Fear

I started feeling depressed at an early age. I was about eleven when it really began. In those days most people weren't paying attention to mental health in teenagers and didn't even recognize it in pre-teens. Highschool brought new stresses and deeper depression. The other thing that a new school brought was a new sport: diving. I had been a competitive gymnast for several years and my brother was on the swim team, so it was an easy transition. One thing that carried over from gymnastics was my fear of heights. It had been hardest on the rings and the high bar, especially once I was above the equipment as opposed to hanging below it. On the diving board my fear was mostly present on the high dive which was not where I competed but I would occasionally go up there to test out a dive. I remember one time I went up there and the room started to spin dramatically. I managed to do the do the dive before I passed out, but just barely. A new school meant new friends and a new social scene. The new school started seventh grade and I quickly built a large group of friends and we would have lunch together. I was home sick one day, and when I returned I learned that they had voted and I was no longer allowed to hang out with them any more. I was emotionally wrecked and went into my first deep depression. For several months I had a hard time going to school and I stayed home a lot, which my brother began calling the Monday Disease. My depression eased slowly over the next few months, but was ever present. The years passed but there were more ebbs and flows as various life events hit me. Suicidal thoughts were common when the depression was deep, but I didn't take them seriously because they were themed around making other people regret something they had said or done. That changed in my Senior year when, after I went on a date and it didn't go very well, I spent a couple of hours staring at an open twelfth story window. For the first time ever I saw death as an end to the pain of my depression. I didn’t climb out that window that night, but I did get some more help with my depression. I was perplexed, however, about how I could be suicidal and afraid of heights? What was I afraid would happen? My diving had been really negatively affected by my fear of heights. If I could get rid of my fear, it would make everything so much easier. Since it wasn’t logical shouldn’t it just go away? Maybe if I took my fear on more directly, it would collapse in the face of its illogic? I made a list of things that sounded like they would trigger my fear the most. I started with cliff jumping and bungee jumping, and added hang gliding and skydiving. Over the next several years, I did many of them whenever I had a chance. None of them seemed to have any real effect on me except skydiving. After my first skydive someone asked what me what it was like, and I had to admit that I didn’t remember any of it. I was so focused on everything that I had to do that I forgot to enjoy the experience or even be afraid. Maybe having something to focus on is the key to defeating my fear, I thought. I went skydiving again, and I was really scared on the way up to altitude. Once I landed from the jump, I realized that I hadn’t been scared since I exited the airplane. This would be the pattern for the next two dozen jumps but I started to understand my fear in new ways. I discovered that I wasn’t actually afraid of heights, I was afraid of edges. I was ok if I got to run out through the airplane, but standing in the door and looking down was terrifying. I was recently talking to someone who started skydiving during a deep depression, and he mentioned that one reason he started jumping despite a fear of heights was simply to feel anything amidst the numbness of depression. Although I could relate to the numbness and desperation to feel anything at all, my drive was to understand the contradiction between my fear and my past suicidal depression. Over the years I came to understand that logic and fear had nothing to do with each other. You can’t overcome fear with logic because our fears don’t make sense in the first place. The only way to get past your fear is to decide that whatever is on the other side of your fear is worth going through the fear to get to. So having come to this realization, why did I keep skydiving? It was an important question because skydiving is dangerous. When a fellow skydiver died I was forced to come up with an answer. My first thought was living my life hiding from danger was not really living much at all. I thought about all the dangerous and scary things in the world that I should avoid and decided that if I hid from all of them then I might never leave my home or meet new people. With time, I realized there was more to it than that. Fear like mine doesn’t go away, so you need to get to know it as well as you can. I imagined myself locked in a dark room that had a large hole in the floor. The hole isn’t going anywhere, so I had better get to know it really well. I will have to get to know every edge and just where it sits in the room. I will need to know how to move throughout

Last updated: Sat May 03 2025 10:22:03 GMT-0400 (EDT)