This week’s post is a day late because I flew this week.
I flew for the first time since 2019, for the first time since a plane I was on failed to land. For the first time since the plane almost touched the ground before, at the last minute, speeding up and taking back off, up above the storm, trying again, failing again, 40 minutes of cold fear each time. Eventually, the plane turned around, left Canada, and touched down in New York. I told myself–and I shouldn’t have–that I wouldn’t fly for awhile. Weeks turned into months, turned into a pandemic, turned into getting a dog and a house, turned into a phobia.
Then I had to fly.
I’ve written mantras about fear into half the stories I’ve written.
“Always afraid, never a coward.”
“Beauty lies on the far side of fear.”
Both of which are nicer than what my friend likes to tell me: “God hates a coward, Magpie.”
It helps that the same friend is a cognitive behavioral therapist who spent time with me about ten years ago to give me the tools I still use to handle fear.
There are so many cliches about fear that stand out to me. When I was a kid, “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” the old Franklin Roosevelt quote, seemed nonsensical. I was a kid. I wasn’t afraid of fear, I was afraid of alien abductions. I was afraid that Bloody Mary would show up in the mirror and kill me. I was afraid of school and my very real bullies. I was afraid of my own gender realizations. I was afraid of a lot of stuff, none of which were fear.
Now though, now I believe it, heart and soul. The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.
In 2019, my plane didn’t crash. Literally the only bad thing that happened to me was that I was afraid. Being afraid is uncomfortable. I didn’t avoid planes because I was afraid I would crash, I avoided planes because I was afraid I would be afraid.
One more cliche about fear: it really is the little-death that brings total obliteration.
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