“I could never jump out of an airplane. I’m afraid of heights.”
It is a phrase every skydiver has heard from a wuffo. I am also afraid of heights. So are a lot of skydivers I know. The ones that aren’t afraid of heights are often afraid of flying. In fact, it was my fear of heights that prompted me to make my first skydive.
I had been afraid of heights for as long as I could remember. Getting on a ladder or even standing on a chair would make me dizzy. It had been a real problem for me as a springboard diver in high school. During those same high school years I had also suffered from severe depression and thoughts of suicide. These two things were hard to reconcile. If the worst that could happen was something I was contemplating anyway, what was there to be afraid of?
My first jump was years later when I had treated my depression, but the fear of heights was still there. So was my puzzlement at the contradiction between that fear and my previous depression.
Early in your training to become a skydiver you have to show that you can spot the dropzone from deployment altitude. This means walking up to the open door of an airplane at 13,000 feet, sticking your head out and pointing to the intended landing area. When it came time for me to do this I approached the door and looked down, but my hands had a death grip on the door frame. I tried to point to the dropzone with my nose so I would not have to let go of anything. Unfortunately my instructors did not find this adequate, so I let go with one hand, jabbed a finger at the ground, and grabbed the door with that hand as quickly as I could.
“So how do you do it?”
One way to deal with your fear is to occupy your mind with other things. The most important thing, though, is to realize that you cannot overcome fear with logic. In mathematical terms, fear and logic are orthogonal to each other. The only way to overcome your fear is to decide that what is on the other side of your fear is worth confronting your fear in order to experience.
Story Time:
A couple of years ago my family was packing to get ready to take a beach vacation. We live in New England and have found a short break from winter can make the cold and darkness much easier to deal with. I finished packing and went to check on my kids to see how they were doing and discovered my older child hiding behind the door to her room. On our last trip to the beach she had been stung by a jellyfish and was afraid it might happen again. Her fear of that sting was so overwhelming that she couldn’t even pack her bag.
I sat down with her and talked to her about our time at the beach over the years. We talked about all the amazing things in the ocean, and what we might see. I told her that I could not promise her that she wouldn’t be stung by a jellyfish. There are more jellyfish out there, and they can be very hard to see. But I also reminded her of how much she likes playing in the waves, snorkeling, and playing in the sand. I never told her she had no reason to be afraid. I never reminded her that a little vinegar had made the sting feel better. Logic was not going to help her at that moment. I just pointed out that on the other side of that moment she was afraid of was a lot of amazing experiences.
One of the benefits of spending so much time confronting your fears is that you get a much better understanding of them. I discovered that I am not actually afraid of heights, but I am afraid of precipices. I don’t mind going out the door of the plane, I’m just afraid that if I spend too much time at the edge I might fall.
“Wait a minute? Isn’t falling the point?”
Absolutely! Skydiving is falling. We call it flying but we are just falling through the sky, so yes, falling is the plan every time I get on an airplane to jump. I have lots of equipment on my back to make sure that I will be ok when I fall, but I’m still afraid of falling accidentally. It doesn’t make any sense at all, and that is exactly my point. Fear has nothing to do with logic, and you will never explain away a fear.
Over my twenty years in the sport of skydiving I have hung from the outside of a plane countless times. I am often in charge of spotting the dropzone before anyone exits the plane, which means sticking my head out the door. I have dangled from the strut of a helicopter and leapt off the side of a hot air balloon. To this day, though, if I am near the open door of an airplane in flight, I am very likely holding on to something, and probably as hard as I can.
What you can’t see in this photo is that I am leaning on a bench. I even might be holding on to a loose seatbelt.
Photo Credit: Allan DelValle Jr.
Top photo: My holding on to the outside of the plane while my friends all exit and make funny faces at me. Photo Credit: Jim Warcup
