No Fear of Flying (Part II – don’t worry, things get a LOT better in Part III!)

I’m still not sure what set me off, but it was sometime in my mid-20’s that I started down the slippery slope into a true phobia of flying. A friend at the time described waiting in line to board a plane that blew up right in front of him on the tarmac. (I now believe this was one of his many grandiose, made-up tales, but at the time I swallowed the story with shock and awe.) I had a couple of “bad experiences,” including one flight that inexplicably (I thought) took a sudden drop of about 1,000 feet in midflight. People screamed and a few held hands across the aisle. The pilot’s terse command, “Flight attendants, take your seats!” and the announcement, “Ladies and gentlemen, please be seated until we know what this turbulence is about,” did nothing to comfort us. Eventually the flight attendants all got up again and started maneuvering their carts in the aisles, but we were never told what happened. It was only years later that my pilot husband explained the phenomenon of “clear air turbulence,” and the likelihood that we were never in any danger, except maybe someone bumping their head on an overhead bin.

I began to do all the things phobics do to try to control the situation that causes their fear. I prayed. I tried to meditate (no good – every bump shook me out of any possible alpha state). I recited a mantra given me by a Jesuit friend: “Love supports the universe and love supports this plane.” In my 30’s and 40’s I asked my spouse Michael to visualize a pink blanket around my plane, and gave him precise takeoff and landing information so he would be sure to do it on time. I tried drinking wine (no good – I was still terrified, and fuzzy-brained on top of it). Just once I tried a Xanax. Not bad during the flight – but the adrenaline that had been pumping during the flight stopped flowing, and the drug really kicked in just in time for me to almost fall on my face as soon as I walked off the plane!

I eventually came to identify deeper roots to my fear. I made a connection to the sudden death of my grandfather when I was seven. He had gone on a trip to Denver for an American Legion Convention and never came back. He died of a heart attack while boarding his plane home. I came to believe, deep down, that travel was dangerous.

Realizing this, however, didn’t stop the phobia. With apologies to Freud, insight was not followed by cure! Anxiety had by now carved a pathway in my brain. Every time I boarded a flight, I felt absolutely certain that I was walking the gangplank to my death. Every subsequent scary experience (which could be as simple as a funny vibration or an unfamiliar whine of an engine) reinforced the sense of danger. Turbulence taught me the literal meaning of one’s knees knocking in fear. Benign experiences did not serve to reassure – in my twisted logic, a good flight simply meant that I had been miraculously spared, but a grisly and terrifying death still awaited me next time I took to the air. When I would land safely and begin to gather my belongings I would almost experience a kind of shock – I lived! Now I would have to go ahead and do the thing I was there to do, and for which I had skeptically planned (in the improbable situation in which I would survive the flight!) The relief I felt the moment the plane’s wheels hit the runway was like a stay of execution. I could hardly believe my luck had held one more time.

The anxiety in-flight quickly spilled over into anxiety about the anxiety. I so feared flying that I could hardly sleep the night before a scheduled flight. I would take care to leave my will out on my desk before leaving the house. I would clean everything, so my survivors would not see any disarray or dirt upon entering the house after notification of my demise. I would call a loved one or two while waiting to board the plane – just to say “I love you” one last time.

Weather became a preoccupation. I would scan the Weather Channel for all national storms and wind conditions the night before a flight. I breathed easier if the skies looked clear, but dreaded flying through rain and snow. My phobic mind filtered all of what I had learned from my pilot husband, disregarding the reassuring facts like redundant systems and FAA safety rules, while obsessing over everything that could go wrong (and I knew way too much about wind shears, icing, flaps, retractable gear, and hydraulic systems!) A basically stoic person, I usually braved conditions I considered bad if not fatal, but on one or two rare occasions I did refuse to board a flight (both during blizzards), and I toughed out the massive inconvenience of finding an alternative route home. On more than one occasion, I would call my long-suffering spouse, and he would “talk me down” from running tearfully for the nearest car rental booth to embark on a 2-3 day drive in bad weather.

In the last few years of the phobia, I began to say no to things I wanted to do, chances to travel for fun, and opportunities to give lectures and workshops in my profession. I narrowed my flying to the minimum (which still, given my far-flung family and conference-oriented academic life meant getting on a plan at least monthly). It was dawning on me that this was not a good way to live. Rather than cure my phobia—what phobia? Why would any sane person think it makes sense to hurtle through the sky at 35,000 feet in a heavy metal tube!? In fact, how could such a thing really be possible? I imagined a day when the laws of nature would suddenly catch up with the fact that all these tons of steel were up in the air where they did not belong, and gravity would suddenly yank them all out of the sky. I felt certain I would be on a plane precisely when that happened. I began to fantasize about a simpler life, lived in one place. I began to romanticize life in a medieval village, or a yurt.

I continued to make do, to fly less, but still fly when necessary. I white knuckled it across the country for work and family trips, and looked forward to the day when I would be able to live life entirely on the ground again. Then 9-11 happened.

It wasn’t the fear of hijackers that grounded me that fall of 2001. But living through the grief and horror of 9-11 in the Northeast had already raised everyone’s baseline anxiety. And then an airplane crashed in Queens, New York—a crash that was exactly my own very specific fear scenario. Catastrophic engine failure. A plane flying along just like normal, and then, with no warning, falling out of the sky like a rock. That did it. I was grounded.

I’d been scheduled to present a paper in Denver at a November conference I very much looked forward to attending. But as the date approached, I found myself completely unable to imagine getting on that plane, or any plane. I went to my Dean and President, and said “If I don’t go present this paper, would you be OK with that?” They were already aware of my fear of flying—although I had never refused to go anywhere before. And to their everlasting credit, they said “These are times of great anxiety, and we understand. We want you happy and healthy. You don’t have to go, and we will pay for the unused ticket.” It was an astonishing act of kindness, a moment of real grace I will never forget.

I knew I had to do something about this. I could not stay grounded forever and live my life. But what? I thought I had already tried everything, to no avail. Then Michael came home from flying his Cessna one weekend waving a piece of paper. A fellow pilot at his small airport had posted a flyer: “Support Group: Overcome Your Fear of Flying.” It turned out this avid small plane pilot, Penny Levin, was also a cognitive-behavioral therapist, and she had conducted several such groups with great success. After a brief conversation with her, she determined that individual counseling would work better, and also be cheaper for me, since much of the group covered basics of aviation I already knew (but hadn’t helped my phobia one whit.) I scheduled my first session.

I have to admit, I had my doubts. For one thing, as a psychoanalytic therapist, I had been trained to be skeptical about cognitive-behavioral therapy as a “bandaid approach.” And having already made my psychological breakthrough about my fear of flying—to no effect—I wondered what more this therapist could do. Nevertheless, I was drawn to her expertise as a pilot, and I liked her straightforward manner.

I was cured with two sessions – and a 3-legged flight from hell! TO BE CONTINUED…

No Fear of Flying, Part I

I am writing this blog at 10,000 feet altitude and rising… There was a time when I would have been doing this just to keep myself distracted and pretend that I wasn’t absolutely, positively certain that I was about to die in the next 20-30 minutes. Today I am actually not only calm, but I am happy. There is a bit of turbulence right now climbing out over rainstorms in northern Georgia, and I am able to think. I am breathing normally. (OK, more or less normally.) This feels like a miracle.

My fear of flying came on gradually. Like many of my generation, I did not fly at all growing up. The word “travel” meant a trip in the car, and not very far. I was born a white girl in the optimistic suburbs, where cars were loved, polished, talked about, and represented the very best guilt-free toy: necessary for dads to go to work and moms to go grocery shopping and kids to be shuttled to school, yet fun. With their enormous porpoise-shaped fenders and shiny chrome fins and grinning grills, they were the necessary luxuries that in many ways shaped our entire lifestyle. In the postwar relief from rationing, and before the Puritanism of the environmental movement, it was commonplace to go for a Sunday drive. This was our frequent recreational outing—driving up just over the New Hampshire border to see the fall leaves, or visit Storybook Land, or just to look around and come back. At Christmas we would take a drive to see other people’s Christmas lights. “Long” trips were to New York City to see the Rockettes and go to the Bronx Zoo, or to North Conway, New Hampshire, to stay in the Eastern Slope Inn or the White Horse Motel, to go to Echo Lake, and to ride the Skimobile on Mount Cranmore. Once my dad drove my grandmother and me to Boston (just about 12 miles away) where the two of us stayed in a hotel for a couple of nights and I felt like a princess. My most distant adventure, again with my grandmother, was a trip when I was about 14 years old to Washington, DC, where I dragged her through every room of the National Gallery and the Smithsonian, and she showed me her favorite monuments and fountains. I don’t even remember how we got there, but I’m guessing somebody drove.

My first flight was at the end of my freshman year in college. I had fallen in love with a lanky boy from Baltimore, a sweet and innocent art major who made pencil drawings with the delicacy and technical precision of a Renaissance painter. He asked me to fly down for an outdoor 4th of July concert performed by the Baltimore Symphony. I have never forgotten that first flight. I flew in on the night of the 3rd, and as the plane came in over the Baltimore, we could see dozens of local fireworks displays, like tiny illuminated sprays of flowers spreading open and disappearing in the dark. I had no fear at all, just a sense of awe and childlike delight. Our starter relationship turned out to be as ephemeral as the harmless bombs bursting in air, but I still have one beautiful drawing of his fingers playing a flute, and the memory of that first magical flight.

My happy relationship with airplanes turned out to be as ephemeral as well. My next flight was several years later, as I hopped aboard the Eastern shuttle (a now defunct plane between Boston and New York). With all the aplomb and assumed sophistication of a 22-year old singer, I took the quick ascent and descent in stride. I affected the bored familiarity of an unflappable New Yorker, and assumed I’d be doing so for the rest of my life. But my equanimity was short-lived. TO BE CONTINUED…

Lingering on the Threshold

Sometimes, when I’m traveling, I am overcome with this sweet melancholy. I feel a faint welling of tears, so deep behind my eyes that they never fill. It’s not sadness, and it has no particular reason or focus. But just for a moment, I feel as if everything that ever happened in my life, and everything that ever will happen, are concentrated in the present, and I’m more an observer than a participant. I catch a glimpse of myself in the laptop screen or the airplane window, and for a second I don’t recognize the 54-year old woman I’ve become. My face doesn’t match the 20-year-old feminist full of wise-ass hope, the newly married 30-year-old activist/singer, the 40-year old mother of a first-grader/priest/therapist, or the octogenarian grandmother professor I imagine myself someday to be. All the loves of my life past, present and future circle around my head like butterflies artfully swarming a Disney princess.

I’ve always loved these liminal moments traveling from one place to another. As a child I loved the excitement of packing the big robin’s egg blue car with its enormous fenders, and heading out to the highway. In my memory, the road to New Hampshire is always sunlit, the asphalt light greenish-gray and shimmering in the late summer heat, and the woods along the side of the road are lush and mysterious. There is always a wide horizon visible through the big windshield, and the sky is always bright blue. I’m sure I must have whined as all children do on long car rides, “Are we there yet?” and “I need to go’t’the bathroom!,” but what sticks in my memory is not the confinement and boredom. But the sense of being in a space neither here nor there—where what comes next is all possibility, and not yet locked in to a certain this or that.

In college, I found my liminal spaces on the 4-hour bus ride from Boston to New York, where my best friend had already begun the hardscrabble life of an aspiring opera singer. I looked forward to sharing confidences in her tiny studio apartment on West 71st Street, eating at Fulton’s Café across the street (now sadly replaced by a fast food restaurant), and discovering all the wonders of New York as a brand new adult trying on her brand new sophistication. But the bus ride was a special time in its own right. (As a college music major I couldn’t afford Amtrak.) Jiggling along the highway in the dark, sharing space with an assortment of humanity and our raggedy luggage, I always sank into a philosophical mood. I pulled out one of the dog-eared spiral-bound notebooks that served as my journals in those days, and took a long, serious, and romantic survey of my life. As the bus put distance between me and my brownstone dorm room, I analyzed my relationships, diagnosed myself and all my friends and relations, plotted my artistic career, bemoaned a variety of things, and indulged in sweet fantasies about my dramatic and glorious future. By the time I reached Port Authority, I was ready to assume the world-weary, glamorous, hardened slouch I always affected to meet (and mimic) my gorgeous friend. I wore black, and identified with tragic or waiflike beauties of the past—Garbo, Piaf, Dietrich, Anaïs Nin.

As I got older, and was claimed by adult relationships and responsibilities, travel became a more serious matter. Flying was often related to career advancement, and my liminal time was swallowed up by reviewing a paper or grant proposal (when I was not preoccupied just with keeping my fear of flying at bay – but that’s the subject for another blog!) There were family visits, of course, and occasional vacations. But the travel itself became something to survive, or at least to get through, rather than a gift of time and contemplation.

One trip that stands out, though, is the plane ride from San Francisco to San Salvador during the horrific mid-1980’s in Central America. My husband and I were not yet married – or even romantically involved. I had recruited him on this trip, both for his fluent Spanish and his natural leadership gifts, to join a small group of church members who had pledged to accompany a Salvadoran pastor targeted by the death squads for his work with the poor in the countryside. The plane, owned and operated by the Salvadoran airline TACA (lovingly dubbed “take a chance airline”), had an unfortunate habit of yawing rhythmically from side to side because its engines, as my pilot husband informed me, were “out of synch.” “Is that OK!?” I asked him. “Yeah, sure,” he said, nonchalantly – but I noticed his jaw kept clenching as he peered out the window. I remember looking straight ahead down the tunnel of the center aisle, which was dark in the nighttime flight, and thinking we were all hurtling to our doom. Not from the flight itself, I fervently hoped (how humiliating and mundane to be on a serious mission, and not even get there because of some ordinary plane crash!) We were all very quiet, not knowing exactly what we would be facing once we landed, but knowing that we had it ever so much easier than the faithful people we were going to visit and hopefully shield with nothing more solid than our U.S. passports.

My habitual preoccupation with my little life was muted on this flight by the enormity of what we had undertaken. We felt like mice getting ready to stand up and roar at a monster—which was in many ways the truth of the situation. Our only security was the paradoxical and angering knowledge that the escuadrones de muerte were funded by our own government, and our deaths would put a crimp in the operations of the CIA-supported Salvadoran paramilitary. Whether we lived or died, we would throw a spanner in the works. If enough mice confronted the monster, and went back to the U.S. to tell about what we learned, the war might even end. To this day, I believe it was one of the most foolhardy, and important, things I have ever done.

Salvadoran pilots, mostly military-trained, don’t tend to take off and land according to the niceties of American flight. Sharp ascents and descents are the norm—especially over the volcanic mountains that ring Central American countries. As the plane jumped and then lurched into what felt like a rocky free fall toward the capital, I fairly leaped onto my future husband’s chest. “Calm down, Coop,” he remembers saying to himself, “She’s just freaked out by the turbulence.” True – but before the month was over, we had gotten to know each other in a deep way that maybe only happens in an extreme situation like that war zone. We sat on a bench under palm trees one evening after saying Night Prayers with our little group. We held hands to the sound of shelling just on the outskirts of the city, and the shrill whistles of the paramilitary thugs who extorted payments for “protection” from the local neighbors. I loved him for his courage and calm, and he loved me for my passion and loyalty to the cause and the people. The leap I took into his arms on the plane turned out to be a leap for life!

Almost 2 ½ decades later, my travel has become much more routine. But I have reclaimed the liminal space of being on that Greyhound bus to New York, or even the car ride to North Conway,NH. I’ve become a mother, a settled professional, and even a brand new grandmother. My fantasies of the future no longer center around the glare of bright lights, although I have not completely given up performing (either on stage or in a lecture hall). My fantasies are quieter now, but no less warmly lit. I still survey my life and relationships sometimes, especially on a longer trip, but by now I imagine I have at least as much life behind me as in front of me, and the future holds more predictable scenarios. Maybe that’s why there is the slightest film of tears at the back of my nose. There are losses to be mourned—deaths of beloved people, relationships that have petered out or just ended due to changing circumstances and interests, jobs finished and cities left behind, and even opportunities not chosen. But the melancholy is sweet, too, because the present is full of joy, and the future holds both further loss and further promise. I am certainly not too old for surprises. As my friend Sharline often says, the Spirit often comes to us by way of surprises. What are today’s surprises, and what gifts do they offer?

Worth Getting Up For

(Sunday, Nov. 1, 9:00 a.m., from Washington, DC)

“Not a morning person.”  One year, in about 9^th grade, my daughter decided this would be her Hallowe’en costume.   As a very non-crafts-y, non-seamstress type of mother, I was not likely to be whipping up an exact replica of a character from the musical “Wicked,” and Macrina’s creativity was not well satisfied with a something purchased at Wal-Mart.  So as was often the case, late on the evening of the 30^th, she resorted to assembling something unique from her own closet and growing makeup kit.   That year, she came down the stairs on Hallowe’en morning in a blue and white striped bathrobe, shod in fluffy slippers.  She had her hair up in two messy braids.  A smear of blue and brown eye color created deep shadows under her eyes.  She grabbed a coffee cup, and pinned a sign on the lapel of her robe that read “not a morning person.”   The costume was perfect.  And the costume was a perfect replica of me (sans curlers, but without any need for the makeup.)

Anyone who knows me well knows that I am NOT a morning person.  When left to my own devices (which means, not required by job or society to get up at a particular hour), I will go to bed between midnight and 1 a.m., and rise between 9 and 10.  I am a happy 10-hours-of-sleep person.  8 hours makes me feel spiky.  6 hours makes me incompetent.  And any time my sleep is terminated before the sun comes up makes me downright evil.

The weather is a big factor, too.  In my teen years I chose to think of my morning agonies as a kind of 19^th century-style romantic angst when the New England weather brewed up dark clouds and the trees wept for days.  Romantic angst had the consolation of high drama.   But as the years went on, I realized that angst didn’t cut it when one is required to get up for work – or to feed a baby – or to drive a child to school.  There were days when I literally had to hurl the lower half of my body out of bed, hope my feet hit the floor first, and get upright before the lights in my brain were turned on.  Over the years I have learned to cope with this mismatch between my brain chemistry and the demands of modern civilization.  But I don’t willingly witness the dawn’s early light if I can help it!

So this morning was a pleasant anomaly.  Setting the clocks back for the end of Daylight Savings Time helped a bit, but I was up – and surprisingly cheerful – at 5:30 this morning to accompany my spouse to Washington, DC, where he is preaching for All Saints’ Sunday at Reformation Lutheran on Capitol Hill.  The drive down from our home in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania wasn’t much fun, as it drizzled all the way.  But I discovered, as I often do when forced to be conscious in the hours before 9:00, that there is a world of delights to be had in the early morning – even early morning in the rain:

Walking through just the slightest veil of rain from Union Station to the Capitol, I find my spirits lifting as I breathe in the cool, moist air.  The trees are mottled grass-green and wheat-yellow, and glistening in the heavy mist.  The sky is a gossamer gray-yellow.  Washington’s marble buildings rise up, dove colored, above green lawns strewn with brown leaves.  The asphalt shines like a woman’s patent leather purse.

It is Sunday and there is almost no traffic.  This feels like a miracle.  The streets are quiet.  The few cars go by with a muted shush.  It’s possible to cross the confusing diagonal streets without taking your life in your hands.

There is a Starbuck’s on Pennsylvania Avenue at 3^rd Street with a blissfully quiet 2^nd floor.  No piped-in music, no talk.  Just the occasional sound of newspapers rustling and laptop keyboards softly clucking.  I am seated at a window where I can watch people and their umbrellas passing by below, through a screen of emerald and gold Maple leaves.

My simple things are not everyone’s of course.  My favorite things are mostly of the urban variety.  I have my Venti black iced tea (unsweetened).  I have the New York Times (yes, I know, I should be reading the Washington Post here in DC like a native.  But these are my favorite things).  I have an electric outlet to plug in my laptop.  I have Wifi.  I have time to think, and a quiet, well-lit corner to think in.  I have a whole hour to myself, in which no one knows exactly where I am, no one needs anything from me, and I can be my own companion.

And in an hour I have another short walk to take through the silvered streets, where a beloved person awaits me.  I will sing hymns, and pray with good people, and listen to my husband preach (which almost always brings me to tears), and then we will go have lunch somewhere.  We will probably hold hands.  Solitude is wonderful, and all the more wonderful when you know you are loved, and there is someone so happy to see you when you are ready to be companioned again.

Maybe it’s a midlife thing, but I no longer need the Sturm und Drang of morning agonies or the late-night drama that I thought was so exciting in my teens and twenties.  Give me these simple urban pleasures.  An hour of solitary bliss, bounded on each end by seasoned love.  I will get up in the morning – any day – for this!