My name is Kirsten, and I have a longstanding hill phobia. You may be thinking that I should choose my phobias more wisely, limiting them to, say, nuclear war - or even spiders. But, since I was a kid I have really, really disliked hills. I would not roller skate on them. I did not like to ski down them. Driving on them- well, that creeped me out beyond belief.
That said, you can imagine my secret worry during a recent trip to visit a friend in San Francisco. The Bay Area (as it seems to be called by Those In The Know), it turns out, is awash with hills. Steep hills. That one has to walk down and drive up. I was pretty worried that I would appear like a two year old when I expressed my fear of hills, but luckily I have an understanding friend who only laughed secretly inside when I told him about it. And then he decided maybe he should try to help cure it.
Hmmmm, I thought. As we drove up and down hills. As I held on to his car seat and tried to carry a conversation which did not sound like I was focusing solely on the hills. Finally I blurted out that I hated hills. I imagined cars losing brakes and careening out of control down, down, down.....
Then he took me on a cable car ride up a very steep hill. At first I was, per protocol, freaked out and held tightly to the iron holder-onner-bar-thing. After a few minutes, I relaxed. The cable car did not roll backwards into poor pedestrians crossing the street, and chugged up the hill at a stable pace. We stopped at various intersections and I was able to look both forward and back, to see the hill above and below. And my phobia started to subside somewhat. In the end, I decided that I liked the cable car, and I really liked the beautiful church at the top of the hill.
I guess the moral to this post is: even 38 year olds can get over their fears and phobias. We all have them, whether big or small. Some of us (like me) have a fear of, say, getting hurt in relationships so we tend to put up walls that in effect create the very situation we fear. I'm working on that. Some of us have a fear of planting tomatoes for fear that they will all die instead of grow. I am not working on that. Some of us have a fear of hills.
At the end of the day- we can't ever conquer our phobias unless we get on the cable car and go up the hill. We need to just jump.
1 comment:
i love reading stuff you write. it's so fun. you need to write a book or something. i would read it!! i even read this post to mom. we were thinking you meant over the hill, as in, getting old! ha! i'm glad you had fun though!!
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