One month after my visit to Amsterdam, I went to Moab, Utah, for a camping trip with my cousin Nathan and his family. Moab is a small town in a vast sandstone desert, the adventure capital of southern Utah. It draws hikers, rock climbers, whitewater rafters, mountain bikers, off-roaders, and more to play in its surrounding canyons and mesas. Where better, I thought, to try to test drive my cure?
I had given a lot of thought to the testing process. The catch was this: some fear of heights is natural and healthy, and I didn’t want or expect a complete excision of those sensations. What I had hoped to get from Merel Kindt was relief from my over-the-top, irrational reactions. That meant, I figured, that the test had to be fundamentally safe, targeting only my unreasonable fears. A friend had suggested that I head to the Grand Canyon, a half-day’s drive away, and stand right on the edge and look down. But I knew that a stumble there really would kill me (as if to emphasize the point, a tourist had fallen into the canyon just the week before), and so I didn’t expect to find any comfort in the view from the top all the way down to the bottom.
Eventually, cruising the websites of various Moab tour operators, I settled on a zip-line operation. Zip-lining, I figured, would have me dangling high in the air, voluntarily stepping from safety into open space, and flying rapidly downhill—some of my least favourite things. It was exactly the kind of activity I would have avoided before my cure, not out of any genuine fear that I might come to harm but in order to pre-empt the possibility of making a humiliating scene. It was perfect.
I booked online, and when the time came, I left my family at the campground—where Nathan’s toddler was riding his balance bike furiously, fearlessly around our quiet loop road, making me wonder if I’d ever been that bold—and headed to an office just off the highway on the far side of town. I guiltily signed a waiver promising that I had no physical or mental health conditions that would preclude my participation in the day’s itinerary, and thought, This better work.
After a safety briefing, my group cinched our harnesses and piled into two large ATVs for a wild ride up the rubbled sandstone cliffs behind the company’s office building. I white-knuckled the grab bar as we climbed up a seemingly impossible trail, and the kids behind me shrieked with that familiar mixture of terror and delight—the sound born of haunted houses, of roller coasters, of a cold sprinkler on a hot summer day.
At the top of the cliffs, we left the vehicles behind and hiked up a sandstone fin to the first zip line. From here, there was no changing my mind, no easy escape beyond finishing the six-line circuit with the rest of the group. Nervous, unsure how my body would react, not wanting to give myself time to stew, I volunteered to go second. A guide checked my harness, clipped me in, and waited to hear through his walkie-talkie that the other guide, who’d already zipped over to the far end of the first line, was ready to receive me.
When I got the all-clear, I sat down in my harness, took a deep breath, lifted my feet free of the rock, and let gravity take me. My stomach churned as I glided into space, picking up speed, but the nerves faded as I made that first crossing. I could, I realized, look around at the scenery without distress; I could look down at the ground flowing far below me. My chest was loose, my breathing free. My body wasn’t responding to a perceived threat. I wasn’t panicking, crying, freezing up, embarrassing myself, outing myself as a lying, fraudulent waiver-signer.
When I reached the far side, I asked Nate, the guide, as he unclipped me, “Do they get a lot scarier after this one?” I knew that some lines were longer, faster, higher. I worried that the worst was yet to come. I tried to sound casual, like I was just making small talk.
“Nothing about this scares me,” he said, unhelpfully. And then, “But if we got you across the first one, you’ll be fine.” I would be fine!
Nate was right. With each zip line, the chasms I soared over got deeper, the rides longer and faster, but I remained calm—calmer than I’d been on that first, nervous ride. I looked down at the rocky gullies below me as I buzzed along, I looked up and around. On one line, Nate dared me to take a backwards start, and I did it: I stepped off the rocks and into space with my back turned to the drop and swooped away.
Later, feeling more confident, I asked the other guide if anyone ever signed up and then freaked out and became unable to complete the course. He said he’d never had anyone refuse to go on once they’d started, but they did get the odd customer who arrived at the start and then decided they couldn’t or wouldn’t go through with it. Earlier this season, he said, they’d had one woman who wept through the entire circuit—but she made it to the end.
That could have been me, I realized. Or worse. I sent a silent thank-you to the universe, and to Dr. Kindt’s team in particular, that I hadn’t become the tour’s latest Sobbing Woman.
After the last customer had ripped across the last zip line, we piled back into the ATVs for the ride down. I was worried, still, a little, about this part: the ride up had been perilously steep, and I wondered how my body would react to the downhill view as we bumped and rocked our way back to town. I opted to sit in the back seat so I wouldn’t be staring through the windshield, hoping that might obscure my sense of our downward plunge.
But I didn’t need to worry, I realized, as we teetered down the trail, the vehicle swaying. I felt okay. Occasionally, as we rounded a bend and a new vista appeared below us, I got that little swoopy feeling in my stomach, but that was fine and natural, I supposed. The two young girls on the tour, sitting in the front seat this time, screamed and screamed with delight, and I tried to let their joy infect me, tried to embrace the swoopy feeling instead of fearing it. It worked: by the time we reached the base of the cliffs, I was laughing.
Unlike many people, I’ve never really enjoyed the feeling of being afraid. Fear for me has rarely been a thrill, a sensation to seek out and ride its wild crest. Instead, I’ve experienced fear as a force that limited me, that made my world smaller.
Growing up, I never liked haunted houses, or anything else that might involve a deliberate effort to scare me—even if it was meant to be fun, to provoke the kind of shriek that dissolves into laughter. That aversion predated my epilepsy diagnosis, but once I associated nightmares with seizures, it only got stronger. I avoided scary movies, and read frightening books with caution. (On an episode of the TV show Friends, I had seen Joey store his copy of The Shining in the freezer—the act, he claimed, kept him “safer,” even if not perfectly safe. When I read Stephen King’s It in junior high, a rare-for-me foray into the horror genre, I took a cue from Joey and did the same.)
But now, years later, I thought about those young girls screaming with joy and fear, the emotions intermingled, in the ATV on the way down the red sandstone cliff above Moab. I thought about one of the other zip-lining customers, a woman from California, who whooped and shrieked her way along each line of the circuit, shouting her delight across the canyons. I thought about the people who scientists call “high-sensation seekers,” the people who chase the intense thrills of recreational danger, like Kelsey, and the two Codys, and everyone else at the skydiving camp.
And I thought about Patient S.M., who was not, after all, indifferent to fearful experiences. It wasn’t just that they didn’t scare her, leaving a void where the feeling should be; she enjoyed them, even sought them out. She was excited by the snakes and the spiders, the monsters jumping out of dark corners in the haunted old sanatorium building. (Feinstein and the rest speculated that the only thing holding her back from becoming a classic high-sensation seeker and engaging in activities like skydiving was her lack of disposable income.) The things that thrilled and frightened other people were pure fun for her—there was, after all, nothing wrong with her brain circuitry for enjoyment. She may have lacked the “brakes” that a functioning amygdala provides, but she had a working gas pedal.
I had never been much like those people, I’d always thought. I conceived of myself as a deeply fearful person—and the fears that had marked my life were real, and painful. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized I had sometimes found ways to enjoy a thrill or two. I had loved plunging through a rapid in a canoe, fear flickering on the edges of my concentration as I dug my paddle into the water. I had felt the joy of steering a mountain bike down a narrow dirt trail, balancing on my pedals and ducking under tree branches. I had even, now and then, managed to truly enjoy my efforts to climb on rock and ice. I had been working to stop tapping the brakes so frequently, but I, too, could press down on the accelerator.
I thought about the patterned nature, the essential circularity, of my fears. “He who fears he shall suffer,” Michel de Montaigne wrote, “already suffers what he fears.” He was right: I had spent so much time being afraid of…being afraid. With my fear of heights, each attack of paralysis and panic—rare as they were in the grand scheme of my life—had made the future possibility of another one seem more ominous. My fear of driving, too, had occurred on a loop: my memories of the earlier crashes rising up in my mind, seizing control, leaving me terrified of the past repeating itself. And my fear of my mom’s death had been driven so powerfully by my awareness of her own experience of losing her mother. Here was a common theme: I feared the past coming to pass again.
Sometimes, thinking about fear and my aversion to it, and trying to make sense of how all the shards of my different fears fit together, I’ve looked back on that little girl I once was—the one who came home from school and told her mom that she never ran quite as fast as she could on the playground, for fear of losing control—and wondered, How many of my seemingly disparate fears are really about control—about keeping traction on the unsteady surface of life?
The loss of control was at the heart of my problems with driving: I feared, dreaded, that remembered feeling of the tires losing their grip on the road. So many of my heights-panics, too, have revolved around the idea that I might slip: that my feet might come out from under me on a frozen creek or a steep trail, that the wind might blow me head over heels, that I might lose my balance and tumble over the railing of that dome high above Florence. And my mom’s living or dying was always going to be beyond my control.
I thought about agency, about my friend’s inexplicable flight from an unknown danger on the bike path, about the times I’d been driven into action. I thought about my own obliviousness in the spinning SUV, how my belief that everything would be fine and I was still in control had, in the end, protected my mind from the trauma of the wreck moments later. Agency, even if only the illusion of it, seemed like one possible cure for fear.
But even an illusory sense of control is not always available to us. Maybe something else to strive for, beyond control, is acceptance—acceptance of the fact that fear happens, for good reasons and for bad. That it’s okay, sometimes, to be afraid. That it can even, sometimes, be fun. These seemed like lessons to take with me into the future.
Now, three years after I’d begun this project of facing my fears, confronting them, trying to renegotiate my relationship with them, it was time to take stock. How had I done?
My fear of driving, the legacy of my traumatic series of car crashes, had been resolved entirely. I’d been freed of the weight of those awful memories and could enjoy the open road again. My fear of loss, the fear of my mom’s death that had haunted me for years and then threatened to transform itself into a consuming fear of others’ deaths too, had been defused, to some extent at least, by my new understanding of my own resilience. There would be more grief in my future, but I was readier for it now. My dread on that front was largely gone.
Then there was my fear of heights, which offered a more lingering question mark. I suspect that, at a minimum, Merel Kindt has successfully cured my fear as it relates to dangling in space—as I did in the bucket of the fire truck, and on the zip line. Whether it will apply perfectly to a steep, exposed slope, or the mast of a tall ship, I don’t yet know. My guess is that, in those contexts, my old fear won’t be gone entirely.
But I realized something, in the process of ransacking my memories in search of my most fearful moments. Going over chronologies, replaying scenes in my mind, I noticed that my worst panics, with the exception of the one on the Usual, were all a very long time ago. They were extremely rare too—something that was easy to overlook when I was listing them all off. And with that one exception, they predated all my efforts to treat my own fear. I wondered if maybe I was fearing the recurrence of something that wasn’t likely to come back again anyway.
Because here’s the thing about the incident on the Usual. I was, as my roommate on the Arctic cruise ship had reminded me, not myself at that time. I was depleted by grief and isolation; I was a more fragile, more raw version of Eva. And the trauma of my last two car accidents, the rollovers coming one after the next during that same long winter of grief, had been compounded by my sadness and anger and loss too.
Suddenly everything seemed connected—and, suddenly, that made a life less filled with fear seem that much more possible. If you set aside the Usual, marked it with a grief asterisk, I hadn’t had a true heights-panic in nearly a decade. And in that time, I had tackled heights far more extreme than the places that had caused my long-ago meltdowns. I wondered if my fear might now be less potent than I had imagined, that it might in the future hold less power over me than I had allowed it to in the past.
Yes, it’s possible, even likely, that I will still feel discomfort around exposed heights in the future. But discomfort, in comparison to frozen, life-endangering panic, is manageable; I can live with that probability. And I can live with the likelihood, too, that as I age I may find new fears. I have better tools now, better understanding. I am less afraid of fear itself.
Just as I never knew, until recently, about my dad’s childhood fear of heights, I don’t know much about what scared my mom. The only fears I can remember her expressing were for me, or about her ability to parent me.
She wasn’t generally an anxious parent—didn’t hover, didn’t try to keep me from being exposed to all the world’s rough edges. But every now and then, she would be struck by powerful and bizarrely specific fears for my safety. She was afraid, when I went on a boozy spring break trip to Mexico at the end of high school, that I would be trampled to death in a nightclub fire; she made me give a solemn promise to look for the exits and plan my escape route upon arrival. A few years later, when I travelled to Dover during a holiday from grad school in England, she had a nightmare that I had fallen from the famous white cliffs, and in the morning she couldn’t shake her dread. I got a panicked email asking me for an immediate reply.
Still, although she didn’t seem like an unusually fearful person, I worried often about frightening her. I viewed her sadness as fragility—I didn’t yet understand the depth of her resilience and strength. I told myself that there were things I couldn’t do, paths I couldn’t take, lives I couldn’t live, because they would scare my mother too much. I didn’t want to terrorize her. But I’ve wondered to what extent I was using my concern for her as a way to dodge my own fears, to live a safer, quieter, more avoidant life.
I know now that I don’t need to make my world smaller—I don’t have to allow fear to shrink the boundaries of the life that I live. But I also know that I don’t have to keep trying, pushing, proving myself. I don’t have to become a rock climber if I don’t enjoy rock climbing, even if it doesn’t scare me as much as it used to. I can choose to seek thrills, to embrace the rush of fear, or I can choose to stay home and read a good book. Maybe I’ll go back to Florence someday; maybe I’ll try to learn to sail again.
But if I don’t, I’ll know that it’s not because fear stopped me. If I never make it back to the top of the Duomo, it’ll be because there was so much else to do and see in the world. My time is not limitless—something I can now accept, mostly, without fear.