Back in the auditorium, I’m trying hard not to listen to a girl getting her hooks set. Before the first one is fully in, she’s shouting “Fucker!” Moments later she’s outright screaming, kicking her feet against the table. She finishes with deep, loud sobs, her shoulders heaving for long minutes, and when she gets up again, one person has to support her on either side. Naturally, my number is called soon after.

I lay prone on the massage table, feeling the coolness of the sterilizing spray the piercer uses on my skin. Then there is the daub of a marker on my back as the piercer marks the spot where the hook will enter. I’d been told the hooks were the same kind used to angle sharks in deep sea fishing. I brace myself.

To my utter shock, it feels exactly like I hoped it would: A sharp pain as the first hook pierces my skin ... then nothing ... then another pain as the same hook exits my skin an inch or so away from where it entered. “Do the other one!” I gasp, so flooded with relief and triumph that I feel like I am going to float right off the table. My piercer laughs.

“That’s what I like to hear!”

The second hook goes in with the same rush, and then I am carefully getting off the massage table in order to take my place among the newly pierced. I feel very, very present in my body: The hooks make me conscious of every tiny movement of my muscles. Just like my long-ago piercing with much smaller needles, these hooks ride in my skin without causing the constant agony you would imagine.

It’s before I’m getting a length of thin nylon cord threaded through the rings at the end of my hooks that I get a good look at the back of the girl who had gone before me, and I realize why she screamed louder than the rest of us combined: Her hooks are enormous, three or four times thicker than mine. I hadn’t even realized that different hook sizes were an option.

Feeling much less badass but no less elated, I follow my attendant to have myself tethered. The auditorium had been set up with metal arches specially built for hook suspensions and the like, and the attendant tethers my cord to one, leaving me about an arm’s length worth of slack.

This is the reason I decided to try an energy pull as opposed to a full hook suspension: I have more control over it. Only two hooks used, I never leave the ground, and I alone can dictate exactly how much pressure to put on them. As I explore the new limits of my body, experimentally tugging on the hooks and feeling the edge of pain, I begin to feel a little punchy, the same kind of hazy love-for-the-world you feel after your third glass of wine at a great party with friends.

By now, at least a dozen people are tethered to the arches or each other. Some are in a trance, some delighted, some just enduring. One person starts shaking and is wrapped in a blanket by two other people who tend to him. Another, eyes fierce with concentration, goes through a series of martial arts moves. Two women who had their ropes tied together are pulling against each other with blissful looks on their faces, laughing while a third person teasingly plucks the taut cord between them.

Also like that third glass of wine, I don’t realize just how endorphin-drunk I really am until an acquaintance of mine, Rachel, comes up to me. Though we don’t know each other well, in my memory she is outlined in an angel-like halo of good feelings — I wasn’t going to have to go through this alone after all.

Though Rachel’s only there because her boyfriend is one of the piercers, she knows exactly what to do with a person high on endorphins. Smiling, she leads me in a series of dance moves, our limbs echoing each other. I felt connect to her and to everyone in the room in a way my semi-solitary life usually doesn’t allow for. I’ve pushed through my fear in the most absurd way possible and still come out alright on the other side. Once again, the magician’s trick has been achieved.