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Extreme sports, particularly skydiving, can be a potent site for emotional healing and self-liberation in the aftermath of personal crisis. Situated within the context of profound emotional rupture and the destabilization of selfhood, this paper examines these extreme leisure activities not as escapism but as an intentional and embodied confrontation with fear, loss, and existential uncertainty. Informed by existential philosophy, skydiving is theorized as a symbolic act of rebecoming, interrupting inauthentic modes of being and facilitating a renewed engagement with presence, agency, and meaning. Employing autoethnography as both method and analytical lens, this study explores the lived experience of freefall as a liminal state wherein normative identity scripts are suspended and the emotional terrain of grief, vulnerability, and clarity is renegotiated. Rather than delivering resolution, the experience promoted a reorientation of affective structures and offered ontological insight. This research is trying to reframe extreme sports as more than thrill-seeking practices in the leisure field. It illustrates how voluntarily engaging with risk can catalyze existential reflection, emotional resilience, and transformative self-awareness. In choosing to fall, individuals may encounter not closure, but a renewed capacity to inhabit the world with authenticity, intention, and attunement.
Mo et al. (Wed,) studied this question.