Wearing Fear at 34,000 Feet
On pausing and not plowing through feelings
“In Irish when you talk about an emotion, you don’t say, ‘I am sad.’ You’d say, ‘Sadness is on me – Ta’ Bron Orm.’ I love that because there’s an implication of not identifying yourself with the emotion fully. I am not sad, it’s just that sadness is on me for a while. Something else will be on me another time, and that’s a good thing to recognize.”
- Pádraig Ó Tuama, Irish poet and theologian
I’m currently on a flight from Boston, Massachusetts to Toronto, Canada. We had a two hour delay for take-off due to a “technical issue”, which to a nervous flier like myself, translates to a “guaranteed plane crash” somewhere between the Massachusetts border and Lake Ontario. I’m only 22 minutes into a 76 minute flight, and I’ve already cried. Or, more precisely, I am crying, present tense. Hot, prickly, trying-to-be-silent tears, to be precise, as to not freak out my left side seat partner, who is a complete stranger. Admittedly, I don’t want to freak out my right side seat partner either, who happens to be my husband.
I hate feeling fear. It makes me feel terrified and sad, a miserable blend served up intricately braided together, not unlike a vanilla and chocolate soft serve twist. If you hated ice cream.
Fear and I have become intimately acquainted over the years. As a child, I steadily acquired new fears the way other kids acquired baseball or Pokémon cards. By my pre-teen years, I was the proud owner of several fears, both run-of-the-mill and rare:
walking barefoot in the grass and getting stung by a bee while doing so
riding the school bus
feeling sick in the car (or on said bus, or in morning assembly at school, or camp, or, or, or….
splinters, and the subsequent removal process
the notion that getting a paper cut that might get infected and cause my finger to need to be amputated
Some of my fears as a child seemed to be inborn (bees, ketchup and mustard mixed together, deep water, the Presidential Fitness test in gym class), while others were taught to me (getting wet in the rain, spilling a bottle of soda, stepping on the carpet in the “wrong” part of the family room, using the bathroom at other people’s houses). At the same time, things that made sense to be afraid of (getting into an argument with a middle school friend, failing a test, feeling doubtful about an audition for the school play, experiencing anxiety when my parents argued) were often invalidated in a subtle but certain way. “You’ll be fine!” sounds supportive on the surface, but to a young person’s sensitive, racing heart, this sentiment ultimately translates to “There’s no reason to get upset about this, so stop feeling this way!”
Well-meaning family passed along their own fears and phobias to me, and by the time I became an adult, it felt as if I had inherited a metaphorical Fear suitcase to haul around everywhere, stuffed to the seams with all kinds of worries and reasons to panic: spiders and sushi and planes and public restrooms.
This suitcase is heavy. It does not fit into the overhead bin. It sits on my lap most days, alive. Breathing.
This suitcase sits on my lap on this particular flight, heavy and hard edged. I want to open the window of the plane and hurl this suitcase out the window, along with some choice curse words. I fantasize about seeing it leave its preferred place on my lap and hurtle through the atmosphere, where it will finally get to be light and small in comparison to the earth and the clouds. I dream of watching it crash into a million pieces on the ground, never to accompany me again.
But alas. One cannot pry open the window on an airplane without eventually adding several new fears to the suitcase, including federal charges and possible prison time. And so it sits.
In these moments when fear hijacks my brain and body, it occurs to me just how many years I had fear trained into me, from before I was born - intellectually unaware but physiologically susceptible to the stress of the outside world all around me - all the way through my childhood. Even as an adult with more autonomy in creating my surroundings, Fear still finds me, surfacing in places and spaces that once were quiet but now shimmer with scary potential. “What if…?” and “It probably won’t come to pass, but it might….” are phrases that have teeth.
I feel scared when Fear insists on accompanying me. How will I make it to the next moment? What sharp new flavors of Fear might unleash themselves on the softness of my body, heart, and mind? I am fearful of the Fear.
I feel sad when Fear insists on accompanying me. I realize how much more fear I will feel throughout however many more years of life I have to live. So many things make me afraid, and so much that I desire to do and experience come with a generous helping of fear. If the joy I so deeply seek comes with fear, how will I manage to hold both? Will I miss out on all the beautiful things as they pass by because I am too afraid to take hold for the ride, however terrifying it might be?
Being someone who lives with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, often called the doubting disease, I have grown accustomed to feeling a fairly generous helping of crippling Fear and anxiety on a daily basis.
Being a human being also means feeling regular doses of Fear and anxiety. Realizing that we each have our own lens through which we perceive and experience the world slightly differently can be helpful and validating at times, but more and more, I find deep comfort knowing that to be human is to feel fear. Fear is not necessarily pathological. After all, Fear has let humans know when to run from the bears in the forest, which berries to avoid eating if we want to stay alive, and can motivate us to act in the face of alluring inertia. Fear isn’t all bad. But, holy hell, does Fear feel terrifying. It burns like fire and threatens to consume us alive.
“One thing you can see, one thing you can feel, one thing you can hear….” My therapist’s voice breaks into my reverie. I have been scribbling these thoughts on Fear in the pages of my journal, and I pause in this moment. I blink. I am still on the plane.
It’s now that I become conscious of the fingers of my left hand, long and thin like my grandmother’s, wrapped around my lucky rock from Lover’s Lane in Prince Edward Island, like a claw. I unfurl them, slowly, and can feel the ache in my hand ease, the slight sensation of pins and needles making their way throughout my digits. The rock is quite small - one inch by half an inch, perhaps - and a bit lumpy. It’s beige with a bit of caramel mixed in with once-in-awhile gold-ish flecks, with spidery lines of brown running over its otherwise smooth surface. I’ve never noticed how much it looks like a tiny potato. I sure know how to pick a talisman, don’t I?
I blink again. I am still on the plane. This fact somewhat surprises me. Fear, though still sitting squarely on my lap, has quieted down just enough to allow me to go swimming, however unenthusiastically, in my brain to muse about the uncanny resemblance between a rock and a root vegetable. 30 seconds - no, was it more like 60 seconds? - have elapsed. I sip this unexpected but much needed drink of relief, hesitantly. I blink. I gulp relief, greedily. The plane still stays suspended in the stratosphere, even after I have strayed a few steps from my watchtower. Hmm. Interesting.
When things feel the smoothest, it’s when we let down our guard and the turbulence hits, right? Fear hisses in my ear. I re-clasp my rock in the center of my palm and recommit to keeping a closer eye on Fear for the time being. Fear cannot be left unsupervised. Can it? After all, we still have 23 minutes before wheels down, and what will the pilots do without my faithful vigilance to keep this flying machine in the air until I help us stick the landing at Pearson International Airport?
I love landing. This time, the voice that speaks up is my own. I love landing? I almost don’t recognize this part of myself. This sentiment doesn’t make sense to me. Technically, landing and take-off are two parts of the flight that carry the most risk. Cruising at 34,000 feet is relatively safe when compared to the start and end of a flight, and yet, it’s the middle part is where I am held hostage by Fear. Take-off feels tenuous. Landing, with all its swaying to and fro (not all that different from the wobbly bits of wheels-up), feels natural. Getting back to grounded. I’ve decided, somewhere along the line, that landing is safe, and during the last ten minutes of flight, I find Fear has calmed down enough for me to sip the last of my water and enjoy some bites of a protein bar.
I blink again. If this micro-experience holds true, what does this mean for Fear? My heart rate has slowed during landing, one of the most potentially dangerous parts of a flight, and I find my brain willingly wandering away to wonder about what I’ll order for dinner at the Inn we have reserved for the night. Doesn’t this very real, visceral experience make it reasonable to wonder if the suffocating feeling of Fear is not the proof of imminent danger itself, but rather my (also very real) perception of danger? And if perceptions can be flawed, is it possible that I just might be safer than I thought on this flight, with this Fear?
I walk down the street in Boston every day. Occasionally I ride my bicycle in traffic. Once in a while I consider that a car might hit and kill me in either scenario, but that Fear isn’t very loud, and it certainly doesn’t stop me from doing and enjoying these things regularly.
A lack of Fear doesn’t equal a lack of threat. What if the presence of Fear doesn’t equal the presence of a threat?
Does this clumsily cobbled together emotional logic crafted from Air Canada flight 771 mean I cannot trust reality? Or does it breathe just a *little* more space around Fear, not banishing her completely, but transmuting her into something a little more tolerable? Providing a bit more spaciousness so that neither Fear nor I suffocate? When I fly, reading, napping, or nibbling a snack feels downright dangerous. I am not choosing Fear to fly with me initially, but am I playing a role in holding myself hostage here?
When I blame Fear for all the rules it makes me play by, I make Fear the enemy and the dynamic between us one akin to war. I have to fight, battle, obliterate, and WIN. What if I didn’t wage war? What if, even when Fear sat in my lap, I chose not to wield the sword?
Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor, a Harvard trained neuroscientist, researches and writes about how we experience emotions in the body. She explains, “When a person has a reaction to something in their environment, there’s a 90-second chemical process that happens; any remaining emotional response is just the person choosing to stay in that emotional loop.”
I am sick of being afraid. Exhausted by it. Many days, I am mad as hell about it. This kind of rage is where I seem to hit the Fear wall, every time. I don’t seem to be able to stop feeling afraid or being angry that I am afraid, and so my body, mind, heart, and spirit are perpetually pulled like a rope in a tug of war between these two emotions, inextricably linked for me, and I can’t find a way to relief or release. I’m being wounded by the Second Arrow, a Buddhist idea that explains how we suffer both because of the initial wound and because of the suffering we keep alive in ourselves. Afraid of fear? Frustrated about fear? Guilty? Ashamed? All second arrows, sure to slice through our senses and inflict more layers of suffering than are necessary.
I have been in therapy for just over six years this summer, and there have been countless sessions where I have shared about this Fear, frustration, and the back and forth between the two feelings, the two arrows. In these exchanges, my therapist looks me in the eye.
“Is there a way that you don’t have to get rid of the part of you that is afraid, but sit with Fear? If you listen to it, what is Fear trying to tell you? What does Fear need from you?” she offers.
I’ve attempted to do this more times than I can count or remember. Fear asks me, begs me, to believe her, to not dismiss her (again, “You’ll be fine!” is dismissive). She needs to know that she is real.
So, I tell her, “I believe you. You’re real. This is really hard. This REALLY SUCKS.”
Admittedly this empathizing does help Fear a bit. At the least, it cools the impulse to double down on needing to prove that I feel Fear in the first place, and that yes, it’s as awful to feel as I am saying that it is to feel. My cells relax just a little. I don’t need to keep shouting it from the rooftops. I am terrified. Without some well-meaning someone chiming in with “You’ll be fine”, I find that I don’t need to cling to the Fear as tightly as I do when faced with someone who denies how I’m feeling.
Don’t get me wrong; I am grateful for this small shift, which has started to softly shimmy into place more often than not in recent years, after a number of panic attacks at 34,000 feet.
And (there’s almost always an “and”).
I can hear my therapist’s voice pose the second question.
“What does Fear need from you?”
After being assured of her realness, Fear still shouts her second request at me. Loudly.
“Please, please, PLEASE! I want you to never fly on an airplane. EVER again! Or teach a class. Or have a conversation that makes you feel uncomfortable, or feel afraid about your health, or, or, or, or... EVER AGAIN. Promise me. PINKY SWEAR!”
Well. Despite identifying as a perpetual people pleaser, I’m not sure I can meet these particular demands. Never fly again? What about to visit my dear sister, who lives in Chicago? I’m supposed to never do that again? Or teach and experience the joy of seeing students discover Angels in America for the very first time? How will I love the rest of my life without the ecstasy of walking down new-to-me streets in Scotland, Spain, or Sicily?
I feel like I’m back in my childhood home, trying to remember which parts of the family room carpet I’m allowed to step on and which are off limits. An invisible map of landmines, a haunted house I continue to restore to its original gory glory. I have a wealth of experience in obeying the fences built around and between things that are allowed and not allowed. Rules meant to hem out discomfort. Guidelines that serve to make life so small that eventually you can’t see the purpose of living such a prescribed existence. I want to know what it’s like to expand, not continue to shrink.
“What does Fear need?”
I blink. I’ve been distracted by Fear’s wants all these years, while largely not hearing what she needs. What if Fear simply needs to be felt, not fixed? To be scorned, yes, but also seen? To not be plowed through, but paused through?
The pilot comes on the intercom. “Prepare for landing.” I can hardly believe that the flight is coming to a close. I made it, even with Fear hanging close around me like a coat. I failed at making her leave. I did manage to talk to her though, and to tell her I know she is real. To tell her that I can see how hard this is for both of us. I thank her for keeping me alive long enough to make it to this moment (after all, she means well).
may just be a genius, I decide.What if Fear can never truly become us, but simply adorn us for a while, like a piece of clothing that we don’t love and would gladly donate to someone else, but that happens to be here for the time being?
If Fear is something that I could wear a smidge more willingly, in service of something beautiful I am moving towards, how might I treat it when I finally do take it off?
Could I find a not-too-terrible place for it in my closet, and while it sleeps graciously, tucked away between the trousers and turtlenecks, could I allow myself to feel stunning in a dazzling dress?
Could I ornament myself in baubles that make me free to feel brave, beautiful, bold?
Can it be ok when it comes time to remove the glittering gorgeousness and don Fear again? To her credit, she has never failed to take me places that transform me. Not in ways I necessarily wanted, but in ways I didn’t know I needed.
As the patchwork green and brown earth of Ontario grows closer, I curse Fear again. This trip certainly would have been more pleasant without her here.
As the wheels hit the tarmac, and the pilot says “Welcome to Toronto. The local time is 6:17 pm Eastern time”, I write on. She is here though, and so am I.