SuperEgo: The Life & Times Of...

“Conquering Fear.”

When you jump out of a plane, you get to conquer fear itself… The problem is, no one tells you exactly when it would happen. The actual conquering. Let me be the first to tell you, it is not WHEN you jump out of the plane.

When you’re in the plane, there were minutes when you contemplated everything you were told to do. You talked yourself into this, you’ve got the helmet on, an instructor is tying himself to you. At 13,000 feet in the air, the doors open, and you think, “…F***K IT! GERONIMO!”

That is not when fear is conquered.

Because at “F*** IT! GERONIMO!,” you’re on top. You’ve got a handle on this whole life thing. It’s the best decision you’ve ever made, and you don’t know why it took you so long. Then you do one turn upward… and the plane isn’t where you left it.

You’ve fallen two inches at this point, and the plane is now twenty feet to the right of you.

10,000 feet. “I’ve just jumped out of a moving vehicle, in the SKY. Attached to two blankets, some rope, and a wide-eyed man in a blue jumpsuit.” You’ve just gone from a high-pitched, “GERONIMO!”, to a baritone, “*gasp*…what have I done?”

8,000 feet. You still have NOT conquered fear. Not in the next twenty seconds as that plane becomes a dot between point A where you jumped, and points B, C, D, and E where you currently are, as you continue freefalling toward the Earth.

6,000 feet. Conquered yet? Nope! You are screaming at the top of your lungs, buuuut you can’t hear yourself, over the PIERCING WIND BLASTING THROUGH YOUR ENTIRE FACE.

5,000 feet. You notice that you just passed through several clouds without thinking about it. The experience you’ve been aching to throw yourself into is passing you by a mile a minute, and you almost missed it all.

4,000 feet. Your tandem instructor has just given you the mandatory warning. It starts to sink in somewhere around the 3,000 feet mark. Realizing your mortality; going through your episodic memory and recalling all the joy and pain, triumph and sorrow, late nights and early mornings.

3,500 feet. Your arms and legs are completely relaxed, even though thirty seconds ago every nerve in your body was flailing uncontrollably. The fear is leaving you.

2,500 feet. Your breathing has normalized. You take in the landscape; a bird’s eye view of the world you walked on day in and day out. Life’s problems become insignificant. This is also adrenaline and dopamine preparing you for blunt force impact, but it’s also a euphoria which no man-made substance could ever match. :)

2,000 ft. The time is now, do or die.

…YANK! You shoot upwards so fast you’re sure that gravity just gave up and that you’re being sucked into space. Then, the descent.

1,000 feet. The target is getting bigger.

500 feet. The ground is approaching fast.

In life, plenty of people will tell you not to look down when you’re on the edge. Well, hey! You’re supposed to look down! It’s called foresight. How else will you know where to land? You have to keep a cool head, know where you’re going, and do everything in your power to land there as safely as possible. That’s what a leap of faith is. Making as informed a decision as possible, then manuevering through toward your end goal. It’s a decision you can never return from, a time you can never go back to. But succeeding means that no matter what the outcome, you thought the ride was worth it.

…And that’s how I view life at this point; from religion, to love and marriage, friendship; hell, sometimes even ordering a drink from the bar Starbucks. The point is, realizing that if you survive that leap, after everything you went through to get there, the knowledge of completion is what allows you to rise above the fall.

As a great man once said, “FEAR, my friends, conquers all.” It’s up to you to turn it around.

Markus Eliance is a freelance journalist, filmmaker, musician and nightlife photographer. For more of his work, visit YourProofItHappened.com. Follow Markus Eliance on Twitter: @markeliance.