“I know you’re terrified of heights. Please jump off these 11 cliffs with me. Happy birthday, darling!”

The Beloved sure knows how to raise the stakes on a significant birthday.

So it was that we took my vertigo on the ride of its life. The Cape Canopy tour of 11 ziplines in the wild landscapes of the Elgin Valley near Grabouw.

A zipline, the dictionary tells us, is a suspended, inclined cable equipped with a pulley, down which a harnessed rider glides for recreation. Technically correct, yes, but it doesn’t paint a true picture.

The cables are suspended between platforms built on the side of cliffs. The ground is very far below as you whizz along, at 50 to 60km per hour, hanging from a cable suspended over a valley.

The cables run for a few hundred metres. It can take up to 30 seconds between jumping off and having your feet back on solid ground.

Doing something that scares me usually means not putting an over-sized T-shirt over my yoga clothes, or booking a seat in the front row of the balcony at the theatre. (Yes, the vertigo again)

For a proper leap I need a little push, and as I now know, no one is more keen to push me off a cliff than the Beloved.

Am I cured? Yes and no.

When I think back to the experience, it’s hard to believe it ever happened. It’s possible I was in a state of shock the whole time, starting with opening the present and ending when I landed on the platform at the end of the final jump.

It doesn’t take a genius to recognise that my fear of letting go and my need to always be in control are deeply intertwined with the old wounds I have been carrying around all these years.

Growing up with an alcoholic in charge can make you feel pretty scared. Being scared forever is scarier still. I can’t change the beginning of the story, but I can tweak the middle and the end.

Each time I let go of the fear of letting go and jumped off the platform and into the hands of the zipline engineers and fate, I felt a wild and incredible freedom.

As we approached the next jump, I would feel terrified again. Then I let go and felt free. So it went for 11 jumps.

Fear is a kind of slavery. It keeps our true selves – beautiful, primal beasts of instinct and authenticity – in check so that we can sit quietly, and apparently happily, doing our knitting (with no disrespect intended to knitting enthusiasts).

Did letting go get easier as the day progressed? Maybe, maybe not. Who knows and, quite frankly, who cares.

What matters is that I smashed through my fears that day, over and over again.

If my terrifying four-and-a-half hour excursion didn’t heal me of my fear of heights nothing can. I am still crippled by fear, even if I see someone else walking near a cliff edge.

But this day reminded me of just how fearsome I can be, and how bold The Beloved is.