Hey Mark,

As always, thank you for the response. You're right - and I agree with you. Skateboarding is risky. I was wearing a helmet, but after this tailbone fall this past Tuesday, I'm just going to let it go entirely. However, it was a massive part of my childhood and I spent a lot of time thinking about myself and growing as a person riding up and down an alley behind my home. It was less a sport, more an act of meditation and something that I appreciate for giving me so much time and space to just... think and be with myself. So, I guess I say that in hopes you might understand where I was coming from in trying to get back on it.

It's a relief to hear you say the symptoms sound more like anxiety. What I find odd is that whether or not it's me falling on my tailbone, bumping my head against a freezer door, or my head getting tapped lightly by someone's elbow, I tend to develop the same set of symptoms. While this event involved more force than the others, the similarity between symptoms despite the differences in forces seems weird to me - do you have any idea why that might be? Does that "correlate" with a more anxiety-driven response?

And Mark, thank you for the suggestion to get anxiety treatment - fortunately, I see a therapist who works with me on all this. A part of why I wanted to get back on my skateboard was, i think, a little bit of my own exposure therapy - to learn to trust that I could fall, and even fall a little harder than I was expecting to, and still be ok.

But, I think what you're getting at also is that there's a difference in the risk associated with certain falls or head bumps and learning to trust that I'll be ok moving through everyday life is very different than learning to trust that I'll be ok on a skateboard. That's a really important distinction to draw and one I'll both internalize and act on.