I Jumped Out of an Airplane and Came Out as Trans
Letting go
For my 48th birthday, I did something I had always wanted to do. I jumped out of an airplane by myself and lived to tell the tale. I had always been a thrill-seeker. I had always pushed that envelope and pushed my luck. I didn’t do these things out of a sense of machismo or bravado, and I did it because I felt that maybe, just maybe, there was a chance that the universe would see to it that my life would end.
I wasn’t actively looking to commit suicide, but I welcomed the chance to see if my luck would hold out. I had a wife, two children, and a terrible secret by that time. I am transgender, and I was miserable.
I had layers and layers of self-loathing over who I was, what I was. In my teenage years, I had a funny notion (it seems so now) that I would outgrow being feminine, that I would adapt and be a man, that I could bury it and walk away from that part of me. Now, in retrospect, this idea seems so ridiculous. I had hoped it was a passing fancy, a trifle, a teenage sexual hang-up that would go away. I had a lot of incentive to rid myself of it. My parents expressed disgust at my activities, calling me a queer, a faggot, a pervert, and a degenerate. Who wouldn’t want to bury that?
Jumping out of an airplane teaches you many things; it is a hero’s journey, where you find your inner strength and face your fears, doing what you thought impossible and coming out alive. The day-long jump course stresses one thing: When faced with adversity, work the problem and solve it. If the parachute does not open correctly, make it open. If all else fails, go to the reserve chute and do not give up, ever. This is solid advice that will take you far in life.
I had always thought I was a coward all my life. So when I was the last person aboard that tiny plane, and the pilot said, “you have to leave, we can take off with this much weight, but we cannot land with this much weight,” I knew I had committed to opening that door, hanging on to that wing strut and letting go.
I’ve been thinking about jumping as both a physical act and as a catalyst for understanding the bigger jump of moving ahead with one’s transition ever since reading An Open Window. All I had to do was jump, so I did. | by Jas Martinez | Gender From The Trenches | Medium
It’s a rather brilliant and beautiful read.
She concludes a discussion about jumping from a window with “it’s the moment fear leaves their body” That letting go is so freeing. You do leave your fear behind. And when you let go, strangely, the sensation is not one of falling; it is of the plane rapidly moving away from you. It just whooshes up and away. A falling body accelerates rapidly. Once the chute opens and all is clear, as you drift down, your perspective changes quickly. The sensation is of the transitory nature of experience, the preciousness of life.
My life, my love, my marriage, my family, all were so precariously balanced. As Dickens said: “it was the best of times, it was the worst of times” I loved the safety and security that my life gave me. And I couldn’t stand it.
In the past year, I left the safety of the airplane twice. I prefer to look at it as I leaped once and got pushed out the second time. My first leap was when I finally stopped living a lie and finally came out as Transgender. It was so completely freeing. The push was the end of my marriage. And rightly so. I appreciate the shove. I clung on so tightly to that door frame it was only one way to get me to let go and build a life as a woman in the world. I could never be the person she wanted me to be, so I lied. I lied to her, and as importantly, I lied to myself.
There’s a lot of writers here on Medium sitting in the door of that airplane, talking about how great the view is from up there, how pleasant the service is, and I say jump already.
Growing up, we had a placard in the kitchen; it said: “The road to hell is paved with good intentions” I started the marriage with the best intentions. Before we moved in together, I purged thousands of dollars of clothes, makeup, and underwear; I vowed to walk away from it all, never look back. That vow lasted ten years. When I made the physical jump out of the plane, I had started crossdressing again. I started down that slippery slope.
Maybe like an addict, even a small taste was enough to send me into a binge. Self-denial, self-delusion, and willpower can only take you so far. You wake up with yourself; you have to live with yourself and look at yourself in the mirror. I was angry and unhappy; I was reckless with my life and the precious lives of my ex and children. If that alone isn’t enough to convince one to change drastically, what is?
I have a semicolon tattoo on my right wrist. It speaks to having passed through fire and flame, from one life to the next, and it began again. As I build a new life and reflect on the old, I don’t second guess the jumping. I wish I could have been more honest with myself and spared those in my life some of the pain I caused.
The fable of the frog and the scorpion ends with the scorpion stinging the helpful frog and remarking, “I could not resist, it’s my nature” Maybe being transgender was so inherently in my nature that I was bound to hurt the most important people in my life and leave them to pick up the pieces.
It is my hope, as time goes on and there is heightened understanding and acceptance of the transgender community, that people will start accepting themselves at an earlier age and their burdens will not be as heavy. May they have an easier time letting go of the comfort of the airplane and be able to drift down to safe landings.
