When Falling Feels Like Friction

When you fall from 13,000 feet, it can feel like you’re not moving at all.

I learned this lesson in July, in Utah, belatedly kicking off my thirties with my brother and my dad by jumping out of an airplane. (With a parachute and an instructor, of course.)

The morning of the jump, my stomach twisted itself into knots, steadily tightening more and more as the day went on. I’ve always said that I wanted to go skydiving, and I’ve always thought it would be a brilliant thing to have done, but faced with the chance in reality, I wasn’t sure I could go through with it. I hoped for a weather cancelation or a scheduling conflict or some other obstacle to prevent me from jumping.

But the weather was ideal, and the schedule worked out, and by 4 pm I found myself strapped to a long-haired instructor named Brandon who told me to curl my toes over the edge of the plane when it was our turn. He would do the work of actually pushing us out.

Dizzying chaos followed—wind from all directions, colors and shapes I couldn’t make sense of, our bodies wheeling through the air. Then Brandon straightened us out so that we were falling parallel to the ground, and at his signal I spread my arms out like wings.

The sky was clear blue; the mountains were inconsequential, like bumps on a map; the terrain below me was the miniature landscape of a snow globe. And though we were falling fast, we were so far from the ground that it didn’t seem to be getting any closer.

Lately I feel like I’m at 13,000 feet in my creative life.

I know that I’ve left the airplane; I know that I’m in motion. But my dreams as a writer seem just as unreachable as they did when I first started out. In some ways, they even seem more distant than they did before, when I was still peering over the edge.

The only thing to do is to keep falling. Keep falling, and maybe try to believe that you’re flying.