On the Magnetizing Terror of Skydiving

Vodka Yonic features a rotating cast of women and nonbinary writers from around the world sharing stories that are alternately humorous, sobering, intellectual, erotic, religious or painfully personal. You never know what you’ll find in this column, but we hope this potent mix of stories encourages conversation.

When I was 24 years old, I jumped out of an airplane. 

It wasn’t my idea. I had accepted a grant to study in South Africa, and when the grant money ran out, I met up with an old friend. Instead of taking me on a tour of the South African beaches, he nervously locked me in his house and tried to sleep with me. I stayed up those nights with my eyelids locked open — my arms protecting my body and deflecting his reaches. On the third day, I forced an escape. I left terrified.

Naturally, when I got back to the U.S., I promptly dropped out of graduate school and started working at a no-stress job in retail. It had been a summer of hell. When my work buddies asked me to go skydiving, I immediately refused. After lots of coaxing, I agreed to go along “just to support.” It was one of those bright blue Wisconsin summer days. One by one, my co-workers ferried up in a tiny six-seat airplane and then floated to the ground, flushed and exhilarated. Eventually, a woman handed me a clipboard with a waiver to sign. I skimmed through the pages. The gist of it: “You can’t sue anyone if your parachute doesn’t work.” 

They took me and my boss, who would jump with me, through a brief training, and because I didn’t believe I would actually jump, I didn’t really listen. I picked my music from a karaoke binder. I went for thrills — the themes to Rocky and Magnum, P.I.

After returning from South Africa, I put myself in all sorts of danger with a blind belief that nothing could hurt me. My safe landing after being abducted had left me feeling virtually invincible. Years later, after working with therapists, I started to understand my behavior as an artifact of trauma. For me, being terrified was magnetizing. 

I signed the waiver to jump because I couldn’t do otherwise. I climbed into that tiny airplane, and away we went to the soundtrack of Rocky Balboa’s triumphant ascent up the steps to the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Below, farmlands cut in geometric patterns — crop circles, squared-out plots, lines and rows. At this point, the video from that day awkwardly cuts to a close-up as I make my way to the door. I am stark pale, gape-mouthed, wide-eyed and terrified. The woman who is filming is bubbling over. 

“Are you so excited?” she asks.

I try to answer her question, but instead produce an open-mouthed attempt to swallow, which, if you try it out, just looks like gagging. Then my boss, who is strapped to my back, launches my foot onto the plank. Against all the resistance I can muster, he pushes our shoulders into the open air. 

For a lot of my adult life, I’ve been plagued by what my therapist calls “intrusive thoughts.” They are graphic depictions of my own death. I see the smack of my body on the ground. These thoughts, along with my appetite for risk, started after that summer in South Africa. I sought out fear-inducing situations, and then bare-knuckled through them with my heart pounding, visualizing how they’d end me.

The woman filming us jumped too, capturing our descent on a camera strapped to her helmet. In the video, I can see how much force is needed to pull my arms open so I can actually float. They are crossed over my heart in an X, just like they were as I stayed up that night trying to protect my body. Then the Magnum, P.I. theme comes in. Imagine high-energy shots of Tom Selleck loading a gun, a helicopter racing over a beachfront town, cars blowing up. Then Tom drives off in his red Ferrari looking like he hasn’t a care in the world. He can float between high-intensity crime fighting and being an average guy who spends his spare time teaching beautiful women to scuba dive. 

Once my arms are open, I start smiling. I open my eyes. By the time my boss pulls the rip cord, I want to stay there forever, floating toward farms and yellow fields. 

Since then, I’ve found a lot of excuses to casually let people know I hurled my body from a moving airplane. It has been almost 20 years since those nights in South Africa, and I still have lots of moments when I clench up, especially when I travel. 

But sometimes, when I step into an airplane, I remember the lightness of that descent. Once in the air, I gaze down at the mountains, farms and cities. Who lives there, and what would it be like to drive my red Ferrari on those roads?