There was a time in my life when I thought it was a good idea to throw my body out of a plane. Yes, like hurl my body into the sky with a parachute strapped to my back, uncertain if it would actually save me from my ultimate demise.
Well, technically a middle-aged man was strapped to my back and he had the parachute on his back. However, I didn’t find this any more comforting. I was told he was trained and blah blah blah. It was all fun and games until my friend and I crawled into a tiny white plane painted with colorful polka dots with these strange men strapped to our backs, shouting over the sound of the engine, as the plane made its way up and up toward the clouds.
I was in college and I was saying yes to everything. Being the first person assigned female at birth in my family to go to college left me feeling at once incredibly anxious about fucking up having gotten this far in my life in the first place and also like I couldn’t say no to anything now that I had access to another world. Chances were high that I would get pregnant or become addicted to any of the various kinds of drugs available to me at my high school or through some of the boys I grew up around—mainly heroin. It felt like a miracle that I found myself at school at all. I wasn’t quite sure how I’d pulled it off, and I was determined to make the very most of it. So that meant, I said YES. And YES. And YES.
Saying yes to everything meant that when a new friend told me we could go skydiving at a discounted rate through an adventure club at school, I had to of course say YES. There was no question in my mind. It never occurred to me that maybe I didn’t work so hard to stay out of trouble as a teenager only to have the privilege of being able to choose to throw my body out of a plane, voluntarily, for fun!? I was starting to get a taste for upper-class thrill-seeking that looked very different from the kind I grew up around which mostly consisted of family members making poor choices around drunk driving or my dad speeding over a series of hills that made me scream in glee because it felt like the car was soaring just like it did when we went to Kennywood Park and I got to ride the Jack Rabbit, my whole body shaking as the rickety wooden rollercoaster climbed the hill that would cause me to scream until I was red in the face as we made our terrifying descent.
You haven’t heard from me over the last few months via Ask a Failure because I have been saying YES. YES and YES and YES. Yes to new love and drinking too much and biking in the hot ass Oklahoma summer streets and going to punk shows and traveling for love and saying goodbye to someone I thought I’d know for longer than we ended up knowing each other and making a childhood dream come true by going to Iceland for a writing workshop and working working working and knowing in my bones that everything was about to change for me once again even though I didn’t know if I wanted it to. I could feel the time in Iceland was some kind of marker. There were too many conversations and insightful comments from others not only about me personally but also the current book I’m working on that made me feel like something larger than me was trying to tell me something—over and over again—like hey are you hearing me yet? Everything you’ve been thinking and feeling and wanting—yeah all of that shit—you could make it real if you stop being so fucking scared of yourself.
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