I want to be spontaneous, like the fun, independent female lead of a rom-com, or the adult version of a carefree American Girl Magazine cover star.

But as I await a life-changing meet-cute and/or an opportunity to wear a funky headband, I am slowly but surely coming to terms with the fact that I’m just not the type of person who can try new things without being emotionally exhausted afterwards. Even so, I try not to limit myself. If I stay too deep in my comfort zone, I’ll continue to find myself on my couch, alone, rewatching The Real Housewives of New York City for the nine hundredth time… My therapist, as it were, loves to throw around the phrase “distress tolerance” — so much so that I named my wifi network after it when I moved into my own apartment. Most of the time she’s referring to making the choice to sit in uncomfortable feelings instead of turning to some numbing device or other unhealthy coping mechanism (snore), but sometimes it means putting yourself into a situation that makes you uncomfortable. Being able to deal with that initial discomfort is a great skill, because you never know if you’ll get something positive out of that new experience! Maybe it will be great! Or maybe it will be terrible, but no one can say I didn’t try. This philosophy is how I ended up taking a trapeze class. A trapeze class.

While I am a firm believer that not everything has to be for everyone, I try to be game when opportunities for new experiences present themselves. So when my friend Parade suggested that I attend a trapeze class with her, I said yes (and not just because our other friend Megan, another trapeze first-timer, said yes — only about 90% because of that. The other 10% is because we were out for drinks and the waitress had been very attentive). Maybe it would be fun! Maybe it’ll be a new thing I like to do! Nothing says rom-com lead like being involved in a quirky yet athletic hobby that embodies grace, strength, and independence all at once (people are always saying this)! Plus, I am pro-adrenaline and I’m generally down for something exciting. I’m not necessarily the world’s most athletic person, nor would I go so far as to say I’m in the best shape of my life, but how bad could it possibly be?

Within a couple of weeks, I was on my way to my first trapeze class. But an eerie feeling settled over me while I was on the subway to Bushwick (a place where I, incidentally, am used to swinging from bar to bar). I made a conscious effort to not think about the class all day, because I knew that if I thought about it too much, I would tell Parade and Megan that I had astonishingly experienced some kind of catastrophe that would keep me from attending. While I made lists of possible excuses in my Notes app (I had a late meeting dropped on my calendar! I burned something on the stove and I have to clear my apartment of smoke! I DON’T WANT TO!), I let the hours tick by without pressing send. My friends were expecting me, and I didn’t want to forge a reputation of flakiness. I even had a friend from high school, Darcy, who I hadn’t seen or even really talked to in a decade, who worked at the trapeze facility (Is that the right word? Trapeze gym? Flying warehouse? Psychological terrordome?) and was going out of her way to be there that night to see me. So, despite the massive pit in my stomach, I let the day go by until I reached the time where it would be super dickish of me to cancel. And then, before I allowed myself to register what was happening, I was on the train to Bushwick — where I, trapeze class or not, almost never want to be.

I got off the G Train at Flushing Avenue and walked out into the bitter cold at an unfamiliar intersection. After walking around the block several times, I was convinced the building did not exist — it seemed to me as though paradise had been paved, and I did several laps around a parking lot, circling my Google Maps pin. But Parade and Megan were inside already, so to my dismay, it did exist somewhere. Parade had to come to retrieve me and deliver me to the check-in desk. By the time I got my vaccination status and payment confirmed, I was fully late. I would never claim to be a punctual person, as I have a nasty tendency to leave my apartment around the time I had initially hoped to arrive at my destination, but I hate being late to a place I’ve never been. It’s so embarrassing to walk into something new, guns a-blazin’ with excuses: “Sorry! Work! Subway! Couldn’t find the building that you all seem to have been perfectly adept at finding!” Across the room, I could see a tiny and decidedly Cool girl in a backwards hat explaining the mechanics of leaning your center of gravity forward and jumping off the platform to the other people who were there for the first time. Above me, the ropes and carabiners rattled loudly over a large net as another slender and beautiful girl with pink hair swung back and forth, upside down. How accessible.

Important to note: I am not afraid of heights in the slightest. I actually love to be high up. This was a major factor in my agreeing to do this in the first place (the other factors famously being mob mentality and cocktails). It’s not the height that scares me. It’s the “going one at a time to do something that is new to you in front of many people to whom it is not new, and also it’s physically challenging, as if you’re on some kind of nightmarish episode of Double Dare” that bothers me. I just could not see myself flying through the air with the greatest of ease. I can hardly even imagine myself walking around on the ground with the greatest of ease — I’m clumsy and I have weak ankles.

The Cool Girl with the Backwards Hat (the less successful sequel to The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo) pulled a harness over my yellow leggings and the Purple Rain t-shirt I had purchased to be oversized but turned out to just fit. She told me not to be nervous — you can do it! Just listen to the cues! And despite her aspirational enthusiasm, I knew I was in for it when this small, nimble, clearly-a-former-dancer young woman looked me in the eyes and said, “It’s all momentum based. I can barely do a pushup — it really doesn’t take a lot of upper body strength!” Because do you know what it does take? Core strength. A lot of it. And do you know what I don’t have? Patience for naturally thin and highly-skilled people telling me lies by omission.

She forged on, hastily taking me through the jump-off protocol that all of the on-time people had already heard. She told me what each cue meant specifically. I said okay, as if I had been listening, but in reality I just picked up the jist while I manically ran some quick physics in my head to figure out whether or not this supposed “momentum” was actually going to be enough for me to get my big, dumb legs over my big, dumb head. Unfortunately, I managed to escape high school without taking a lick of physics, and my degree is in Screenwriting, which is universally considered to be the opposite of physics, so the only way to find out if this was actually going to work was to do it. But everyone there, instructors and friends alike, was encouraging, zealous, and warm, and for a moment it felt possible. Or like I was on the brink of being roped into a pyramid scheme.

What they fail to mention in the initial on-the-ground crash course is that the “cues” are just someone screaming at you from the ground, telling you when to make an honest attempt at swinging your legs above your head, getting them between your hands, and hoisting your knees onto the bar. It is terribly difficult to make out what exactly they’re saying. The pulleys designed to slow the speed of gravity as you fall to the net are loud, and any voice just sounds like the shout of someone who is noticing that you are bad at this. Just listen to the cues? Just listen to my self-esteem plummet from the platform, through the net, down to the center of the earth to the tune of, “Legs up!”

My legs never got up. It simply was not to be. The first time I jumped off the platform, the exhilaration of gliding through the air made me let out a little yelp, and so ended the positive bit of the experience. I didn’t really expect to get my legs up on the first fly — I had to get an idea of how it felt first. But once I earnestly tried on the second attempt, I knew it was going to be a long couple of hours. There was no way. And not “no way” in an “I’m being pessimistic and if I just believed in myself it would happen” way, like a weird kid whose Rick Moranis-type dad ends up being the coach in a Little League movie. I mean “no way” in an “it is not physically possible” way, like the science behind Rick Moranis accidentally shrinking his children. It was ambitious to assume otherwise. There were other cues beyond “legs up,” but I don’t know what they were because no one ever got a chance to scream them at me from the ground (and, contrary to the apparent understanding of certain ex-boyfriends of mine, this is perhaps the only time in my life that I’ve ever wished someone would scream at me more!).

There were ten people of varying ability in the class, taking turns going up. I was last, a constant reminder through the duration of the session that I was The One Who Was Late — number ten on the whiteboard displaying the batting order (a term I use not only because I was the worst one, but also because I would have preferred to be beaten with a bat than keep fucking doing this). Each time my turn came around, I dreaded it more. And each time, like clockwork, I swung forward, heard someone yell something indistinguishable from the ground that I deduced to be “legs up,” made a futile attempt at tucking my legs under me to turn myself upside down, failed, and swung back the other way. They kept trying to yell “legs up” at me again on the second swing forward, but if I learned anything as this extended torture ensued, it was that if it didn’t happen on the first swing, it sure as shit wasn’t happening on the second. By the time I was moving forward again, what little momentum I had garnered in my initial jump had died, much like my will to live. It felt like I had to go up a thousand times to just swing back and forth, but I can never know for sure how many times I went because I blacked out for most of them. I would drop down from the bar after my pathetic swinging like a dead cow at an old-school butcher, flip off the net, and then dissociate while Darcy told me I was so close that time!

As other people in the session learned new skills, I was continually encouraged to keep trying to get my legs up. I was given alternative hand positioning — another Cool Girl (too many Cool Girls in one room — this should have been a red flag from the start) handed me a loose stick and had me lay on my back on the ground like roadkill. She explained how to swing your legs over when you have your hands in the middle, but I knew it would hardly make a difference. “Now we’re gonna do a backflip! Emma, just try and get your legs up.” “Time to add a catch! Emma, just try and get your legs up.” Though I did actually manage to do the backflip dismount (something that really is all momentum based), I would have rather been actual roadkill. People clapped for me as I hit the net after turning in the air, but the only achievement I really felt was not getting off the net and promptly leaving the building. I weighed whether or not it would be worth it to steal the harness and abandon my coat to save time on my way out (I would argue this is a fair trade of goods).

We cycled through the order again and again, and somewhere along the line I started to wonder when it would be over. After 90 minutes… 2 hours… I managed to ask Megan only once what time it was and when it would be done, under the guise of, “I live far away and have to work tomorrow,” even though the real reason I asked was, “I hate this place and desperately want to get out of here.” When it all wrapped up, Darcy said, “Well, everyone got off the platform, which we can’t always say, so great job everyone!” It was definitely meant to be encouraging, but I found it condescending, even though I knew it wasn’t. If I hadn’t known her for ten years I would have been way more irritated by it, but instead I could only think about how, after not seeing me for a long time, this class, and my limp body lamely swinging back and forth in my yellow leggings and Prince t-shirt, will be her freshest memory of me.

As we were walking out, I told my friends, “Yeah, I would do it again!” which was a bold-faced lie. I think I’m a pretty honest person much of the time, but this just felt like the cordial thing to say in the moment. I knew within twenty minutes of entering that place that I would never be back, a thought that was only reaffirmed the next morning, when I was perhaps more sore than I’ve ever been in my life, and stayed that way for a week after the fact. And all I did was swing back and forth! This is the one redeeming thing about sucking so badly at this activity — if I had been even a little bit better at it, I probably would have been more sore, which would not have been worth it.

And listen — I may have paid $50 to learn that trapeze class was not for me, but that’s a priceless lesson to learn, because now I never have to wonder “what if,” and, more importantly, I never, ever have to go back there. I may not fly through the air with the greatest of ease, but I was certainly able to make the choice to never return with such swiftness — I am the George of the Jungle of decision-making in that regard. I tried, but there are some levels of distress I simply cannot tolerate, and that is completely fine. Not everything has to be for everyone. LEGS UP!