Crying on the Floor of JFK: A Lesson in Falling Apart

I once enjoyed the bounce of the plane rising through the clouds, relished the expanse of landscapes out my window, and jumped at the opportunity to hop on a plane. But once flight anxiety took root, the enjoyment evaporated and no amount of statistics on flight safety offered any relief.

I powered through my uncomfortable feelings on planes, but my ruminations started to be accompanied by tightness in my chest, a pounding of my heart and a pit in my stomach. I boarded each flight begging for it to be easy, for turbulence to hold off, and for the time to pass quickly. I stared at the flight attendants at each bump, looking for evidence of shock or horror. A stranger once tried to console me after spotting my white knuckles on the shared arm rest and tears rolling down my cheeks. Without fail, the screech of wheels on the tarmac came with an audible sigh of relief.

When I opened up about my fears, I was often met with disbelief and dismissal:

“But you fly all the time!”

“It’ll be fine, it’s safer than driving.”

I felt embarrassed and alienated. I didn’t understand what was wrong with me. My flight anxiety worsened and by 2012, it morphed into premonitions of certain doom. And one morning, it completely overtook me.

It was a cold Sunday morning after a weekend away with old college friends in Boston. I grabbed a quick breakfast and a Dunkin’ coffee and made my way to Logan. I had a flight to DC via JFK, the cheapest flight I could find. I swallowed my conviction that my life could very well be ending in less than an hour, and got on the first leg of my flight.

As the plane began its descent, the captain’s voice came on from the cockpit. “Strong winds today, air traffic control is holding us in a circular pattern until we’re clear to land.” A shockwave went through my body. My breath caught in my chest. I stared out the window. There were too many planes circling. The air traffic controllers couldn’t possibly keep them all separate. One of the controllers was going to miscalculate. My mind conjured the nose of another plane out the window, the one that was going to collide with my plane and end us all. It wasn’t an if, but a when. My insides burned. Tears fell. What should’ve been a quick up and down was now going to be the tragic headline in the evening news. The title of my obituary flashed behind my eyes. I defaulted to begging, desperate bargaining with the universe.

Please just let me get on the ground, I begged.

I also knew that if I got on the ground, I still had to get on my connecting flight. It was unfathomable. My mind spun. I just had to get my feet back to earth. I didn’t have to get on the next plane. There were trains, right? The bounce of the tires on solid ground did not trigger relief. With an impossibly short layover, I was expected to walk off my plane and walk onto another.

I called my dad crying. “Can you see your plane out the window?” he asked gently. The white form reflected in the sun as passengers filed past me to join the boarding line. I could.

“Do you think you can get on it?” I couldn’t.

My inability to say yes overwhelmed me. I had been scared countless times, crying even, but I had never not gotten on a plane. I moved to a corner of the terminal, my breakdown on display as I sat on the floor in a ball. In hindsight, I was having my first panic attack, but I didn’t know it at the time. All I knew was that if I got on that plane, I was going to die. I forced myself to return to the boarding area, but my feet cemented to the floor. The boarding screen flashed ‘last call’, yellow block letters taunting me. Once the letters turned red and spelled ‘closed’, I convinced myself I had simply run out of time. Admitting defeat was too painful.

My embarrassment weighed on my shoulders as I walked out of the airport, typing my credit card details into the Amtrak website. I made the trek to Penn Station, promising myself that I’d never not get on a plane again. I held myself to that promise, but not because it was easy.

I tried drinking. I tried valium. I tried music. I tried re-reading pages of self-help books – anything to disrupt the anxiety. I tried wearing a specific traveling outfit, as if consistency improved chances of survival. By the end of 2015, my husband and I had a free business class flight from Europe to Asia. As I settled into my oversized seat and was offered drinks and champagne, it hit me that I couldn’t even enjoy this rare treat. Something shifted. Enough was enough. I needed to make a change.

I made a single resolution for 2016: “Not freak out on planes.”

I decided to track my flights. I taped boarding passes in my journal and made notes about how the flight went. How much stress I felt. How much turbulence the flight had. How it went. By flight 17, things were shifting. I noted “Overall I did acceptably well, but still bits of stress" about a flight to Singapore. On one descent to a windy Chicago, I bumped in the seat and realized my heart wasn’t pounding.

I took 48 flights that year and on December 31, 2016, I wrote in my journal: "Here I am on a plane a year later and I feel I've really made a solid life change and I am proud of myself."

When I was struggling to get on planes, I didn’t understand why I couldn’t just think my way out of it. I didn’t know why my intellectual mind was at such odds with my physical body. I didn’t know that my nervous system wasn’t distinguishing between a patterned response and actual danger.

My decision to take action, one flight at a time, retrained the habit.

My journey with flight anxiety is just one example of my journey interrupting unhelpful or harmful patterns. FOMU patterns look the same. In the beginning of posting on LinkedIn and updating my profile, I spent hours feeling terrified and second-guessing, but I kept hitting post. Each time I did, I chipped away at the pattern. Now, I can do it with ease. It’s the same for my clients. Their bodies have labeled the emails they haven’t sent or conversations they’re avoiding or risks they haven’t taken as a threat. Left unchecked, patterns like these often take the reins, distancing ourselves from our values and costing us time, energy and opportunities.

Seeing the patterns for what they are is the first step to interrupting them and taking back agency. The only way out is through action, even while fear is still heavy.

My dad explained it to me once this way: habitual anxious thoughts, like I had getting on planes, are like walking repeatedly through the woods. Follow the same route enough times, you’ll eventually have a path and it becomes easier and easier to go down it. The only option is to stop following it. And even if you do, the forest will take time to regrow, and even when it does, it will never be the way it was before.

When I get on planes now, I remember how it felt. I suspect I will always remember what it felt like going down those forest paths, but now I look at them from a distance and get on the plane.