Before my suspension at the Ontario Suspension Convention, I asked my facilitators not to let anyone photograph me if I was crying. I had never cried during a suspension before, so I said it with an off-handed “it probably won’t happen, but just in case,” and felt somewhat silly for even saying it.

A little over an hour later, I was lying on a massage table and sobbing hysterically into a piece of gauze. My legs were barely elevated, but the hooks felt excruciating. As one so often does during the roughest moment of a suspension, I began questioning the series of decisions that led me there.

I had been wanting to do a scorpion for six months, at least. My home suspension group works outside and we hadn’t managed to make it happen before winter came. I’m oblivious to discomfort once I get up and into my suspension headspace, but I’d feel bad hanging for an hour if my friends were freezing their asses off to keep me safe. So I waited.

When Lynn Loheide, floor coordinator for OSC (and all-around lovely person), reached out to me to confirm what I wanted to do at susCon, I was amused to re-discover that the only guidance I had given on the registration form was “static, cube, many hooks.” I said I was thinking of doing a scorpion, and they asked if I was thinking of doing it in the cube. I very much wasn’t — I had forgotten that I had requested a cube suspension at all — but as soon as Lynn asked, I was definitely doing it, despite their warning that getting up in that position is an ordeal. For weeks, I chanted “scorp in the cube” in my head to hype myself up. It had been about nine months since my last suspension, a 1 a.m. two-point back on July 5th that lasted only a few minutes due to dizziness, a predictable outcome after too many hours of not eating. It wasn’t disappointing, per se, I was excited by being able to pick my feet up rather than being lifted into the air. But my previous suspension, elbows at last year’s OSC, ended up short for similar reasons. My very first suspension was an hour-long, peaceful meditation, and I was itching to return to that headspace. Leading up to my scorpion-to-be, I was as rested, well-fed, and hydrated as I’ve ever been. My plan was to get up and stay up until I was good and ready to come down.

I suspended Saturday evening, on the second day of the susCon. It had been a good, if emotionally challenging, day. I had made a minor mistake on a suspension I was assisting on, someone corrected me, and though nothing bad happened, a familiar wave of shame washed over me. I stayed composed and focused on the suspendee until they were down and in post, but when the person who caught my mistake came up to debrief, I lost it. I told them I appreciated their correction and that I felt stupid for crying, and they told me it was okay and hugged me. When I talked to the lead facilitator (after crying some more in the bathroom), they said almost everyone had had a similar response to correction at some point, and that the experience shouldn’t spook me away from helping on more suspensions that weekend. My overly self-shaming and emotional response to necessary, respectful critique was a trauma response I was frustrated to still be encountering so many years into working on it. The non-judgmental compassion and validation with which others treated me was an affirmation that I could both make mistakes and be “overly” sensitive without having others look down on me or losing my place among them. These two facts together completed the strange rollercoaster of working through emotional dysregulation — trigger, response, repair — and I ended up no worse for wear, though I had thoroughly cried my makeup off.

Two hours later, I was lying on a massage bed in the cube, feeling generally stable and surprisingly calm. Everything was pre-rigged, but I spent a long while lying on the table before being pierced — some issue with the hooks they had pulled, I think. I was half-sleeping for most of it, as my narcolepsy medication had worn off hours before. I heard without processing the snatches of conversation and crinkling of sterile packaging around me. Despite the wait, the time to get pierced came faster than I expected, as it always seems to.

I like getting pierced. Or, at least, I thought I did. I’m not so sure anymore, but when my suspension team asked how I wanted to be pierced, I confidently told them I wanted to take the hooks one by one. During my past suspensions, it had been easy for me and helped me get into the experience. I had taken four hooks one by one during my first suspension, and felt pretty sure the eight they had planned for me would be painful, sure, but ultimately not too bad.

As I always do, I felt a jolt of nerves when the tip of the needle lightly pressed against my skin. As I always do, I went ahead with the piercing anyway. Unlike the previous back hooks I’d taken, this hurt. It’s not like the others had tickled, but this pain was more in every way, maybe made worse by the fact that I thought I knew what I was expecting.

After catching my breath, I asked — completely casually, with absolutely no apprehension in my voice — if they were using 4 gauge gilson hooks. Yep! And I had three more to go. Plus four black sheeps in my legs. While four 4 gauge hooks is overkill for what I was doing, it was Saturday evening and many of the day’s hooks had been used already, so 4 gauge it was.

At this point, the thought crossed my mind to ask for another piercer to join in so I didn’t have to do the rest of my hooks one at a time. Unfortunately for myself, I’m nothing if not exceedingly stubborn, so onto the next hook we went.

Ouch. Ouch. Ouch. Bright flashes of pain as the needle passed through my skin, always taking longer than I hoped. Dull burning radiating out in the seconds after my hooks were in. I allowed myself a moment to feel accomplished for conquering the back hooks before turning to the task of enduring my leg hooks. Thankfully, they were less unpleasant than the back, with my thighs hurting more than my calves. I’d never felt the psychological exhaustion of repeated pain spikes before, but this was draining, and the real challenge was yet to come.

Tensioning my back was easy. Comfortable, even. But my legs needed to go from flat on the table to, ideally, vertical (spoiler: that didn’t happen). As soon as the tensioning started, I realized getting there would be a lot harder than I anticipated. I had taken knee hooks before, once, but in a position that allowed me to control the tension myself and ease off gently. There was little gentleness here.

I buried my face in my arms, turned off my carefully-curated playlist. Pain makes the world overwhelming. I asked my facilitators to add tiny bits of tension. I’m always conscious of how quickly — or slowly — I’m progressing, and each time tension was added, I waited until the pain was unbearable to say “stop.” After a few breaths, it dulled, but never felt manageable. I felt a few tears escape onto the table, wiped my eyes. More tension on my legs, somehow still more pain. Sharp pain, enough to make me forget I even had hooks in my back.

I don’t quite remember when I started properly crying. I think someone asked me how I was doing, and I said the only thing I could think: “It really hurts.” The words turned into a sob and I was suddenly crying, intensely.

My facilitators asked if there was something wrong, if the tension was uneven, but no such luck — it felt exactly how it was supposed to feel, which was, apparently, excruciating.

I had started doubting myself as soon as I felt the first needle, an unexpected blow of pain from the 4 gauge needle. My previous suspensions hadn’t been easy, per se: my elbows especially had been challenging, and I had a moment of doubt. But this was much worse, maybe because I had so little control over the pain. With my elbows or a back suspension, I could bend my knees and shift weight to my hooks gradually, and ease off if I needed. Here, it was mostly in my facilitators’ control. Almost as a reflex, I did try to arch my lower back to better support my legs and spare myself some pain, but the effect was probably negligible.

I wondered if I had gotten myself into something I couldn’t handle. I had certainly underestimated it.

But by this point, I had an opportunity to be reminded of why I love the suspension community. Kit, a facilitator I’d long admired, had noticed from across the room I was having a hard time. They came over and sat next to me, asked me how I was doing, and laid a comforting hand on mine. Or on my shoulder. It’s a blur. They handed me my water and another glucose tablet (orange, which is inarguably the tastiest). We talked, I complained, they distracted me. Eventually, I was ready for more tension.

The cycle continued. A little bit more tension, a lot more pain, a few deep breaths, and repeat. In reality, my knees were only a few inches up from the table, but it felt like I must have lifted them much higher by that point. I could feel how much the drawn-out process was taking out of me, and eventually decided that good enough was good enough — wherever my legs were was where they’d stay. After all, we still needed to remove the table, another process which promised to be unpleasant at best.

It was nothing if not a team effort, and I’m eternally grateful for the patience of the four (I think?) people who helped lower the table. Holding it awkwardly, they would slowly bring it down a few inches until I said stop, then hold it until I was ready again. I’m not sure how long it took — I was trying to be contentious of their physical effort, but pain does have a way of overriding such concerns.

“It hurts so fucking bad,” I said to no one in particular.

Someone whose name I didn’t know, standing to the right of my head, opposite Kit, responded that it usually does right before you get up. I knew this, I’d said it before, and yet I was comforted to hear it. This was probably the longest I’d ever been in such pain, and I knew that once I got up, it would all feel worthwhile. I knew calling it off was an option, but for me, it would have taken a completely unexpected, all-consuming, wrong-feeling pain or exhaustion to make me tap out. As long as I felt like I could maybe bear it, I would keep going. For me, suspension is about trusting myself enough to surrender to the experience, and I was willing to allow this one to take me wherever it led.

Mercifully, the table-lowering was easier than tensioning my legs. Despite the pain and physical and mental exhaustion, I felt like I was nearing the end of this phase. I had been holding my chest up with my arms the whole time, but started allowing my back hooks to bear more of the weight. They were still surprisingly comfortable, and I was silently grateful for the larger-than-necessary gauge. The table receded, eventually pressing only against my elbows and stomach.

And then it was gone, somehow sooner than I expected. The pain was dulled by the sheer relief I felt, and replaced by the euphoria which follows the end of enduring pain. I laughed and let my arms dangle. I talked to Lynn about how rough it felt getting up, and definitely appreciated their heads up about that particular challenge.

The person doing my cheek spear came over to pierce me. It was easier than expected, and I settled into a comfortable silence, enduring the discomfort of swallowing every few minutes to avoid drooling (though, I’m sure, no one would have blamed me). This was the part of the experience I had been wanting to re-create, and the utter calm of suspending felt even stronger with the contrast of the difficult process of getting up. I heard suspensions going on around me, the floor quieting down as the night progressed. There’s not much to say, and that’s why I love it. It’s pure experience, pure being, both deeply attached to and disconnected from the world around you. My eyes are mostly closed when I suspend — I could almost be floating, tethered to my surroundings only by the reassuring thrum of activity that feels like pure love. In my spiritual moments, I think this must be what people mean when they say they’ve met God.

I had started prepping around eight, but by the time I got down, it was about eleven. I spent about an hour up and immediately felt the stirrings of my joints’ complaints. By the next day, I was in so much pain I struggled to sit still. Bone-deep aching in my hips and knees that made it hard to focus on the immensely interesting classes — knot-tying, which I had been looking forward to, was hard to accomplish with my body screaming at me. I endured the morning, but retreated to bed when the suspension floor opened. I slept, woke up for dinner, and slept again. By the next day I was recovered enough to help with suspensions, though the aches would take a week to fully disappear. As often happens, the pain outlasted the fleeting bliss of suspending. I’ve stopped trying to explain why I suspend, at least in a way that makes sense to someone who hasn’t. How can it make sense that the calmest I’ve ever felt is an experience sandwiched between excruciating pain and unbearable aches? It doesn’t seem to, and yet, it must, or sense must be worth abandoning. I see the gleam of understanding when I talk to others who find peace in suspension, and I believe with absolute conviction the stories of suspension changing someone’s life, of showing them a way through. It feels like a raw, rare moment of full humanity, held by a community who I trust will embrace whatever emerges. In any other space, my tears would feel shameful, burdened by painful history. Held by friends and hooks, my tears feel sacred.