How Six Minutes Can Affect Your Life Part 4: Feeling Alive & Love

After my jump, I felt nothing for the next few days, maybe a week.  I mean, I was proud of what I did considering I had been waiting a long time to accomplish this goal, but emotionally...complete nothingness.  It was the feeling you get after something amazing like a good movie or book and your heart just drops because...it's done.  I anticipated the probability of skydiving many years ago.  This goal then became a focus of mine that only intensified after my life was threatened because I had so much to accomplish.

After I scheduled my jump something changed in my mind.  You know those dreams you get as a child where you are flying, you are invincible, and nothing can hurt you?  I dreamt about that for about thirty days.  The feeling of suspended tranquility, unbelievable admiration, and a somehow mildly empowering feeling of accomplishment. 

Freedom.....
......complete......and utter
Freedom.

It was a place similar to what I would call limbo considering I was neither here nor there.  It is a place you may find when swimming under water or, I have been told, when doing a suspension (hanging from fish hooks?).

And then it was gone.

It was so surreal and I felt apathetic.  I felt as though I was a failure.  In the different aspects of my passed.  What did I do wrong that I ended up here with ...nothing? 

This took me awhile to adjust. I thought I was to feel alive after all that excitement and I felt dead.  I could not figure out what was wrong with me.  Then something clicked.  To many of you this will sound weird if not trite, but I had felt something I had not felt in years.  Love in its purest form.  The type you might have towards a new born child.  Do not get me wrong, I love my family and friends dearly.  I also love people in that "this is a person.  Why do you need to hurt this person?  Why does a person deserve punishment for being different than you?" type of way (too bad you cannot just stick an adult in a corner some days :P).  I had something for a bleak moment and it was gone like that.

So a part of me is lost in that at the moment.  I accept that though.  If I am patient and behave, I might get a chance to figure it out.  Love is a bit complex to figure out in one night anyway.  In the mean time, my writing has increased tremendously making me wonder if the extra oxygen levels cleared a few things or just added more air to my head for ideas to move around instead of bang into each other.  Maybe this was a process of rebirth. Pushing the "reset" button on my life? Adding more perspective because I have too much to experience yet and I just won't know it until I get there.

Dear Jiminy, I Stopped Believing in Fairy-tales....

You ever have those moments or days where suddenly everything that you once knew seems different as though you are seeing it for the first time?  Ever wonder if that moment is suppose to be 'eye opening' or 'eye closing'?  Ever wish you could go back to the way you saw things before your figurative eye sight change?

The first movie I remember seeing in the movie theater, even though my mother would beg to differ, was The Little Mermaid.  As a little girl I remember wishing my eyes were blue and sparkled like Ariel's, that my voice was as mesmerizing as hers, and that I would have a prince to be as passionate about as Eric.  I remember wanting to be her so much that I would practice my scales the same way they are sung in the movie, but even though I was nothing like her I still imagined myself as the star of my life, beautiful and precious in every way and that everyone should treat me as royalty.  Reflecting on this thought probably makes me appear that I was a spoiled brat, which I probably was until I prayed and received siblings, but in the mind of  a growing imagination my thoughts were positive in the idea of placing value on myself.

Later Disney produced the movie Beauty and the Beast, which has since been my favorite movie.  Why?  Because we can all identify with Belle and the Beast.  Some days I wake up and I feel ugly and crampy like the Beast while other times I still believe that some day I will be a princess.

It was not until a recent feeling of apathetic healing that the chant, 'I do, I do, I do believe in fairies,' entered my mind in the voice of a child and soon....it was gone leaving only the adult voice saying, 'Life is not a fairy-tale.'  This thought came to me in front of a mirror and as I looked up I could have sworn I saw the once glisten of a twinkle disappear into a tear.  My apathetic composure had suffocated the childish hope right out of me.

I began to think about the chant that entered my mind, which stemmed from the 2003 version of Peter Pan starring the blue-eyed cutie Jeremy Sumpter, and realized that my belief of a world imagined is not necessarily the avoidance of reality, but the hope and prayer of possibilities.  The fairy-tale of every Disney princess is to find a prince or find someone to share the journey and the story of your life.  The fairy-tale of Peter Pan or Robin Hood is a possibility of adventure, fighting for something better than what currently exists.  A fairy- tale exists exists to inspire that there is always something to reach for, something beyond what ever is in front of us, and the possibility of 'reaching for a star' to become something magnificent.  Do I still sound like a dreamer?

Possibilities.....hope...they start to blend together if you think about them too long until the existence of apathy moves in.  It does not mean you lose your imagination, but it does mean the temporary ending of the vision of possibilities.  I guess this is where I lost my original 'eye sight' wishing I could turn back time to once again avoid reality.  The only thing left to say is......Dear 'Jiminy', I stopped believing in fairy-tales the way you wanted me to......