If you ever fell feet-first toward a black hole, gravity wouldn’t pull you in evenly. It would pull on your feet much, much harder than on your head, because your feet would be slightly closer. The difference, called a tidal force, would stretch you into a long, thin string of atoms.
At the same time, the sides of your body would get squeezed together as everything got pulled toward the same point - you’d become a tall, narrow strand of you. The effect would intensify as you got closer to the black hole, until you finally became a one-atom-wide string of stuff falling into the singularity. Physicists, with rare humor, named the process “spaghettification.”
The good news (if you’re worried): the effect is weakest near the biggest black holes. For a supermassive black hole like the one at the center of the Milky Way, you could cross the event horizon and still be intact for a while. But for a small stellar-mass black hole, you’d be spaghettified long before reaching the surface. Either way, the trip ends the same.
