Fear

Frightening thing, that … fear …

Robyn has once more assigned us a task.
This time, it is to "name at least one fear that torments you, and then agree to face the damn thing head on."

So … heights, and how to tell them to fuck off.

I was always petrified of heights, vertigo took me by the balls a good ten feet from any clifftop and had me crawling on my belly and whimpering like a girl (at least a girl who whimpers).
And yet now I can be regularly found walking nonchalantly around the tops of parapet walls on high buildings as easily as if I were walking across a flat field.
Eric, our Health and Safety Officer hates me. He cowers in his hard hat and safety harness while I lean out and peer down at the tiny people waaaaay below. He also swears at me a lot.

I know the moment I conquered my fear. I also know that I'm never, EVER going through THAT again!
As some of my older - or at least some of my more attentive - readers may know, way back in the mists of time the firm of Architects I once worked for was responsible for the upkeep of several hundred of Norfolk's Saxon, Norman and Mediæval churches. This involved quinquennial inspections. Which involved clambering up the insides of the bell towers on old, woodworm-eaten Victorian ladders. This also involved no safety equipment whatsoever (other than a plastic hard hat). Before the days of sweary Health and Safety Officers and harnesses, we were required to "get up there however you can".

Getting up the towers was scary enough, but it was what we had to do when we were up there which really filled our pants.
Around two hundred feet up in the old bell towers were the old bell frames. Most had the bells still in situ but most were too rotten and fragile to ring without the whole damned lot collapsing in a clangy mess. Most of the intervening floors had rotted away centuries ago and the view from the bell frame was straight down onto the stone flags of the church floor. My job was to lean off the top of the topmost ladder, grab hold of and swing up into the bellframe and give it a good poke around to see if it would stay up there for another five years.
These bellframes are made from massive, foot-thick oak beams. But they were put there nine-hundred years ago and are now a bit the worse for wear. The ends are all rotten and the whole rickety woodpile creaks and sways when you try to move. It is also shin-deep in pigeon shit … Nice …

Needless to say I hated this job. But I did it. Until Langley Church Tower. When the ladder slipped round out of reach and I was stuck up there.
I was by myself as we were short staffed, and the vicar who had let me in wasn't due back for several hours.
So, after an hour or so, involving lots of shouting and banging (unfortunately no bells left up here and this was years before mobile phones), I made the monumentally stupid decision to try to reach the ladder …

To say I will never try anything so FUCKING STUPID again as long as I live would be quite an understatement.
Let us just say all I achieved was to kick the damned thing further out of reach and then to hang there under the bellframe for a bit, knowing I was about to fall to my death.
How I managed to climb back up into the frame I will never know.
The vicar came back to lock up after dark, assuming I had gone. He managed to shift the ladder round and I got down safely, if shaking like a leaf.

The next day I found myself up the scaffolding on a building site and amazingly unafraid. And since that day, I have had no problem with clambering over cliffs, leaning off the tops of church towers, or any of the other things that used to scare the willies out of me.
I think my fear of heights must have been scared to death.

True story.