Essay on How I Overcame My Fear of Heights

According to Martin Gansbery from Thirty-eight Who Saw Murder Didn’t Call The Police “law-abiding citizens in Queens watched a killer stalk and stab a woman in three separate attacks”. Thirty-eight “law-abiding citizens” who after hearing “he stabbed me! Please Help me! Please help me!” did nothing but slide open their windows and turn on their lights. Even “Assistant Chief Inspector Frederick M. Lassen, in charge of the borough’s detectives and a veteran of twenty-five years of homicide investigations”, was distraught over the situation “not because it is a murder, but because the “good people” failed to call the police.” The “good people”; as a society, we believe that it is a human instinct to want to help one another and that we all strive to protect each other, yet these so-called “good people” did neither of these things, which led to an innocent woman being slaughtered brutally. Is there really such a thing as “good people” in our world, or is everyone so wrapped up in their own lives to care for one another?

Friday, May 26th of 2017 was one of the scariest days of my life, even though it was meant to be one of my most enjoyable days. It was the day of my final eighth-grade trip and my class and I were meant to go ziplining, a field trip everyone was looking forward to. Personally, I am dreadfully fearful of heights, so I was evidently not “ecstatic” about this trip. Nevertheless, anytime out of class that I could spend with my friends was a time that I could try my best to treasure. We arrived at the venue, called TreeTop Adventures, and were given a quick explanation of what we would be doing, and then we were shown how to do it safely. After much practicing, my friends and I were finally able to split off from our group and go ziplining!

Every single one of my friends knew of my dreadful fear of heights, so they tried their best to comfort me, making jokes and doing anything to get me to laugh. Eventually, all of my fear slipped away, and I allowed myself to bask in the tremendous joy that I was feeling. With my friend group, I tread up to the easiest zipline, which was made for younger kids or beginners, and slowly gathered the courage to begin. I clipped myself onto the line and slowly crept onto the edge of the platform. I breathed in shakily, looking down at the ground which was approximately ten feet below me. My friends cheered for me, some from the same platform, and some from the platform below me. Closing my eyes, I felt my chest tighten as I felt my feet leave the platform.

The wind blew in my face, causing me to open my eyes in order to ensure my glasses hadn’t fallen off, and as I opened my eyes, I saw a glorious sight. The sun was shining brightly and caused the trees around me the glimmer; it was a mesmerizing sight. Reaching the lower platform, I joined in laughter with my friends as we discussed how exhilarating the experience was! After that experience, my friends and I rushed from zipline to zipline, staying in the intermediate zones. Finally, we had finished all of the easy zipline trails and only had the difficult levels left. Giddy with joy my group and I decided to skip the advanced levels and went straight to an expert path seeing as how we only had an hour or so left. Everything was going phenomenal until we got to the part of the path where we had to walk across a path of white looped ropes, each loop was about a foot or so away from the other and it was a sort of sidestep to reach the loops. If that wasn’t worrisome enough, the looped path had nothing below it for support and was approximately 40 feet or more off of the ground.

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One by one, my friends walked across the path shakily, exclaiming their fears of falling. The line that we were all connected to, which was supposed to protect us from falling, continued to shake as my friends crossed the path unsteadily. Finally, only my best friend and I remained to cross the looped path. I could tell that she saw the fear in my eyes and the tears that were starting to brim my eyes as my fear of heights started to creep back into me. To make matters worse, the sun was slowly creeping away, creating imagery in my head of terrible promises of death. Being a good friend, my best friend decided that she would go first in order to show me that my wild imagination was feeding me false ideas and that the path wasn’t as hard as it looked. As she prepared to start the path I could tell that she was just as scared as I was, and I admired her for facing her fear. Slowly, she stretched her feet out and stepped on each loop, slowly and carefully. Around the middle of the path, my friend made the terrible choice of turning around to smile at me. Through her smile and eyes, she tried to relay the message to me that it wasn’t that hard, and was even fun. However, when she turned around her foot slipped through a loop and she got tangled in the loop.

Time froze at that moment as I saw my friend struggling to untangle herself, and I could barely hear the scream that left her mouth. My friends at the lower platform yelled at her, asking her if she could move, and trying to tell her to calm down. One even tried to climb onto the path to help free her but was held back due to the fact that only one person was allowed on the path at a time for safety reasons. As this was happening, I was frozen in place trying to think of what to do. Before I was my childhood friend, tangled, unable to move, and with one mistake, could easily fall to her death. Then, once again, my friend turned her head around to look at me and this time I could read in her eyes that she needed my help. She needed me to save her.

In that instant, something clicked inside of me and, before I knew it, I was telling my friends to stay put where they were and for one of them to go ahead in the path in order to find an exit, which was a sort of zip line were you descended down to the ground in a straight line quickly. As he ran ahead, I ordered my friends to put as little weight on the line in order for the chances of the line snapping to decrease even more. I then told my best friend to slowly back out of the loops, focusing on one leg at a time, and told her to never let go of her hook. Following my lead, my other friends told her what legs to move in order to untangle herself. Suddenly, I remembered that there was an exit just a few steps behind me, so I yelled to my friends that I would be right back and ran opposite them and towards the exit. Quickly hooking myself to the exit, I jumped off the platform and descended a bit too fast, and ended up scraping my leg against the tree. Bleeding, I ran to the closest instructor and told them about what was happening. Eventually, every single one of the instructors was running off to help my friend and I was sent to the nurse to take care of my scrape, which ended up being pretty large and bleeding a very large amount. Within half an hour, my best friend was saved from that dastardly looped path, and I was sent to the hospital for stitches. Even though I had injured myself, I could only focus on whether or not my friend was going to be okay or not, which led to my nurses being rather aggravated with me. Luckily, my friends decided to visit me at the hospital, which led to a very teary meeting among us, as we all hugged each other, declaring how much we cared for one another and also promising to never go ziplining again.

Although that day led to misfortune and my fear of heights being even larger than before, something positive did come out of that day. That day I learned that my friends were “good people”, people who tried their best to do the right thing in order to save someone. Now, it’s true that my friends might’ve been a bit biased due to the fact that we all knew each other on a deeper level, never the less, they still proved to be “good people” and ultimately did the right thing. It’s “good people” like them that prove society’s idea, that it is a human instinct to want to help one another and that we all strive to protect each other, to be correct.

Bibliography:

1. '37 Who Saw Murder Didn't Call The Police; Apathy At Stabbing Of Queens Woman Shocks Inspector.' Nytimes.com. N. p., 2020. Web. 29 Jan. 2020.