An Almost Meltdown on Waterloo Bridge

I am deathly afraid of heights and I am slowly accepting I cannot ever fix that

I tried for years to expose myself to situations where I had to be up high and it always went south for me. I always panicked and had to flee.

My earliest memory of being scared of heights was being about four and being placed on my father’s shoulders. I freaked out and screamed and cried. Everyone laughed and thought it was completely ridiculous.

Yeah, I am that afraid of heights. Being on a ladder is frightening.

Other memories of being a small child and being afraid of heights had to do with being placed on my brother’s bunk bed at college or being taken on a pier at the beach. I particularly remember the pier incident because I stopped dead when I looked down at my feet and saw the ocean far below through the cracks of the boards and panicked. I started screaming and crying and they had to take me off the pier.

As I got older I was able to go out on the pier with someone else around but I never stopped being afraid. Now I know that this is a problem for me because I have proprioceptive and vestibular sensory issues. I don’t know where I am in space and I get terrifyingly disoriented. I don’t feel safe. I feel like I’m flying off of whatever tall something I’m on.

This preamble is to set things up for a little story I’m about to tell you. In 1996, when I was 24 years old, I met a British guy, my ex-boyfriend, at a Sci-Fi convention (of course I did) and we kept in touch after having hit it off and had sparks fly that weekend that we spent together.

Four months later I moved to England to live with him. I’m not sure why. I’m not sure I ever loved him the way I should have. I loved him, just maybe not enough to move halfway around the world.

But I had lived in England 4 years before and I think I just really wanted to go back and having little money, that was my ticket to leave the US. I stupidly thought I could solve all of my problems by leaving the country. they of course, as I have said before, just followed me there.

We lived just around the corner from Notting Hill Gate tube station in a flat above a dentist's office. Further down from us was Portabello road, one of the big markets that are tourist attractions in London. Because of the big flea market that they have on the weekends, it was nothing for us to step out on our front stoop every weekend to people sitting on our front steps eating sandwiches. Tourists.

My boyfriend at the time was a movie buff. He was the son of a man who dealt in old reel-to-reel film and who helped his father sell his memorabilia at stalls at film fairs. So we would quite often venture to the South Bank of the Thames where the Museum of the Moving Image and its accompanying movie cinema was.

On one particularly rainy day, post-rain, I put on my platform sandals (it was the 90s) and got on the Tube to go meet my boyfriend on the South Bank. He was coming from his job at Earl’s Court and I was coming from the flat in Notting Hill. We were to rendezvous at Waterloo tube station.

But before I got there, there was a bomb threat at the station stop before Waterloo and all of the passengers in the Underground had to disembark from the train and come up to the surface. In order to meet my ex, I was going to have to cross Waterloo bridge to get to the Waterloo tube station. I had to go across the bridge over the Thames.

It was not a big deal for a lot of people but it was a huge deal for me. Mainly because we were not really crossing the bridge so much as we were actually crossing a catwalk that was attached to the side of the bridge. Even better! That’s sarcasm.

The catwalk was slippery. I was wearing platform sandals. My feet were wet and slipping in the platform sandals, which, on a good day, had me looking like a young colt trying to walk for the first time. But fashion and vanity dictated that I had to wear them that day for some reason.

I tried to balance myself in these platform shoes because I don’t have the greatest motor skills, I’m terrified of heights, and I’m walking on a catwalk across the Thames.

When I tell you that I was terrified out of my mind that is not hyperbole. It is not an exaggeration. About halfway across the bridge, I thought I was going to lose it. I started to have panic well within me and I felt it was going to burst out of every part of my body.

I felt an overwhelming urge to grab the woman who was walking in front of me and ask her to hold my hand and guide me across. I was inches away from doing it, and reached out to grab her but stopped myself.

The social contract necessitated that I do not do something as invasive as grabbing someone from behind on a bridge because, I, an adult was afraid of walking on a relatively short bridge (both in height and length) in the scheme of things.

It would not have been within social decorum to lose my shit on the catwalk outside of Waterloo station and grab onto a stranger. I did not want to be seen as nuts or be arrested for accosting someone.

And so I looked down once and that was all I needed to do to know that I could not keep looking down. I then fixed my gaze straight across the bridge, which because I’m autistic and tend to always watch my feet so I know where they’re going because of my proprioceptive issues, was no easy task. How I avoided a meltdown I do not know.

But I self-talked myself across that bridge. I told myself to look straight ahead and keep looking straight ahead and just keep moving. I made it across without incident but was not unscathed emotionally or physically.

I met up with my boyfriend and at that point, I was shaking like a leaf all over and my teeth were chattering. I should have insisted that we go back home. I don’t know I may have even tried to insist that we go back home but he had already bought our tickets ahead of time and so I had to go.

I have no memory of what film we watched that day because I don’t think I was actually there. I think by that point I had dissociated. My mask had been so firmly in place that I was able to not melt down in public, but it had turned inward instead and caused a shutdown.

A month later I would not be so adept at containing my meltdown when my boyfriend broke up with me and I fled the flat. I took the tube to Hyde Park and walked around intensely crying, prompting one man to walk by and exclaim irritatedly that “It can’t be that bad.”. I wanted to throw a shoe at his head. Luckily I had enough wherewithal to not do that either.

I have tried for the last two decades, and some change, to get over my fear of heights, but it has only gotten worse. I eventually became terrified of driving over bridges and overpasses and subsequently gave up driving.

Before the Pandemic, I ran terrified from a shopping mall because it had multiple floors that faced a giant courtyard going up several stories. I had been there before, always terrified, but on that day, for some reason, I could not handle it anymore. I have never been back and it has been almost three years.

I think about the day I crossed Waterloo Bridge’s catwalk a lot since being diagnosed autistic, not as some personal accomplishment, but because I know I would not be able to do that today. My sensory issues have worsened. Every sensory issue is more intense for me now.

Is it because I am in pretty intense burnout right now and maybe I will not go back to how I was before? Is it because of perimenopause and the estrogen drop because estrogen protects the brains of those with ovaries and without it autism can be more pronounced than before? Or is it because my mask dropped a year ago and this is how I always was and didn’t realize it? I do not know.

I am trying to accept how it is because I don’t know. I am trying to accept, post-diagnosis, that like most of the things I wanted to change about myself, my fear of heights will not get better.

Heights will always terrify me because of my sensory issues with vestibular and proprioceptive input or the lack thereof. So, I keep looking to the future even though this will not change. I am still moving forward by looking straight ahead.