My Brain on Airplane Mode

Confronting Myself at 35,000 Feet | ✈️ no. 010

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The view from my seat in the (emergency) exit row. June 2024.

There are more things . . . likely to frighten us than there are to crush us; we suffer more often in imagination than in reality.

—Seneca

I’ve experienced a great deal of pain and suffering in my life . . . most of which has never happened.

—Mark Twain¹

Author’s Note: I visited my beloved home state of California last week and had a fantastic vacation, but I almost didn’t go due to my fear of flying. What follows are some reflections I wrote down while trying not to go bonkers on the plane.

I.

“Do you worry about the hassle of traveling or the plane falling from the sky?”

Leah Baumgartner

asks me.

“Definitely dying,” I respond.

I’ve been afraid of flying for as long as I can remember, so my stomach is always somewhere in my shoes when I’m sitting on a plane.

Supposedly, I had my first airplane ride as a toddler, but I have no memory of it. “We should have taken you on more flights,” my mother once said to me.

As an adult, I avoided flying for as long as I could until I boarded my first flight at age 24. All I can remember thinking is that my obituary had already been written by Alanis Morissette:

Mr. Play-It-Safe was afraid to fly . . . / He waited his whole damn life to take that flight / And as the plane crashed down / He thought, Well, isn't this nice?

Every flight I’ve taken in the last thirteen years has been an anxious one, some worse than others, but each has been a battle to regain some semblance of control over my runaway mind.

II.

“Flying across the sky is safer than crossing the street,” The Wall Street Journal tells me and, if you’re someone who has ever vocalized your fear of flying, you’ve probably been told something similar.

Sensing I’m more anxious than usual about our upcoming flight to California and knowing I’m a sucker for citing your sources, Leah reminds me there are 45,000 flights a day in the United States and 2.9 million people flying in and out of U.S. airports, safely, at least according to the Federal Aviation Administration.

It’s moments like these that do make me feel better—not about flying—just knowing that I get to spend the rest of my life with someone loving and thoughtful enough to collect and deploy these facts in hopes of making me feel just a little bit better rather than dismissing or judging me.

And, I guess it does help in one major way: It reminds me how self-centered I can be. Yes, 2.9 million people do fly every day in the U.S. but, suddenly, the flight I am on will be the one to have trouble. If Jacob is on a flight, surely tragedy must be on the horizon. It turns out, though, what seems like such a very big deal to me is just another day for everyone else including the pilot and the crew: Get over yourself.

This is a good lesson.

But, what most folks often fail to remember is that my fear of flying isn’t logical: It’s yet another manifestation of my anxiety, symptomatic of how my brain routinely overwhelms me with relentless imagined troubles. I know it’s not logical—it almost never is—but that’s not enough to stop myself from being carried away by a series of unprovoked thoughts that seem to emerge from nowhere and play on a maddening loop.

Trying to manage the anxiety is like playing the most terrifying game of whack-a-mole where instead of bonking goofy cartoon characters with a foam mallet, I’m forced to watch the worst things I can imagine pop up one after the other, and all my swings are in vain because there is nothing—nothing—I can wield that is strong enough to make them retreat into darkness: They just keep springing to life.

III.

Sitting in the exit row, the flight attendant asks if I am willing to assist in an emergency: And isn’t it ironic? Don’t you think?

EXIT: I stare at the red handle and start imagining the big door accidentally opening mid-flight. I see myself being violently sucked out of the plane but still somehow strapped to my seat, stuck, flipping furiously through frozen air, my vocal cords frayed and raw from my screams, twisting, turning, falling, mercifully losing consciousness shortly before my soft skull and fragile body collide and disappear into the earth with an anticlimactic thud heard by absolutely no one.

More legroom! Isn’t this great! Leah says to me.

IV.

Cruising altitude now, eyes closed, trying like hell to make a temporary truce with my mind and find some peace. It occurs to me the only thing scarier than being over 35,000 feet in the air is being forced to sit alone with my thoughts for a minimum of four hours with nowhere to go but down down down.

Overtaken by anxiety and always fearing for my life, I obsess over the spectacle of flying: The perception of immediate danger and risk, suspended so impossibly high in the air, an unnatural state, my guaranteed safety a tenuous illusion I find frequently disrupted by the resistance, the swaying, rattling bumps of turbulence. I eagerly await touching down, feeling the wheels hit the runway, being grounded, back where I’m safe.

Yet, the safety of the ground is also illusory. After all, it is on the ground where I inflict an obscene number of daily, imperceptible harms upon myself: Eating poorly, not sleeping, not exercising, losing myself to worry, to stress, to anger, to sadness. Here, too, I walk around lost in imagined disasters of every sort from the spectacular to the mundane, from getting terminally ill and losing the people I love to never being able to find a parking space and running perpetually late.

I’m never grounded—that’s the problem.

And it turns out I’ve never flown a day in my life, either, because there hasn’t been a single flight I’ve ever been present for.

Land, sea, or air, my problem is the same: An inability to be here now. I’m always somewhere else but these trips are no vacations.

I keep my eyes closed.

I focus on my breathing: It’s shallow and shakes like the plane, but it’s okay. Let’s try again.

A gentle chime followed by the pilot’s voice over the intercom: He cracks jokes; he knows shortcuts; he’ll get us to California quickly—where the weather is great!—so just sit back, relax, and enjoy the trip.

I open my eyes. The man sitting next to me in the aisle seat is already asleep, and he’s starting to slump into his chair, his head near my shoulder, mouth open, breath smelling like morning.

I look at my wife sitting by the window diligently completing her sudoku, and I’m filled with gratitude for a decade’s worth of her love and understanding, for the gift of always telling me I’m enough as I am and reminding me to say kinder things to myself: I want you to love yourself, too.

I distract her with a quick kiss and a smile that surprises both of us.

Reaching across her lap, I achieve a small but powerful victory: For the first time, I give myself permission to lift the shade and look out the window to see myself soaring above the clouds. From here, I can see everything.

1. This is a popular quote that’s definitely misattributed to Twain (as so many quotes are). I’ve never been able to locate the actual essay in which he says this. Still, misattributed or not, I like it and find it useful, so I included it.