Arnold Zwicky's Blog

In the face of impossibly large numbers of things to post about, rising by the minute, I will just pick little bits of stuff, so I will at least be telling you something.

Now, about where I live now, on the third (top) floor of the Avant independent living community. On the side of #3003 facing the street (El Camino Real, a major city street — also California highway 82 — and the smaller El Camino Way running parallel to it) there’s the living room (a big space in the middle now housing my worktable, huge desk, and accompanying office furniture and equipment) and on either side of it, two bedrooms: on the left, what I’m using as my actual bedroom; on the right, what is now serving as a little living room (currently with my recliner chair, a coffee table, and three ordinary chairs for visitors — very much a work in progress).

As I mentioned in an earlier posting, the street wall in the middle room is one gigantic window, left to right, floor to ceiling, which I keep entirely open to the light (beside the street view, it has the foothills in the background, and My Tree right outside the window) because it’s more or less endlessly pleasurable.

Except when I get up to get something from, or off, the street end of the big desk and inadvertently look down at the tree and the ground below it. And am seized with churning vertigo and the certainty that I am about to crash through the window and fall three stories to my death. Oh jesus fucking christ!

I break the spell by stepping back from the brink and deliberately looking up at the window-wall. By then my heart is racing and I’ve broken out in sharp-smelling fear sweat, but it damps down and vanishes almost immediately, once I have stopped staring death in the face.

I have suffered from acrophobia since I was a child. There’s a family story about the original trigger, but it’s probably a fable seized on after I started getting transfixed by fear — on Ferris wheels, at the top of long flights of stairs, looking down out of floor-mounted windows. Not, as it turns out, in planes, even little two-seaters that can cruise close to the ground; that’s an experience I just adored as a kid — saved my money so I could (armed with permission documents from my family) ride my bike (across fields and though woods) to the Reading (PA) Airport and hire a guy who would take me on an aerial tour of Berks County; the pilots got to know me and started finding places to show me that I hadn’t seen before. It was wonderful.

(You will see that I might have been an acrophobic fairy-boy — people would now say fag(got), but fairy-boy was then the taunt of choice — but I was also one tough and adventurous kid.)

I was also forbiddingly smart in various ways, smart enough to study up on acrophobia and possible treatments. I worked on programs of exposure therapy for myself. But they all ran aground when I came up against intractable thresholds. There was such a threshold for the angle of view of the ground beneath my feet; I could accommodate up to a point, but then there was a bright line, which I couldn’t get past. Otherwise, the only thing that worked was not looking down. (It is, alas, very hard to descend a long staircase without looking at where you’re putting your feet. But now I can’t climb staircases at all, up or down, so the staircase problem has in a sense disappeared.)

I collected observations. Things got worse if I was tired, sick, unhappy, stressed, in a novel environment. They also got worse as I aged, though that might just be a consequence of the other factors.

But back to Avant #3003. So far I’ve told you about my workroom. Then there are the two other front rooms. They each have floor-to-ceiling windows. For the little living room, these are actually doors opening onto a little balcony; so far I just avoid going out on the balcony, so there’s no problem there (the balcony of course has a floor).

But then there’s my bedroom. It has a single-pane floor-to-ceiling window right by my bed. I lower the curtain on it for the night, but then I raise it all the way to get some light in the room during the day. When I do this, I’m standing right by the window, so, eek, I’m suddenly standing on the precipice of death. Instant panic.

The first time this happened, I just fell back on the bed. A quick but temporary solution. Today I’m up to the 5th morning in the bedroom, so I now know not to look down and then to edge away carefully from the window (and the view it affords, beneath my feet, of the roof over the main entrance to Avant).  New places, new customs.

(I know, I know, that’s an awful lot for “a little bit of stuff”. That seems to be my way.)

This entry was posted on July 13, 2026 at 9:12 am and is filed under Language and medicine, My life, Psychology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.