Thursday, February 19, 2015

Fear of Flying

I just returned from another trip to California, which marks my eighth plane trip in a little over a year. Which also marks the period of time in my life where I have flown the most. I love traveling. 

But...

As has happened after every trip in the last year, seemingly unexplainably, I pledged that I would never fly again. That that was the absolutely-no-doubt-about-it-I’m-serious-this-time-and-I-mean-it last time I would ever board an airplane. Great Britain? I’m taking a boat. Hawaii? There are cruises for that. My beloved California? Road trip.

This is a very recent fear in my life; it developed a couple of years ago, most definitely not a life-long affliction. I love to travel; traveling means vacations, it means new experiences, new countries, trips to Disneyland, expeditions to the beach. It means memories of the job I had in college at a kids’ summer camp in New York, which changed my life (and is the reason I became a teacher, became interested in the Middle East, and have a non-profit organization assisting orphanages in Ethiopia). Traveling means making the world a much smaller, more accessible place; but at the same time, opening our horizons and realizing how small a world we live in if we don’t travel. I caught the travel bug early, and I still carry it around, as this very expensive disease that I don’t mind that I have because the benefits far exceed the cost.

Since this last trip, which ended 3 days ago, I have been thinking about why I have been recently scared of flying. I have probably been on an airplane about 200 times: several trips each year of my life, different legs of a single trip, in small planes from which people skydive, from which they see the Nazca lines, five-person planes, 300-person planes, on and on and on. And I've never had a bad experience in terms of the actual flight or the experience in the air. Sure, there has been turbulence, both slight and significant. And yes, I did actually get sick while spinning this way and that in the small plane above Peru. There was that one time when I was 7 where I was terrified because my ears felt like they were going to explode, and the nice gentleman sitting across the aisle from me took one look at my face and told me to yawn a bunch of times to pop my ears. But other than that, I haven’t had any less-than-pleasant experiences while flying. So why this sudden fear?

When I was a senior in high school in the year 2000, I had a couple of strange dreams, that one could argue were premonitions or just coincidences. I dreamt that a building was on fire, some office or complex next to me. The next day, as I was at work at an espresso stand in Everett, the bread company, Gai’s Bakery I think it was, went up in flames. I stood watching from the espresso stand as several fire trucks pulled in and got to work at putting out the fire. The second dream was a bit scarier: I was on an airplane, and it was going down. People were crying, the flight attendants were running around, and I was just sitting there, not quite sure what to do. The next day, a plane went down in California, and I just listened to the news, not sure what to think, not sure what to do just as I’d been unsure what to do on the plane in my dream the previous night. And then I thought, “Geez. I should have said something. I should have told someone about my dream as soon as I woke up, warned someone, something.” A silly thought? Yes. But you know what else is a silly thought? Keeping hundreds of thousands of pounds of metal, people, luggage up in the air… with what? A few engines? Aerodynamic wings? Science? It’s hundreds of thousands of pounds of metal, floating through clouds, people. It doesn’t make sense.

But I don’t think this is why I have recently become scared of flying, as that was 15 years ago and this fear has been only in the past three years or so.

I tried to think of the first time I was scared, like really scared, on an airplane. And it was in 2011, as I was coming back from my Boston/London/Ethiopia trip. There was a lot of turbulence as we got closer and closer to Iceland, where I would have a layover before flying to Seattle. Ordinarily, turbulence had never bothered me; it was kind of exciting, like a roller coaster at Disneyland. But this time I became frightened. This time was the trip where I had flown to London to meet up with a friend who was having a difficult time, and there was nothing I could do to help. This time, my dear friend was not in a position to have company, and I was really worried about her, a worry that clung to me for months after I left London. This time, I’d lost the use of my foot for four days, having to hobble around the city in extreme pain. 

It was a very difficult, troubling, heartbreaking trip, because of a lot of obvious reasons but even more so a sense I got that things were just not okay, but I wasn’t sure why. My friend hadn’t told me that she was sick; my friend hadn’t told me that we weren’t friends anymore; my friend didn’t say anything ominous or somber. But somehow, I felt that our connection was broken, that my friend wasn’t there anymore. As I flew out of London, I grieved for my friend and our lost friendship. And I was alone in my grief; having been asked by my friend to keep this to myself, to not share what she had told me, as little as she’d told me, I had no outlet or opportunity to grieve publicly. I was unable to talk about it with anyone, this loss of a friend that hadn’t been lost yet, but had, somehow. This friend, who at the time was the person I shared everything with, who was the person I felt closest to in my life. As I sat in my seat on the plane, grieving my friend but knowing that I couldn’t talk about it, I think a part of me started to shut down. Some part of me knew this was more pain than I could handle on my own, and part of my brain started looking for exit strategies.

And I think this is why I become scared now every time I am on a plane, since that one trip out of London. My grandfather used to fly a lot; he was in the Navy and was flown from port to port. And then one year, his father passed away, and he attended the funeral, flying from Seattle to Minneapolis. There was some turbulence, but no more than ordinary. When he returned home to Seattle, he told my grandmother that that was the very last time he was going to be getting on an airplane, even though he was only 40 years old at the time and he and my grandmother loved to travel. My grandmother always chalked it up to the emotional part of the trip, my grandfather’s connection to his father and the trauma of losing a parent, instead of the mild turbulence. I think my case is the same.

I still get excited in airports; that has never changed. I don’t want to lose that. I want to overcome the experience I had in 2011 and see it for what it was: a difficult time in my life that has no connection to flying, to airplanes, to travel. If I can separate those two, I think the fear will go away and I can embrace the excitement I once felt being on airplane, going on an adventure. I think this is one reason why I keep flying; to show myself that it is okay, that it is safe, that it is much safer than the 50-100 miles I drive every day in my car. Flying is the way for me to connect to people, to be there for people and to spend my free time doing what is most important to me, being with my loved ones. And if my loss of connection in 2011 was what caused this fear, then the promise of connection should be the thing to solve it.