Adrenaline Forest, part one

This picture was taken four hours back, but it feels like a lifetime ago. A different time. A time before my innocence was lost.

My dear friend Ros had organised for a group of chums to go to Adrenaline Forest. Now, I'm not particularly good with heights, but every other time Ros has made me do outdoor things, I've at least failed with panache.

So I cheerfully went along. I wore my lucky sequinned cat top. Look: you'll see the diamantes glinting in the overcast 18° of Wellington summer. The world was my oyster.

The staff were lovely as we climbed into our harnesses and learned how to use the safety equipment. Adrenaline Forest is basically an obstacle course way above the ground: wobbly highwires, swings and flying foxes suspended between really tall trees. There are seven levels, with the hardest reaching 31 metres above the ground. We started gently on level two.

I was the last of the four in our group to make the attempt. I'd finally worked out how to use the equipment. I just had to climb two metres up to the first platform, and then set out on the first highwire. And I need you to know, for that first two metres I was ****ing brilliant.

Then, as I stood on the platform looking out on the stretch ahead, the most mortifying thing happened to me. A panic attack began. It's hard to explain how it felt. It wasn't being anxious or nervous or lacking in confidence. It was the wholesale sensation of irrational terror that simply shut my brain down with blunt force.

Panic attacks aren't a thing I'm especially prone to. The only other time I felt the beginning of this awful phenomenon was at the Cu Chi tunnels outside Ho Chi Minh city, where you stoop to walk through the dark and hot space, barely wide enough for a human being. That time, I could feel claustrophobic screaming rising inside me, even though I'd barely made it inside at all. The other tourists behind me were gracious enough to reverse and let me exit, as I backed out arse first, yearning for the light.

Now history was repeating itself, only with shittier weather, and a crowd of young people in the next group behind me waiting patiently below to take their turn. I felt like I could probably struggle through the first leg of level two, only four metres or so and a short way above the ground. But I also knew I would end up paralysed at some stage thereafter, at some point before the level was done, and it'd be much harder to rescue me, and endlessly more annoying for folks stuck in the queue.

So I committed what might have been my bravest act of cowardice ever. I bailed out two metres - two ****ing metres - into a seven level hours-long course.

As I descended, backing myself arse first out of another challenging situation, the young people were very kind, helping me down. But I knew they were going to make fun of me later and if I wanted young people laughing at me I'd spend time with my family THANKS.

Anyway, I felt like a dick. I sat by myself while others climbed in the trees above me. I had a cry when no one was looking. I learned a bit of lesson, about what it's like for folks who live with this kind of experience more frequently than I do, the debilitation they must go through. And I resolved to get back in the saddle.

I'm going to return. And I'm going to do level one. It's the level that children can do, except for the children who skip it because it's too easy. And it's going to take me multiple attempts, and there will possibly be more crying. But I am going to do level one.

Ros reflected on the way home, 'I meant to take before and after pictures of you. There was no after'. We laughed. Because damn it, there will be an 'after' eventually, even if I have to ask one of the children also doing level one to take it.

Arse first, there is nothing I cannot achieve.