‘I was more resilient than I thought’: Author Eva Holland on her new book about facing — and sometimes accepting — our fears
Holland’s struggles were both micro and macro: Her fear of heights started with a fall on an airport escalator a young girl, and a more recent driving phobia manifested after three car accidents on unforgiving northern roads. Yet those fears were more like symptoms connected to a root cause. As a girl, Holland lived mostly with her mother, who lost her own mom at an early age.
You participated in a Yukon Ultra Arctic race, which is a 100-mile trek in the dead of winter when there are 18 hours of dark. What is the difference in the fear you have with heights or driving versus the fear you face in a race where competitors lose feet and fingers? In the book, you describe a point in the race where you’re trying to put up your tent and switch your clothes in the dark. That would have scared the shit out of me.
You write that you grew up with the fear you would lose your mother at a young age, like she had lost her mother. Then it happened. How did that translate to your other fears, that the one thing you dreaded the most came true? One of the things you try is what I’d call mainlining your fear. You have a fear of heights, so you go skydiving. It didn’t work. Why?
Those were instances where I think I had a really pure reaction to a genuine threat. It was only after working on the book that I can tell you there’s a qualitative difference between them. In my heights panic, it’s sort of irrational and feels fuzzy and paralyzing, while the others felt really sharp and clear, like it was a drive to action.
I’m not really a therapy person, and I didn’t know what to think of it. But it was amazing. The EMDR procedure consisted of me closing my eyes and holding these kinds of buzzing pods in my hands — they buzzed in an alternating rhythm and prompted my eyes to naturally shift back and forth behind my eyelids. Once I had eyes closed and pods buzzing, the therapist had me tell the story of each incident.
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