I don’t go on rollercoasters because I genuinely believe my heart will fail under stress from the accelerations and loops. At the gym, I don’t do box jumps because I’m afraid of not landing the jump and falling a few inches.

Yet on Friday evening, I found myself prepared to step off the edge of the 100-foot Hollywood Casino in Bangor, equipped with only ropes and sheer terror.

“Why am I doing this?” I asked the people who were fastening the ropes to my harness, moments before I was supposed to go over the edge. “Can I quit now?”

The urban rappelling adventure is a fundraiser for Penobscot Community Health Center. In the second year of this event, the center is raising money to be able to offer expanded children’s mental health services. Between Friday and Saturday, approximately 60 people will be going over the edge. Both years, the center raised $75,000, which is short of its goal of $150,000.

“We really wanted to grab people’s attention and challenge them a little bit,” said President and CEO Lori Dwyer. “It gives you a flavor of some of the anxiety people feel when they suffer from mental health challenges.”

The rappelling itself was coordinated by aptly named Canadian company, Over the Edge, which organizes similar events for organizations across North America. It travels around the country coaching scared people like me to not quit when you’re standing at the edge of the building.

The hardest part, though, is the anticipation. And that’s where Kara Hay came in. I was panicking out loud as I was being strapped into the harness, wondering what I’d gotten myself into when I saw a woman in a Captain Marvel superhero outfit complete with a light-up star on it walk into the lobby.

“You got this,” she told me. It immediately calmed me down. When Captain Marvel tells you you can do it, you really feel like you can.

I later found out that Hay is the CEO of Penquis, a non-profit organization that was raising money for the cause. Hay had raised over $800 in 36 hours this year, and had also rappelled down the Cross Insurance Center as part of this fundraiser last year.

When we were locked into the safety gear, we rode the elevator up to the roof. Hay joked that the gear made us feel like this was a Wild West movie set. I focused all my attention on her and paid none to the fact that we had reached the roof from which we were going to jump.

From the roof of the hotel next to the Casino, the Cross Center looked tiny. That’s where they’re rappelled from last year, Hay said. This year, they had risen to new heights, according to Dwyer. I made quips about how I didn’t need to rise up to new heights. I’d chosen humor as my mechanism to avoid thinking of the roof I was about to jump off of.

But the dramatic fall I was expecting never came. An Over the Edge team member led our group of five through a training session that included what to do if you get stuck and how to maneuver the ropes to keep going down at a slow pace.

Then it was time to stand on the edge. “I might cry,” I warned the team as they explained to me how to do this. They were used to this, and said if I really wanted to quit I could. At that point, I looked over the edge that I was standing on, and I almost fainted. Things look really small from the roof of a 100-foot building, I realized.

But then the Over the Edge volunteers told me that this was the hard part. I can’t be the person who writes a story about rappelling down a building without actually rappelling, I reminded myself.

I then focused solely on their instructions. I walked back to the edge until only my toes were on the roof. Then I straightened my legs back out. At this point I was diagonally hanging off the building with my legs still on it and my hands clinging to the rope harder than I’ve ever held anything before. “Let go of the rope now,” they told me. I refused. “I’m at a crazy angle,” I told them.

But then something weird happened. Standing at the edge of that building, I felt very safe. The harness had me strapped in a dozen places and the Over the Edge team was more than capable of getting me out of any bad situations. So I took my feet off the edge. I’d overcome the lip of the roof and after dangling for a few seconds, I started walking along the side of the building while trying to reach a stable speed.

“Look at you, you’re jogging down the side of a building,” someone shouted at me from the roof. “That’s the coolest thing I’ve ever been told I’m doing,” I thought. At the same time, I heard Hay and other people on the ground cheering for me.

As I descended, I saw Bangor, Brewer and the Penobscot River at a strange angle. I focused on not going too fast. But at this point, I knew, there was no more danger. It was just fun.

I reached the bottom and looked up at the path I’d just taken, almost not believing that the same person who refused to climb down ladders just rappelled the side of a hotel building.

Everyone’s motivation is different. Hay did it for the cause. I did it for the story. You can do it for any reason you want, but this is coming from the least adventurous person ever: if you can get over the edge, it’s worth it.