Why so Nervous, Nellie?

In short ...

The nature versus nurture debate has been tossed around since the days of Shakespeare...

 "A devil, a born devil, on whose nature .
 Nurture can never stick" .

 (The Tempest).

...either way, traumatic enough events abound throughout my life to account for my easily frazzled nerves, quite aside from any influence that my wog genes (a "wog" being any non-Anglo-Celtic European, esp. from Southern or Eastern Europe, e.g. Greek, Italian, Balkan, Slavic, etc., in Australian English) might impart on my behaviour. No need to rehash the trauma history here in all its gory detail. Perhaps suffice to say that I first ran away from home at the ripe age of 4.

In all honesty, I wasn't specifically "running away from home" as much as "running back to home" ... from Canberra (to which my family immigrated in the late '60s) to Florence (from whence we came). Being a resourceful kind of a kid, I worked out that walking there just wasn't going to cut it, so off I fled on my trusty tricycle. I probably managed to cover quite some distance around Lake Burley Griffin before the scouts that my mother sent after me finally caught me up and shepherded me back into her yard. Thereafter she kept me on a much tighter leash, I'd say for the next 20 years.

Acrophobia

You'd think that someone who spent the first 4 years of their life inhabiting a 10th story apartment with a balcony would be fairly comfortable seeing the world from far above. My father had even had to put chicken wire around the balustrade to stop me from launching all manner of projectiles through it and watching in wonderment as they clattered to the pavement far below.

Of course, it's not so much an extreme or irrational fear of heights that sends me to jelly on a rock climb, so much as the fear of falling!! ...or, more specifically, the fear of inevitably hitting something on the way down and/or at the end of the fall. That's the only bit that will hurt, maim, or kill me, after all.

Perhaps that's not so irrational.