You should write a book!

Forbidden Stories - How I got out of the airplane.

Almost all of my students have heard how I survived falling out of an airplane without a parachute. It's a real crowd pleaser and for some reason, nothing about it upsets Swedish adults or even the guardians of Swedish culture that often get me thrown out of Swedish schools. In fact, the only thing the adults have trouble with is how I got outside that plane. 

I had just about physically recovered from being shot.  I was lucky that all my wounds fit under clothes and I had just joined a medieval reenactment group, so I had both amateur medical care and an excuse to wear weird 'protective' clothing. My mom was still oblivious to my extra-curricular activities, and I could just claim that I had hurt myself hitting people with padded sticks. My step-dad was mildly suspicious, but he was weirdly protective of other people's secrets. My guess now is that he had a few of his own, but he never told on me to my mom. 

It had been nearly a month since E's death, which was the same incident in which I had gotten shot. It was obvious to all my home friends that something was wrong, but no one knew what. I'd occasionally put on my obviously fake smile sometimes, but the people who knew me were concerned that they hadn't seen my real smile in a month. That all changed when my friends told me I could watch them go skydiving. 

I'm not sure what I was thinking, but I don't remember being explicitly suicidal. I've been like that a few times in my life, but not this time. Mostly I felt guilty. I felt like E's death was my fault, that I had done something to cause her death and that she wouldn't be dead if it weren't for me. I was paralyzed, waiting for the other shoe to drop, and I hate waiting. 

One of the things that's wrong with me, which I'm not sure is autism, but maybe it is, is that I hate indecision. Sometimes a problem will bother me for a long time, tear me up inside, just make me sick, and then I'll decide to do something, and all the worry and sadness will go away, even if the thing I decide to do is ultimately meaningless or doesn't accomplish anything. That's what 'watching my friends skydive' did for me. Somehow, I told myself, this would make me feel better. Somehow, this would settle something. 

As I said, I wasn't explicitly suicidal. I wasn't thinking about death. I wasn't thinking about ending it, or being free from guilt, or pain, or worry. It was just that I'd decided to do something. So, while my friends were strapping into their parachutes, I loosened my little safety belt. When they opened the little side door they were going to jump out, and turned back to do a final check to make sure everyone's chutes were right or straight or whatever, I jumped out. 

No one expected it. I'm not even sure I knew that was what I was going to do when I went up. I hadn't been angry anymore, not even at myself. Hadn't been guilty or even much sad. It was selfish, but I was a teenager. I knew I needed to do something, and this was something. Jumping out of an airplane would fix what was wrong with me. 

And in a twist of cosmic irony, it did. I didn't know how it would fix me to be in a deadly situation like that. I didn't know my friends would catch me halfway down or that I would even survive. But a few seconds of freefall and my brain in overdrive processed the grief and trauma I'd had for weeks. Once I left that plane, I was helpless. There was not a single thing I could do to change what was going to happen. Gravity and other people were entirely in control, and somehow, my ignorant teenage brain processed that sometimes we're not in control, sometimes things happen that aren't our fault. 

In that moment, right before I was ridiculously lucky to get slammed into by another person wearing a parachute and saving my life, freefall felt like helplessness, and helplessness is freeing. There comes a moment, when you have tried your absolute hardest and there is nothing more you can do. It can be a work thing, a relationship thing, a sports thing... But if you've done everything you can, there's a brief moment, before you win or lose, that you can't do anything else, and there's a moment of relief. Because it's out of your hands. Because you're done and the results of your actions aren't your problem anymore. 

I'd be lying if I said I didn't savor that moment every time it came after this. When my hotel was overbooked and I'd given the last room to someone, but 12 more people were coming expecting rooms. When I picked a fight with the wrong guy and I knew I was going to lose. When a relationship was truly over, because I'd failed someone too hard. Despite the stress, and frustration, and anger, and sadness, these moments were an echo of freefall, of that first time learning that helplessness means we're done fighting. We can take a breath knowing that we tried. 

I didn't go up there to die. I didn't even think about what would happen if I hit the ground. The ground was not part of my mental calculus. I just knew I needed to jump. And if a single detail had been different. If they had AADs like they do now that auto-open parachutes if you're going to fast. If they had missed when they tried to catch me. If they'd been a second slower following me out those doors. I'd have died. But I wasn't trying to. 

But if you only get part of the story, you might think I was suicidal. And part of the story, with all of the forbidden stories, is scary. 

It's dangerous for me to think about why some adults hate when I tell my stories. Sometimes it makes me feel like I'm better for having lived life and made mistakes, while lots of people live lives of cautious inaction, especially the kind of people who become teachers. I'm not better than them, but their shunning of me leads me down dangerous paths. Makes me a worse person.

The thing I have to remember about the forbidden stories is that I never survive these things on my own. I'm exceptionally lucky, both individually and because I had good friends looking out for me. Part of what is so hard about being in a place so foreign without the kind of friends I'm used to having, friends who've had late nights, where everyone's mask slips. It's hard to have that now, when we all have jobs and many of us have kids. 

I'm insanely lucky to have survived at all. Every day is a gift, and my aegis could disappear at any time.