So now that I’m safe and sound back on the ground again, I wanted to take a bit here to expand on some thoughts that dominated my brain for at least 2.5-3 hours on two occasions over the last weekend…
I’m starting to get really afraid of flying, and it shows! 😯
Admittedly our flight back home from Michigan wasn’t nearly as bad as going up – we had a row all to ourselves, we weren’t stuck in the very back, and I was able to last the majority of the flight without constantly worrying about whether or not the plane might just randomly fall out of the sky somewhere in between Flint and Tampa.
Seriously – they do that sometimes…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JUFntnLky_4
It’s to the point where pretty much anything that happens on an airplane makes a scene like that appear in my mind, and I have to actively fight not thinking about those kinds of tragedies while we’re taking off or going through turbulence. And I know that flying in a plane is still technically safer than driving on the highway, and I know that I’m probably more likely to get hit by lightning while driving on the highway than I am to have anything happen to me up in the air … but at some point I always find myself taken aback and just sort of defeating that very logic with the incredible feat that it really is to get an 85,000 ton steel bird off the ground in the first place … I guess it just makes me wonder, are we really supposed to be up there in the first place?!
Of course, the crux of it is that with having both of our families more than a day’s car ride away, flying is really the only reasonable way for us to visit unless we’re staying for an extended length of time. Like last fall, it made sense for us to drive up to Michigan because we were going to be there for two full weeks and it was nice having our own transportation so that we didn’t have to inconvenience family all of the time, but for a trip like the one we just made where we literally had to fly up Thursday morning and back home on Sunday morning, there’s just no way that would’ve ever been possible if we had to spend 20 hours driving each way in order to make it happen.
So I get that it’s a necessity for me to travel via air for certain trips, and I’ll even admit that there are some that I’d like to go on in the future like visiting Hawaii and Europe and even Australia that there’s pretty much no other way to get there save for via plane!
…but I don’t like it, and short of talking to my doctor about giving me a handful of drugs to just make it all go away for those 3 hours while we’re dancing with death at 35,000 feet, I’m really not sure what else I can do. I try to distract myself the best that I can … writing, or playing games on my phone, or even blogging in my latest trip … but the whole experience still makes me feel really uneasy and I certainly couldn’t imagine being in the type of job that requires it on a regular basis.
…
Hmmmm … so I guess that’s about it for now. Thankfully, I don’t really see us having to fly anywhere really for at least the rest of the year, if not even longer, so at least there’s that.
At this point I don’t know if this is something that I need to learn how to conquer one way or another, or if I should just be grateful that I really don’t find myself flying more than once every couple of years and leave it at that. 😕