Sometimes I’m not sure if it’s my mother’s memory or my own: A dog is pursuing me (her?), bounding across the lawn, getting so close to the curb where I’m standing that I have to climb on top of a car to escape. The beast is snarling and nipping at my ankles as I scramble onto the aluminum roof, denting it as my limbs make the ascent. A pit of sheer terror and adrenaline make me faster than usual—not nimble, but speedy enough to get away. Spurred by a hardwired survival instinct, I narrowly escape the attack.
Maybe this happened to me in my childhood, when I had a paper route, or it may have not happened to me at all. It could be a story my mother told so often that I visualized it as my own and adopted the core fear that dogs are scary. Who knows? Memory is an ethereal castle built of whispers and air and smoke and its turrets are ever-shifting as we age and stack more sand and dust upon its feeble foundation.
Another dog memory is much more vivid. This one I’m certain is my own, from when I was roughly 16 years old.
One late summer day on the cusp of autumn, towards the end of the last millennium, my childhood friend Su and I drove out to the Pennsylvania countryside to visit a swath of pastoral land (which we simply called “the farm”) owned by the religious community we grew up in—a small Sufi sect based around the teachings of a mystic guru from Sri Lanka. Many of the congregants, including our parents, were bohemian hippies who’d been raised Catholic or Jewish and had grown disillusioned with their upbringing, finding themselves searching for alternative faith traditions, as was popular in the 1960s and 1970s. (In adulthood, I’ve done the same, forging my own path: I’m ethnically half-Jewish and religiously entirely Jewish, but I remain grateful for the values I learned being raised by Sufi mystics.)
Driving to the farm that sunny day, we delighted in the countryside. So different from Su’s urban, and my suburban, climes: Acres of corn, and wheat, and tractors, and grazing livestock. Sweeping skylines, giant pickup trucks, and silos instead of steeples piercing the clouds. (We hadn’t been there in several years, having lost interest as teens in attending the official community events, much to our parents dismay.)
Fondly, we remembered having adventures as kids getting lost in the surrounding woods and we decided to chase down that experience.
The primary grounds of the farm—which feature a lovely garden, an outdoor mosque, a kitchen, the burial site of the sheikh M.R. Bawa Muhaiyadeen, and a graveyard for the congregants—are flanked on almost every side by forest. In spring and summer, everything glistens and stuns, verdant and abloom. It is a beautiful place.
Off of the main lawn, there was a semi-bulldozed entrance to the woods, leading to a dirt path. This is the path we always used as kids, which led to a dilapidated old treehouse that we loved to climb—it felt so hidden, and secret, and ours, something that adults couldn’t ruin.
Now, as teens, we realized that it was less secluded than we had remembered. It wasn’t that far in from the path and was plainly viewable from the surrounding clearing. We needed to go deeper.
We walked for a long time, rustling our way through trees and mud and bushes, finally reaching the creek and the abandoned train tracks that ran alongside the water.
As we wandered farther into the wood, following the creek, we noticed some signs indicating we were entering private property. But the forest was so quiet and remote, we didn’t imagine anyone could enforce such an arbitrary territorial line. There wasn’t even a fence. It was just more forest.
How could the soil here belong to someone else, when the dirt patch five feet behind us belonged to the farm? Besides, we hadn’t seen or heard another soul in hours, no signs of life. Our solitude was complete. Or so we thought.
We spotted the man in the distance before we heard the barking. A figure in a hooded sweatshirt appeared on the dirt path at least a third of a mile away.
Fear hadn’t registered yet. And then we saw his dogs.
Two German Shepherds materialized from the dense wood, sicced on us by their mysterious owner, presumably for daring to trespass on his land. They were in a fury, sprinting towards us—growling and spitting, frothing at the prospect of catching up to their prey.
We both turned to flee when some primal pang of instinct seized me, forcing me to grab Su’s arm and whisper, quiet but firm, “No. Don’t run.” A freezing calm in my veins, hypothermic, as if I’d been plunged into an ice bath.
I don’t know how I knew, but I knew: We could not run from the dogs.
Everything went still. There was a hungry focus, a clarity. Survival.
We turned around and walked quickly but carefully, at a measured pace, away from the man and his dogs, fear in every follicle, trying to keep our cool. The barks were getting louder and louder, and the dogs were right on our heels. But we forced ourselves to keep steady, not running, not letting the dogs sense the thrill of a chase.
As the sound of the dogs intensified, I peered back behind us, and there they were: mere feet away, almost on top of us. My entire body braced for impact, expecting to get mauled momentarily.
And then, what I can only describe as a miracle happened: The dogs disappeared.
I turned around to see what in the ever-living-fuck was happening. What I witnessed has confounded me for my entire life since.
It was not that the dogs had turned around and retreated, called back by their owner—and it’s not that their barks were fading in volume and that I could see them running back to the man in the distance. No. They vanished in an instant. One moment I could feel their breath at my back, smell their fur, hear their roars. And the next moment they were gone. Nowhere.
For me, it was a religious experience. I felt protected. I think it’s partly why my faith in some divine force has never wavered: It is one of several occurrences in my life that I simply cannot explain. (The last time we spoke of it, Su remembered it quite differently, more logically. This doesn’t surprise me, memory being so unreliably constructed by each of us on ever-shifting tectonic plates and filtered through our own lens, experiences, and beliefs.)
Whatever the truth of that day, this harrowing encounter in the forest intensified my long-standing fear of dogs, which persisted through my college years and well into my 20s.
Later in adulthood, when I grew to rabidly adore dogs, to the point where I now coo excitedly at every furry friend I encounter in the street, I realized that my fear had actually began its decade-long thaw that day in the woods. It had been a crucial point of exposure: I’d faced the worse-case scenario—chased by attack dogs in an deserted forest!—and lived to tell the tale.
And continued exposure—to my friends’ dogs, to my extended family’s dogs, to dog-sitting for Basa (pictured above)—is what showed me that most dogs are safe, and loveable, and loyal, and smart, and they enrich human life immeasurably. It would have been inconceivable to younger me but I stand before you today, a woman who LOVES dogs.
Although it didn’t feel like it at the time, those German Shepherds in hot pursuit had softened me. Being forced to face something I feared, even against my will, ultimately had a positive effect.
And life is often like that. What feels unbearable, what twists us into knots, what constricts our nervous system into tension, can be a prelude to release. Fear can point us to the parts of us that need more attention, some spiritual kneading, a deep tissue massage.
But don’t take my word for it alone. The power of turning towards fear, instead of away, is well documented. It is why, for example, OCD is most effectively treated with Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP), a behavioral therapy which helps people practice confronting their obsessive fears in small doses and not engaging in their compulsive behaviors in response. Over time, the more the obsessions are faced, the less anxiety they produce. (Yes, I’ve been through it myself.)
The lesson is clear: Avoidance is never going to heal us. But exposure might.
This brings me back to another couplet of experiences where the lessons of exposure were on full display. In the first of these linked tableaus, I am quite young, eight years old, on vacation with my family at Disneyland.
It was a miracle I made it as far as California. The trip, long-scheduled in advance, was mere weeks after a helicopter and a plane had crashed into each other above my elementary school, killing everyone aboard both aircraft as well as two children who were playing at recess. Like most of my classmates, I was in school that day and witnessed the tragedy. I heard the thundering explosion, saw the flames, tried to escape through a thicket of black smoke, and walked in a daze among the smoldering wreckage on the field.
In the weeks and months following, my nervous system was in tatters. Every sound made me skittish—from a car backfiring to a dog barking in the distance. At each waking moment, I expected another plane to fall out of the sky and blow into smithereens. I was roaming the Earth as an exposed nerve.
Understandably, I did not want to get on a plane of any kind, even if that plane was transporting me to a land of palm trees and amusement parks. But my parents forced me to go (and I’m glad they did; the exposure to flying so soon after the crash staved off flight neurosis, which many of my classmates suffered for years).
Still, although I’d bravely endured air travel and ended up in Disneyland, what should have been a joyous escape from anxiety was instead a cornucopia of sensory overload.
Disney was a lot. The sounds of human beings screaming (sure, probably with delight, but I just heard horror) rang out from every corner. Behemoth metal rides screeched and boomed. Some of the attractions had real flames. And the throngs of people in every direction reminded me how difficult it might be to escape if something went wrong. In the parlance of 2025, I was straight up not having a good time.
But my parents were determined for me to try to have a little fun. Somehow they convinced me to go on the log flume, Splash Mountain, with my brother Jesse. It seemed like a reasonable idea since fire was my top fear at the time. They cajoled, “It’s a water ride, how bad could that be? Plus water puts fire out.”
It was a disaster. I did not know the log flume was a thrill ride. In fact, I did not know anything about the log flume except that the titular log was to carry me across water and was therefore unlikely to engulf me in flames.
After the first of three vertical drops, where the rider is deposited at top-speed down a giant waterfall, freefalling into the abyss off a rocky man-made cliff, I wanted to escape. I would’ve jumped out if I could, which I could not, since I was fastened in by a steel safety bar.
The worst part was not the vertical drop itself; it was not knowing when the next one was coming. I couldn’t stand the anticipation. The uncertainty was eating me alive. I repeatedly asked my brother, and every other person in our flume, “When is it over, do you know when it’s over?” and, “When is the next drop, is there another drop, when is it coming?” Nobody knew.
What I didn’t understand was that not knowing was the whole point: The idea was to be surprised, to gleefully find oneself careening down a waterfall in a controlled environment that mimics the dangers of wilderness thrill-seeking without any of the risk.
What was probably a five minute ride felt like an eternal torture. When it was finally over, I wept with equal parts relief and misery. I swore on that day I would never go on a ride with a vertical drop ever again. No roller coasters, no flumes, not even a water slide. Famous last words.
Fast forward to eighth grade, on a school trip with the jazz band (I played tenor sax) at Dorney Park, a regional amusement park in Allentown, PA.
Hellish memories of Splash Mountain were coloring my experience and I was assessing each ride based on how likely it was to drop me off the side of a cliff. There weren’t many rides that met my criteria of being 100% thrill-free. It was a bummer. My classmates were having a great time and I was sheepishly avoiding most of the attractions.
In response to my moping, one pushy friend, who I’d been following around most of the day, mounted an hours-long peer pressure campaign to get me to at least try the wooden coaster, Thunderhawk. Thunderhawk was built in 1924, one of the oldest coasters in the country, and somehow this became a selling point instead of a mark against it in her distorted argument: She said it was “too old to be that scary” and didn’t have “loop-de-loops like the steel ones.” It was weirdly persuasive. Nobody was more surprised than me when I broke down and agreed to her demands. As strong as my fear was, my desire to be liked and accepted was stronger, so I grudgingly acquiesced.
The second the rickety old Thunderhawk started moving, I regretted my decision. Plunged immediately into the flight side of fight-or-flight, I screamed for them to “STOP THE RIDE, LET ME OFF, STOP THE RIDE.” The teenage boy manning the controls just looked at me and shrugged, calling out to me as he disappeared from view, “We can’t stop it once it starts!”
There was no escape. It was the log flume all over again: Here I was, trapped, my fate out of my hands. I started to cry.
Adding to my terror, Thunderhawk snapped and cracked and popped, audibly announcing every one of its 70+ years in service as it whipped around its serpentine track. It sounded like it was about to collapse. Every time it went around a curve, its creaky old bones lifted me and my friend out of our seats, suspending our adolescent bodies in mid-air with nothing but a steel bar between us and oblivion.
As we ascended the first hill to the steep drop ahead, I closed my eyes and prayed, tears running down my face. I can’t believe I’m going to meet my end on this death trap, I thought as we crested the peak.
Plunging downhill, I felt my heart drop into my stomach. I braced for impact, destruction, injury, mayhem.
Instead, something miraculous happened. While in a nosedive, clutching the safety bar for dear life, I noticed a peculiar sound emanating from my own body: Laughter. Not a mere giggle. Uncontained, howling, jubilant laughter. My noisy brain, usually spewing a script of language at me, was quiet. There was nothing but the ecstasy of freefall. I tilted my head backwards, the wind blowing my hair into my eyes, and let the guffaws free.
A kind of hysteria overcame me as dopamine rocketed into my nervous system. This is what I’d been so afraid of? Or rather, this is what I’d been missing out on: The exhilaration. The exuberance of losing control. What a RUSH. How exultant to let myself fall, to relinquish my grip on the outcome, and just let myself be in the present. No thinking, just feeling, my usually chatty inner monologue reduced to the primitive sound of “whhhhhhheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!”
When we exited the ride, I was effervescent, bubbling with zing and bounce. “Again!,” I said to my pushy friend, “I want to go again!” And I did. Again and again. I must’ve ridden Thunderhawk five times and then graduated to some of the steel ones too, the ones “with the loop-de-loops” where you hang upside down. In the space of a single afternoon, I was forever changed.
In the decades since, I’ve strapped myself in to thrill rides dozens of times, closing my eyes, and plummeting out of my mind and into my body, with nothing but laughter tying me from one second to the next. Each ride is a practice in accepting uncertainty, every down-dive a reminder that in life, we never know what’s around the bend—and that can be part of the fun: embracing the adventure, becoming one with the mystery.
Of course, facing one’s fears doesn’t always end like this. It’s not always triumphant.
Sometimes our fear is actually wisdom that we should heed. Sometimes our fear is a pang of intuition, steering us away from bedlam. Often, giving into peer pressure is not the right thing to do.
Learning to parse what is helpful trepidation, the kind that keeps us alive, and what is fear that is pointing us towards something that will help us grow, is a lifelong project. And I’ve still got lots to learn and many, many fears to overcome.
But I do know this: If there is a demon we want to conquer, exposure is the surest way. Avoidance keeps us stuck and makes our world small. If we want to stretch into the full expanse of possibility in our lives, to deepen our experience, and embrace the unknown, we have to take the plunge.
So now I try (with varying degrees of success) to remember that the contraction, the tension of discomfort, comes before the relief of expansion. It’s all part of the dance. Up and down. Pressure and release. If we can endure the pinch of peril we just might find profound joy on the other end.
What about you—are there things you once feared that you now embrace, or even adore? How did you do it, was exposure part of what got you to the other side?
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You are an absolutely thrilling and marvelous writer. In the old-fashioned parlance of print - this was a page turner!
Again, I shared some of your childhood fears - I, too, was petrified of certain rides and anything where it went upside down or spun around and around (I was fine on roller coasters!).
I later learned - after an inner ear infection - that I probably have always had a funky inner ear thing that makes it prudent to avoid spinning around rides or turning upside down too quickly.
Ah to be, pardon the pun, dogged by hapless-turned-happy memories of facing fear. This dark time demands such bravery.