I have a fear of stairs. Not always, just sometimes. It all stems from one night when I lived in Japan. The stairs there tend to be quite steep, because the normal Japanese foot seems to be smaller than ours (but that’s just conjecture; it could just be because of lack of space).
At any rate, one night after work I was travelling the train system and yet again having to walk down an interminable flight of steep stairs with my usual insouciance, both hands in my long-coat pockets, and guess what: I tripped at the top of the stairs.
It hurt. Lots. There was no blood, but imagine a log rolling down a hill covered in boulders and you get the picture.
So yesterday my ultimate nightmare came true: climb a mountain in Val-David. It was actually a walkable path, but in places, steep — very steep, and lots and lots of stairs with no balustrades or handholds. I wasn’t very worried about going up. It was coming down that I was worried about.
Because think about it: when you’re going up a flight of steps, they’re clearly delineated, silhouetted against each other. But going down, they all seem to blend into one entity. And besides, you can never fall up the stairs.
So after I reached the top, a ten-minute-or-so trek, I was seized with anxiety. I could not concentrate on the brilliant vista. All I wanted was for it to all be over with, that I would be at the bottom again, but there was that extra anxiety factor: I had to do it by myself. No one could do it for me. Like a 40-story subway staircase, all going down.
That’s a long way to fall like a log rolling down a hill covered with boulders.
But what ended up being extremely funny was that one woman, some brash New Yorker bigmouth who was quite happy to put me down because of my spoken fear of stairs, was the only one of the party who fell flat on her ass on the way down. "I've got blood blisters on my hands," she whined.
It wasn’t as bad as I’d thought it would be.
I might even do it again after witnessing her humiliation.
Yes, I think I might. This could be the end of my fear of stairs.
I got vertigo coming down the stairs today.
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The key is not to think. But I do think. I visualize that trip, that stumble, and then the long fall and then I get terrified. Sometimes at night I lie there awake and relive it and then I relive it when the escalator is out at the metro (a common occurrence) and I look down 8 flights of stairs and know I have to walk down them. They're endless and I see people hopping down them unconcerned and wonder what's wrong with me.
ReplyDeleteBut 37,000 feet above the earth in a plane (where I'll be in a week) doesn't bother me at all. Go figure.
All true.
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