Heres a fun story about standing outside Gatwick Airports North Terminal at 5am, feeling like someone has their hand around your throat. So, its the other day, and Im taking advantage of a super-cheap EasyJet flight to get off these increasingly frozen islands for a few days. Im warm and toasty and within budget. I have everything I need. I even find one of those multi-seat benches without any metal arm-rests (seriously, metal arm-rests at airports NEED TO STOP) so I can stretch out and have a few hours of kip. I wake up at 5am. My flight leaves around 6.30am. The sky is clear and dawn is every colour of the spectrum except the usual one for this time of year (grey). Its perfect flying conditions. So I go and stand outside for a while, because my heart is racing and it feels like someone is choking me to death. I used to have a fear of flying, see. It was a Big Deal. It used to stop me getting on planes, and when I did manage to get onto them, Id hyperventilate the whole way, agonisingly attuned to every clot of lumpy air wed fly through, every aircraft noise I didnt understand (ie. all aircraft noises). It was miserable and frustrating and I fought it like Gandalf and the Balrog of Moria, because I wanted to see the world, so I Deny You, Fear - You Shall Not PASS. Eventually, I won. Im not sure how. I just kept going back enough times and eventually through sheer bloodyminded persistence my fear of flying scuttled off. I didnt Smite Its Ruin Upon The Mountainside or anything. It just left one day, and I could get on planes again. And Ive been doing so ever since. I flew to Toronto in 2013 (to speak at TBEX) and obviously I few back again. This year I took more flights than any year of my life so far. It wasnt an issue any more. Until the other day, when it all came back out of nowhere, and I couldnt reason my way round it, I couldnt fight it because Id forgotten how that worked and I was just so surprised I was going through this crap again, seriously, WUT. So instead I went outside into the cold and felt like I was having a nervous breakdown for the next hour, until my flight left and I was consigned to 24 hours at Gatwick Airport before I could get the next cheap bus back up north. Anxiety problems are no fun. I thank the gods that I dont have a longterm anxiety disorder like the one Kady Morrison is writing about here: vox/2014/12/4/7262991/anxiety-disorder-help And anxiety doesnt care about facts. You can be at the top of your game and it can still be giving you a kicking - which is what Chris Guillebeau has been experiencing this year: chrisguillebeau/2014-annual-review-lessons-learned It also doesnt care how stupid it is. You can *know* this is effing crazy and you have NO DAMN REASON to be freaking out, and yet you will continue to freak out. However, anxiety is related to stress. Its related to diet, and to sleep patterns, and to being on top of your work. Those are all things I can do something about. Those are all things *I am now doing something about*. And therefore Im confident this will go away again, hopefully quickly, because Ive got lots of flying to do in the short-term future. However, the lesson is - lifting a line from Chriss article: What doesn’t kill you at first will probably try again. Complacency is a destructive force. And it seems that flying is not something I can take lightly, even though theres no way Im stopping doing it - and no way I want to, either. Onwards. And *upwards*.
Posted on: Tue, 16 Dec 2014 18:11:04 +0000
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