When things go awry

Looking beneath and beneath again

I’m not a fan of travel. I’ve done lots of it, flown hundreds of thousands of miles in past sales jobs that took me from my home in Seattle to cities like New York, L.A., San Francisco, Minneapolis, Boston, Dallas, Houston, Atlanta. Once I had a job where I worked in both Seattle and San Francisco, before Zoom. I spent a week in San Francisco a month. I stayed at the same hotel every time, and kept a bag with an extra pair of workout shoes and other bulky items so I could travel lighter.

Because of this, I rarely travel for pleasure. A vacation to me is better if I don’t have to get on another plane. I don’t like flying. I can do it, but I don’t like it, hurtling through the sky in a metal tube. I much prefer the drive to a cabin in the woods, or mountains, or on a lake or the ocean – all of which are within easy driving distance of my house. But some of the people I love are not within driving distance, so sometimes I fly.

I’m supposed to be on a plane tonight. But I’m flying Alaska, and they had a plane lose a big piece of the fuselage last week. As they were flying. They made an emergency landing in Portland. No one was physically injured. Groundings and inspections and a cascading array of flight cancellations ensued. Just after checking into my flight last night, I got the notification that my flight was cancelled. I’m on the same flight, scheduled two days later.

I’m staying with my best friend and her wife, I have my computer, I can work from here. This isn’t a hardship. But it’s reminded me how unsettling change can be, especially change (travel plans) combined with fear (nervous flyer). I had time to consider this at 3am, wide awake in my very comfortable bed.

Since this small shift is not in any way actually causing me practical difficulty, and, in fact, gives me three more days with beloved friends, clearly the actual thing that’s happening isn’t the thing that’s waking me up at night.

I’ve been thinking about what lies beneath. Often, I’ll identify something that I think is the problem and try to sort it out, bombard it with solutions. And then it turns out the thing I think is the problem isn’t actually the problem after all. It’s really about the fear, grief or the resentment fueling my need for action, for impact.

I often ask my clients: “What is the problem you are trying to solve? Is it a solvable problem? Is it yours to solve?” When it comes to things that are keeping me up at 3am, I’m usually flat out wrong about the problem I’m trying to solve. I’m usually solving for the wrong thing. Or taking an amorphous but painful emotion - I miss my dead kid over the holidays, still - and trying to attach it to something I’ve identified as the issue – I need to get more comfortable with traveling, how can I fix that?

Years ago, when I had that job in San Francisco, I flew from San Francisco to Chicago for a business meeting. As we were flying I noticed vaguely that the oxygen masks had come down. They dangled like slightly shameful appendages above every seat. I took the one in front of me and put it over my mouth and nose. As I breathed in, I realized that I wasn’t fully conscious before I saw the mask come down. We had lost pressure in the cabin, and it wasn’t until the oxygen hit my brain that I realized I had been on the verge of passing out. I heard that suppressed quiet murmur that can happen when a group of people get afraid but are trying to keep their shit together.

The pilot announced that we were going to make an emergency landing. Quite quickly, I saw a small airport in Iowa rising up to us. The airport was empty except for a line of fire trucks and ambulances with their lights on parked along the tarmac. Not what you want to see from the window of a plane. They had us brace for landing. We landed.

Then we had to wait. There was no explanation, nothing was said about what was happening. We were in the middle of nowhere, late at night, and the regional airport was closed. Sporadic, clipped announcements informed us that they were trying to get a plane to take us onto Chicago. We waited. About an hour later, a series of buses came to take us off the plane. We had to get off the plane through the rear door. A nervous man in his thirties next to me told me to look at the plane seats and see how many people had pissed themselves, like it was a game. This hadn’t occurred to me, I hadn’t pissed myself. Did he perhaps have personal knowledge of this fear reaction? What we just experienced together was scary, terrifying, I didn’t want to mock whatever people did in reaction to that. The oxygen masks were yellow tangled wires hanging from the ceiling still, now unmoving, like limbs from a nest of dead insects. I walked down the middle aisle and saw that, indeed, a number of the seat cushions were wet, in that tell-tale circular pattern.

While I was in the bus, I used my phone to book a rental car. No way was I getting back on a plane. In fact, I’ve never flown American Airlines again. Not because something happened, but because no one explained what happened. Ever. Nothing was in the press, I got no communication from the airlines. When the bus finally got to the small terminal, everything was dark and closed. It took a long time for an airline employee to find a carton of bottled water and rip it open. I don’t know how long it took for the next plane to come and get them, because I got in my rental car.

It was a surreal drive, through corn fields in the middle of the night. It was hours and hours. I was still in that state of surreal awareness; I could have died, I didn’t die, some of my worst fears just happened in real life and I’m still standing; I probably shouldn’t be driving right now, but I’m going to because I just want to get the fuck away from that rural airfield in Iowa and the waiting emergency vehicles, lined up, silent, with flashing red lights.

I got to my meeting in Chicago on time. I didn’t change my travel schedule at all, beyond never flying American again. And I should have. I should have paused. Rested. That’s what I’m thinking today. When something bad happens, small or large, a scary near miss or a health problem or any reversal, I no longer want to stuff my feelings and power through. I want to own, in whatever manner is appropriate, that a thing happened. And it made a mark. And I get to choose to support whatever healing, naming, processing, and metabolizing I need to go through. And I’ll do it soon. So that I don’t find myself, years later, staring at the ceiling in another state trying to figure out why I’m so afraid.