First Climb

If you listen very closely, you may hear a crackling sound.  That's the sound of Hell freezing over, because I have now gone above the ground.  Willingly.

My husband and I arrived about twenty minutes early at the Field House where our lessons were to take place.  This, of course, gave me plenty of time to sit and look up at the dizzying heights I had paid good money to climb on - for no other purpose than to go back down again.  Honestly, I couldn't figure out what people found in it.  It seemed about as pointless as people spending money on those mechanical binoculars at look out points, that never seem to work correctly anyways.

It is kind of sad that just sitting in a cafe chair about twenty feet away made me dizzy with vertigo.  It also got me angry.  I am a fairly intelligent person.  I am a logical person.  Yet just looking at a wall made my breathing go shallow and my heart race.  When the class started I told the instructor that I doubted that I could get more than three feet up... but in my mind I told myself that I was going to make it up at least ten.

The instructor (Christie?  Christine?  I was too busy having a mild panic attack to really get her name) showed us how to get into our harnesses   She taught us how to make a figure eight knot - which my Eagle Scout husband was able to pick up on depressingly easily.  Then she asked if I was ready to climb.

I shouted "NO!" and ran away to my car, leaving everyone behind me.

Just kidding.  That's just the immediate thought that popped into my head while I was being hooked up to the rope.  In reality, I nodded and made some kind of trite joke about possibly needing the fire department to save me from myself.  I began climbing, and paused, and breathed.  And moved another hand, another foot, another hand, another foot.  I stared at the wall, about three inches from my face.  I breathed in the slightly stale, musty odor of prefabricated psudo-rock that they make indoor rock climbing walls out of.  I had the time to wonder what they exactly made it out of.  Within a few movements, I could feel that I was off the ground.  Not "feel" like one feels a warm breeze, or notices that the temperature has dropped.  This is the feeling that one gets when walking in the woods just after dusk.  You may know that the path you're on is safe, but your subconscious basically says, "Yeah, I don't care what you think... I believe that there may be something out there.  And that something might have teeth."

I started to repeat my mantra; remember the one I talked about earlier?  The one where I told myself that what I'm feeling was nothing more than a surge of endorphin running through my brain, and that this was a learned response?  Yeah.  I repeated it.  A lot.  And after a while, I didn't feel the need to remind myself the words.  I just breathed through the panic and fear.  And it was okay.  Not great, but okay.  The fear wasn't going to kill me.  Falling wasn't going to kill me.  The fear might stop me from going to the top, but it wasn't going to stop me from trying.

How high did I make it that first day?  Well, I made it more than the three feet that I told the instructor.  I made it more than the ten feet I told myself that I was going to make it to.  At the end of my third climb, on my first day, I made it about fifteen feet off the ground.  Fifteen feet might not be a lot to most people, but to someone who had never been on a step ladder before, those fifteen feet might as well have been Mount Everest to my fear-addled mind.

And Mount Everest felt good (or at least, my little tiny itty-bitty first step in climbing did).

I hate lighthouses

To prepare myself for my first climb, I spent a few hours researching CBT (cognitive behavior therapy), immersion therapy, and other common therapies for phobias.  For those of you who are unfamiliar with CBT, in essence it "focuses on examining the relationships between thoughts, feelings and behaviors." (NAMI's fact sheet on CBT) Simply put, one examines the situation that causes fear and panic and the responses to it/reasons behind it.

Logically I realize that being off the ground isn't intrinsically dangerous.  Climbing a 6 foot ladder won't kill me.  I realize that rock climbing isn't dangerous - especially indoors with a harness and an instructor.  Try telling that to my primative brain, though.  Whenever I'm faced with heights - an escalator, a glass elevator, the balcony in a highrise - my logical brain stops working.  All of my thoughts are taken over by raw panic: my heart rate skyrockets, I start to pant, and I freeze. 

There have been times where I've actually needed help getting down, like a cat getting stuck in a tree I'd freeze in terror.  One time when I was a kid my family visited a lighthouse.  It had one of those awful cast iron circular staircases spiraling up through the hollow interior.  I hate those things. I'd like to find whomever invented them and kick them in the shin.  I hate seeing all around me, and can despise the fact that I can literally FEEL the air and space; no nice safe earth anywhere to be found. Vertigo ensues, and I feel like I'm going to fall, but I'm not even sure what direction I'll be falling.  For all I know I could fall up.  Illogical, I know... but try telling that to my panic-ridden primitive brain.  Forget "fight or flight," I'm pretty sure there's a third option: freeze.  Like the rabbit who sees a hawk and freezes, all my muscles lock up.

Long story short, I ended up freezing about three quarters of the way up the lighthouse.  While my family was up top, taking pictures and admiring the view I stood on the stairs, unable to move either up or down, with a vise-grip on the handrail.  My dad ended up having to pry my fingers off and guide me down those evil stairs.  From then on, heights went from being an uncomfortable experience to something to be avoided at all costs.  It wasn't just being afraid of the heights, or freezing in a high place again, I was now afraid of being afraid.

Back to rock climbing.  In order to do this, I had to know what I was going to do when the fear came, to keep my brain from short-circuting and getting stuck saying, "I'm high I'm high I'm high I'm high I'm high..."  I came up with a script of what I was going to say to myself, a literal script that I would tell myself.

"This is just a physiological response to being off the ground.  It is chemicals being released by my brain in a learned response to being off the ground.  It is synapses firing, adrenaline being released.  It isn't real.  It is just fear.  I am not in danger.  I won't get hurt."

 I practiced this script, and then I went to my lesson, husband in tow.  I looked up at the 40 foot rock wall and felt the fear wash over me, and I hadn't even started.  Just looking up made me dizzy.  And that made me mad.  How could a rational, intelligent person be defeated by just looking at a wall?  It was stupid, and I despise stupidity.  At that moment I despised my fear, and decided that not only was I going to climb that evil wall, I was going to defeat it.  Originally I had a goal of just going a few feet up.  No more.  I am going to make it to the top before this self-experiment is over.  Hopefully without needing a new pair of pants.

And so it starts...

ac·ro·pho·bia

noun \ˌa-krə-ˈfō-bē-ə\

1 : abnormal dread of being in a high place : fear of heights  

2 : abnormal or pathological dread of being in a high place : fear of heights  

(definition courtesy of Merriam-Webster)

As part of my final year at DePaul's School of New Learning, I have to do something that the powers that be have coined an "externship."  In this externship, I'm expected to have "...an opportunity to focus on the particular dynamic of learning from direct experience in new situations."  Furthermore, I'm expected to "...to push yourself to define and to expand your learning style, to learn about something with which you don’t have much experience, and to familiarize yourself with your ability to successfully adapt to new learning."*

Generally, when I'm learning something I prefer to be given something to read and then go from there: whether it be write a paper or design a project or even teach myself how to knit.  I'm not a fan of group classes.  I'm much happier to do things in my own way, by myself, and learn by making my own mistakes (and then hopefully fixing them).  In preparation for my externship I did a little brainstorming.  Should I learn photography?  Perhaps hire a professional organizer to teach me how to get (and keep) my clutter to a minimum?  While both of those are something that I either don't have much experience in, or am not very good at, neither of them push my boundaries very much.  I needed to think of something that would truly push me outside of my comfort zone.  In a flash of inspiration similar to when Archimedes sat in a bathtub and shouted "Eureka!" it came to me: I'll learn to rock climb.  It's perfect.  I've never done it before, there are group classes at the local park district Field House, and it's totally outside of my normal self to do much of anything fitness-wise.

Did I mention that I'm petrified of heights?

I'm not talking about a little feeling of discomfort when up on a 10' ladder in November hanging up Christmas lights.  I'm talking about my knees shaking when I stand up on a stool to change a lightbulb.  I'm talking about getting extreme vertigo the last time I was dragged (unwillingly, I might add) to the IMAX theater in the Museum of Science and Industry to see a documentary on Hurricane Katrina.  I left early, by the way - and I'm pretty sure there are still nail gouges in the arm rest of the chair I was sitting in.  My hands hurt from how hard I was gripping that slightly sticky, textured plastic.  By the time I was outside that wretched theater my knees were shaking and I was covered in a cold, fear-driven sweat.

My first rock climbing class starts tomorrow night.  My husband will be there; he says it's for moral support, but I think that it's actually because he wants to see his acrophobic wife go more than 3 feet off the ground and snicker at the look of utter terror that I'm sure will be on my face.  I plan on using a combination of what therapists call CBT - or cognative behavior therapy - and mediation to power through my fear.... or at the very least not get stuck on the wall like a terrified kitten up a tree.  I would hate to be the person that they have to call fire rescue for because she got stuck UP on a rock wall.

Wish me luck!

*Both quotes are taken from Chapter 3 of SNL's Foundations of Learning workbook