jar, and then, if they could, to hold the open jar for ten seconds. The steps continued to escalate until number eight, the final task: allowing the spider to walk on their bare hands. If any participant reached this point, they were removed from the research pool. (And fair enough! I don’t consider myself particularly squeamish around spiders, but I would struggle with that one.)
Four days later, it was time for treatment. The two groups that were slated for memory reactivation were told that, regardless of how far they’d gotten with the initial test, today they would need to touch a spider in order to complete the process. They were instructed to stand two feet away from a tarantula in an open cage. For two minutes, they remained there—presumably, with hearts hammering, pupils dilated, and all the rest—being asked a set of questions about their fear and anxiety levels and what it was that they feared most about touching the spider. Throughout that time, they lived under the looming belief that they would very shortly be asked to touch the spider. This was Kindt’s effort to trigger and reactivate their fear memories. It was a delicate task, bringing them just to the point where the memories became malleable again and not any further.
When their two minutes were up, the subjects were led back outside without having ultimately been asked to touch the spider. Then they were given their pills, either forty milligrams of propranolol or a placebo. Four days later, the participants took the spider phobia questionnaire and completed as much of the eight-step behavioural assessment test as they could all over again.
The changes were stark. Faced with the eight-step test, every single member of the group that had received both the memory reactivation procedure and the propranolol pill was able to progress further in the test than they had before their treatment; many reached step eight and touched the tarantula with their hands. Meanwhile, the groups that had received memory reactivation and a placebo pill, or the propranolol pill alone, remained barely able to touch the jar. Later, at three-month and one-year follow-ups, the group that had received the full treatment remained stable; they hadn’t regressed. They could still touch the jar.
When Kindt and I first spoke on the phone, just a little over three years after the publication of the arachnophobia study, I wasn’t sure of the current status of her research. I wasn’t sure if she was taking new subjects or if I would be a suitable candidate. But then, near the end of our chat, she rattled off a list of phobias she’d tackled so far: spiders, snakes, silverfish, dogs. Confined spaces. Heights.
“That’s what I have,” I said.
“You want to be treated?” she asked me, laughing a little. I told her, also half kidding, that I would love to try.
But I was in luck. She had opened the Kindt Clinics a few months earlier. She was now treating people not just in the course of her ongoing research but as regular patients. For one hundred euros an hour, if I met the criteria to be accepted, the cure could be mine.
A few days later, I filled out an online questionnaire, supplying answers about my fear and rating my level of agreement with statements like “I avoid having to face the situation at all costs.” I got a doctor to check my blood pressure and sign off on the dosage of propranolol I would have to take; since the drug is a blood pressure suppressant, it isn’t necessarily safe for anyone whose blood pressure is already too low.
One of the questions was about my family history. Had anyone in my family died of a heart attack or related causes by the age of sixty? I disclosed my mom’s stroke at sixty and her father’s death at fifty-four from an aortic aneurysm, and as I typed my answers into the form on my screen, I was startled all over again by the bald facts of how unfair my mom’s life had been.
But regardless of that sad history, the clinic accepted me for treatment. I booked a flight to Amsterdam and tried not to get my hopes up. Kindt’s results so far have been strong. But the success or failure of the treatment seems to hinge almost entirely on the reactivation component—the part where the sidewalk concrete is made wet again. The challenge of the treatment is in retrieving the fear memory in such a way that it becomes labile.
“Why do we have memory?” Kindt asked me when we spoke, before answering her own question. Memory’s essential purpose, she said, is to help us adapt efficiently to our environment, to learn about threats and then retain that information without having to relearn it each time a given threat appeared. That purpose helps explain why fear memories are generally static and enduring: they’ll be needed as warnings in the future. They only become labile, alterable, again if there’s good reason for them to open up.
For that to happen, Kindt explained, “there should be something new to be learned, otherwise the memory trace is only in a sort of passive state retrieved, but the memory trace doesn’t open up.” On the other hand, if the threat that the person is exposed to in treatment is too new, the brain will create an entirely new memory, a new piece of learning, instead of revising the old one. She offered an example: if someone were afraid of spiders and you exposed them to a spider for half an hour, or an hour, or several hours, their initial wave of fear might eventually begin to fade, at least to a low simmer. “If you do this, then a new memory is already formed,” she explained. After that, the propranolol would affect the newly formed memory of the low-simmering fear rather than the original, more potent memory.
That person would in all likelihood have to start all over again the next time they were exposed to a spider. Kindt’s goal was to prevent the appearance of the fear response at all, and to do that, she had to trigger people at just the right pitch. I’ve never been a huge fan of analogies that compare the human brain’s agile, endlessly creative workings to the cold functioning of technology, but this one seems apt: what Kindt needed to do for her patients was to open up a given memory file in edit mode, not in read-only mode, without prompting the computer to draw up a whole new document instead. It was a difficult needle to thread.
“The difficulty in translating the basic science to clinical practice is that we cannot directly see what’s going on in the brain,” she told me. She has no surefire way to know, while working with a patient, which of the following processes she may be observing at any given time: “This is passive retrieval, nothing is happening; this is probably reconsolidation; and this is already, wow, this is too long, and then we passed the window of opportunity to change the fear memory itself.” Instead, she has to go partly by intuition, by asking questions of the patient, by observing their reactions to the process. When she hits the bull’s eye, the drug seems to do its job. But the reactivation is still an uncertain process.
On the plane to Amsterdam, I tried to imagine what my life would be like, feel like, with my fear of heights neutralized. I couldn’t really grasp it—and I didn’t want to try too hard, since it was possible that the treatment wouldn’t work for me. I didn’t want to conjure up a vision of a life free of this fear, fall in love with it, and then have it slip away.
I’d been encouraged by my EMDR experience. Change, even dramatic change, in my relationship with fear was possible, more possible than I could have believed before I walked into Svenja’s office on that sunny summer day. But at the same time, my traumatic memories from the car wrecks had always felt like an intrusion, an invasion of my mind, something that had been stapled onto my life from the outside. As powerful and intractable as my fear reactions had seemed when I experienced them while driving, they had also felt alien to me. I could remember so clearly how much I had enjoyed driving in my pre-crash life. The bad feelings were foreign, parasitic; it was logical that they could be expelled eventually.
My fear of heights, though—that was different. It was part of me, woven into my life since that day I fell down the escalator at Pearson Airport as a toddler, and quite possibly even before that. It wasn’t that I wanted to keep it, that I felt attached to it emotionally; I just couldn’t fathom how it could possibly be severed from the rest of me.
I pictured myself cured, the panics in high places as mere memories rather than premonitions of future panics to come. I imagined them receded into a fearful past, as untouchable to the new me as my good memories of driving had been while the trauma had its grip on me. Things would be different in small but meaningful ways, I figured. I wouldn’t have to ask around about the terrain before going on a hike anymore, checking its suitability and gauging the likelihood of my winding up sobbing, frozen in place, humiliated and incapacitated by fear. I could become a bolder, better version of myself.
In my intake interview, conducted over FaceTime with Kindt’s colleague Maartje Kroese a couple of days before I flew to Amsterdam, I’d been asked what my hope was for the outcome of the treatment. I’d said that I doubted I would ever be someone who enjoyed exposure to heights—I didn’t imagine myself becoming a regular skydiver, for instance, or an ace rock climber—but I hoped that the treatment would silence the voices in my head that rose up, in perfectly normal situations, to scream You are going to die! It was the outsized, irrational reactions that bothered me the most. Some fear, some discomfort, I could live with. If, while hiking on an exposed slope, I could instead think, A fall here would be a bit uncomfortable, I might get scraped up a bit, that alone would be worth the trip.
Ahead of our interview, I had sent Kroese some of my writing about my fear of heights. During our forty-five-minute chat, we went over some of the lowlights of my career in fear-panics. We talked about the escalator, and the top of the Duomo in Florence. We talked about my descent from the Usual. We talked about what drove me to resist practising avoidance—why I continued to expose myself to situations that I knew risked triggering my fear—and we talked about how my body felt when it was triggered.
Kroese and Kindt needed to understand exactly how my fear worked in order to activate my fear response in such a way that it could be altered. It all hinged on that. Kroese had got me to rate my past fear-panics on a scale from 1 to 100. In the treatment, she told me, they would try to get me up to an 80 or 90.
We talked a bit about the methods they might use in a controlled environment. The Netherlands, after all, is not known for its vertiginous terrain; mountain exposure seemed out of the question. We talked a bit about ladders, about rock climbing gyms, about the steep, narrow stairwells of ancient churches. Kroese discouraged me from dwelling too hard on the possibilities. Leave it up to them to figure out the answer, she said. I should try my best not to think about it.
So as I flew from Vancouver to Toronto to Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport, not only did I try not to think about whether the treatment would work. I also tried not to think about what they were planning to do to me.
Somewhere over Ireland, with dawn just lightening the eastern horizon, I realized something. This flight, from Toronto to Amsterdam, through a night shortened by our traversing of time zones, was the first red-eye I’d taken since the terrible night when I rushed from Seattle across the continent to my mother’s hospital bed. As I sat cramped in my window seat, flimsy airline blanket pulled up to my neck, the memories of that night in 2015 flooded back, as bad memories do when they’re released from storage: How I’d pressed my forehead against the plastic of the window, hiding my tears from my seatmates. How I’d chanted the truth over and over to myself. Your mom is dying. You will never talk to her again. She’s already gone.
The next day, I met Kindt and Kroese just before 11 A.M. Amsterdam was rainy and grey, the wind blustery. Back at home in Whitehorse, and in my mind and body, it was 2 A.M., but after my flight, in the quiet studio I’d rented near the clinic, I had managed a solid eight hours of sleep, and I was feeling okay. Before bed, wrecked by jet lag, I’d been anxious and overwrought about the treatment. Would it work? How cruel would it be if I wasn’t scared enough for it to function? What if, at the one moment in my life when I wanted the fear to overtake me most fully, it refused to perform?
But so far this morning, I felt calm. All I could do was put my faith in the clinicians and see what happened.
I had agreed to be filmed during my treatment by a Canadian documentary crew. They were making a TV special about the science of fear and by sheer coincidence had planned to be in Amsterdam to film several of Kindt’s clients when I would be there. They met me out front of the clinic building and shot several takes of me approaching the doors. I strolled. I stared into the middle distance. The repetition was unexpectedly soothing—a good distraction from what was coming.
Inside, I met Kindt for the first time. With a camera rolling, we sat down for a brief interview. We talked about the particular ways my fear seemed to be triggered; we talked about where my fear lived in my body when it was active. She took my blood pressure and asked me how I felt, fear-wise, on a scale from 0 to 100. I had felt traces of the old panic rising in my chest as I told her about the incident on the Usual. I told her I was already at a 30.
Then she unveiled her plan for me. We were headed to a fire station. I would climb into the bucket on a ladder truck and rise into the sky. What did I think? I burst out laughing. “I don’t think I’ll like that at all,” I told her.
We all piled into the film crew’s minivan for the journey to the outskirts of Amsterdam. At first I joined in the chatter in the vehicle, but soon I quieted down and stared out my window at the flat green fields. I was nervous. I was afraid of what was about to happen, but also, more powerfully, I was afraid that I wouldn’t be scared enough. I hadn’t had a full-blown panic in more than three years—not since the Usual—and I was afraid I’d gotten too good at suppressing my reaction, at controlling it to some degree, even while I was unable to free myself from it. Kindt had told me to do my best to let go, to let it rise up and overpower me, to drop my defence mechanisms. I hoped I would be able to do so.
I waited outside the fire station while the others went into a courtyard to set up. Just over a fence, ducks paddled in a suburban pond. I tried to think about how I’d felt in Florence, trapped by that inescapable mental image of my body sliding over the terra-cotta tiles of the Duomo, or when I was halfway up the tall ship’s mast, on Lake Ontario, swaying and frozen, fixated on the image of my body shattering on the deck below. I tried to let the memory of that fear flow through me.
Finally it was time. Kindt led me to the ladder truck’s bucket—more of a small fenced platform, really—and had me get in and stand in the corner next to a gate in its safety rail that could be opened to increase my sense of vulnerability, if I needed to be terrorized further. A tall, round-faced firefighter was in the bucket with me, at the controls; another sat at the wheel of the truck itself. They both made eye contact with me and smiled, and I wondered how this ranked in terms of weird uses of their time. Probably pretty low, I supposed, all things considered. Kindt stood at my shoulder; the camera operator, packed in with us too, peered around the firefighter’s bulk. Can this thing hold all four of us? I thought. And then we began to rise into the air.
Instinctively I reached out to hold on to the rail; Kindt made me release it. I stuffed my hands in my pockets; she made me give that up too. “Safety behaviours” were forbidden. Now only my feet connected me to the platform, which jerked and shivered in the wind. “Oh my god,” I said. “Holy shit.” We rose higher. I forced myself to look down—at the courtyard shrinking away from us—instead of steadying myself by looking out at the flat landscape stretching to the horizon. The firefighter turned us around in a slow circle, and the courtyard spun below me. I felt sick, dizzy, terrified. I told Kindt I was at a 60.
We rose higher still, until the truck was maxed out, until we stood well above the fire station, higher than anything else visible in any direction. The wind blew my hair into my eyes, shook the platform from side to side. I moaned. I didn’t feel like I was going to die, but I was not happy. Was it enough? I told Kindt I must be at a 70 now. Time passed—I don’t know how much. Not more than a minute or two, likely, though it seemed far longer. I was vaguely aware of the camera guy zooming in on my face as I groaned and my hair whirled around me. Kindt stood close and looked into my eyes, trying to gauge the level of my terror.
Was it getting any easier for me to be up here? she asked eventually. I was getting used to it, a little, I said, when the wind wasn’t gusting and the platform was still. That was the signal for us to head down and hope for the best.
Back on the ground, my legs shook. I took my time exiting the bucket and stood on the pavement of the courtyard, feeling ready to collapse. My chest was tight, my breath short and fast. I gulped for air. Kindt brought me a bottle of water and a single pill. The propranolol. I swallowed it, then went to wait, shivering, in the shelter of the van while the camera crew gathered some additional footage. Kroese came with me and told me not to think anymore about what I had just done. We made small talk with the van’s heat on full blast.
Sooner than I expected, I felt completely calm. My body felt normal again. My heartbeat was slow and steady, and the shakiness was gone from my legs and my chest. That was the pill, Kroese told me.
At the clinic, I read a book in a quiet room for a couple of hours. Kindt and the film crew left, bound for a farm where another patient would confront their fear of chickens. Kroese took my blood pressure again, then sent me home with a reminder not to think, talk, or write about what had happened until I’d gotten a good night’s sleep. I told her I’d try my best.
The next afternoon, I was back at the clinic, back in the film crew’s minivan, back at the fire station. I’d gone to bed early but had woken up after four or five hours of sleep; it was, after all, the middle of the day back in Whitehorse. I hoped I had offered my body enough REM cycles to get the job of memory reconsolidation done.
I felt nervous, but it was nervous excitement, not nervous dread. I searched inside myself for any creeping fear of what was coming—and I didn’t find any.
All morning, I had tried to look for any sign of change. Was I brasher, less nervous, on the steep stairs that led up to my rented apartment? I thought I might be. But then, had the stairs really scared me before anyway? It was hard to say.
I stepped onto the platform with Kindt and the camera guy again, and I was not afraid. A different firefighter was at the controls. Butterflies swirled in my stomach, but, again, they felt like the fluttering, anticipatory kind, the stirrings that precede a date with a crush, or before you stride out on stage to accept your hard-earned diploma.
The crowded bucket began to rise into the sky, and I was not afraid. I looked down at the courtyard receding below us and felt none of the nauseating, dizzying terror of the day before. I was fine! I grinned, then started to laugh out loud.
We rose higher. The wind shook the bucket from side to side, and I laughed. I stared down at the ground, then out at the horizon, then down at the ground again, and found that my only worry was that my glasses might fall off my face and plummet to the pavement below. I rummaged around inside of myself. Where was my fear? It should have swelled up and taken over my body by now. Was it hiding in there somewhere, waiting to pounce if I let my guard down? But I couldn’t find it.
Kindt asked me a few questions; the camera guy chimed in too, holding his lens close to my face. I don’t remember what they asked me or how I answered—I remember only my sheer giddiness at the sudden, unexpected absence of my fear.
As we neared the ground again, I joked that I was smiling too much. The camera would catch the yellowing of my teeth, I said, feeling suddenly vain and self-conscious. Yesterday I’d been too terrified to care how I looked, I realized. Without the fear, there was so much more room in my head. Looking at it that way, I almost had to welcome the spike of insecurity.
Back on the ground, I still wanted to laugh, still couldn’t stop smiling. The film director asked if Kindt and I would be comfortable going back up again, with the camera guy on the ground this time, so he could get some footage of us rising up into the air from that perspective. “Sure!” I said, brash, savouring my lack of terror. I could go back up again. I could do anything.
Kindt and I stepped back into the bucket and rose into the air. Still my fear stayed away. We went even higher this time—I guess because we had fewer pounds of person in the bucket—and the wind seemed even stronger. I took a selfie with Kindt, quickly, worried that my phone would be blown right out of my hand. Now and then, I looked down at the ground, to prove to myself that I still could, but mostly, this time, I tried to enjoy the view. Soon, though, I was distracted. The firefighter seemed nervous about the wind and the height and the time the camera crew was taking to get their shots, and I felt the first tinglings of fear creeping back in. I started to worry—not so much about our safety but about my cure. Would it hold under this strain? My elation drained away, and I shivered in the cold March wind. “I think I’m done with this,” I said to Kindt.
By the time we reached the ground, I was shaken up. Not panicked, not like the day before, but uncomfortable, my mood sinking.
The camera guy and the director met us as we stepped off the platform. How was that? they asked. I answered something like “not great.” They tried to follow up, camera rolling, and I told them I needed a minute to collect myself. They kept filming, standing in front of me, still tossing questions my way. “I just need a minute and then I’ll be happy again,” I said, and Roberto, the director, said that they didn’t need me to be happy for the camera—they just wanted to capture the reality of what was happening with my treatment.
You know that panicked feeling when your throat tightens up with anger or upset and tears rise to your eyes, and you try to hold yourself together, but the harder you try to control your emotions, the more they try to explode out of you? I was angry. I was disoriented and shaking from the cold. I just wanted a moment to take a deep breath and pull myself together! Why wouldn’t they listen? I was being as clear as I could manage. I felt cornered, disrespected, antagonized. Most of all, I was afraid that my explosion of negative feelings might compromise my cure. They wanted to capture my reality? My reality had been elation, freedom, joy. What I was feeling now was a result of my efforts to accommodate their needs, their demands.
Finally I said, “I’m freezing, I can’t even think, I can’t do this right now,” and walked away from the camera.
I was mostly silent on the drive back to the clinic. I tried to call up my memories of the sheer joy of the first successful bucket ride, but my angst and anger seemed to have overpowered them. What should have been a triumph, a pure victory over decades of fear and shame and tears, felt ruined. When I made it back to my room, I collapsed on the bed and sobbed, letting out all the sadness and anger that I’d held back until I could be alone.
When I’d calmed down some, I thought back to Svenja and my resources. I tried to conjure Fairy Meadows, its raw rock faces and ragged clouds, the green meadow and the cold, tumbling stream. I pulled up a vision of my grandmother, her wrinkled eyes and cheeks, her bony Vicks VapoRub hugs. My mood eased, a little.
I emailed Kindt and Kroese for reassurance. Could getting as upset as I had, immediately after coming out of the bucket, compromise my cure? I had learned enough, in my efforts to understand my fear, to respect how powerfully emotion and memory rule us.
But it didn’t work that way, they said. The change had been made. And besides, Kindt reminded me, some fear was natural and good. Some reactions were reasonable, not irrational at all. She’d been afraid herself during that second bucket ride, she told me. It seemed clear to both of us that the firefighter had been nervous too. It had been so windy; we’d been up so high. Anyone could have felt rationally unhappy in that situation. And here was something else for me to remember: I had lost the joy of the first successful try, sure, but I hadn’t panicked the way I had the day before. I hadn’t even come close to experiencing that full-body, uncontrollable terror.
I realized I would have to relearn my own reactions. For so long, I had worked at suppressing and ignoring my fear responses. I had taught myself that they were irrational, not to be trusted. Now, if I was truly cured, I would have to learn to trust them again.