Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle – Ian Maclaren

Last week, I was in Seattle for Microsoft’s Build conference and what I didn’t know at that time is that I would find myself driving 1100 miles across the United States alone because a dark foe called anxiety would surface like nothing I had experienced in my lifetime. This post is my therapy, it’s how I have always cleared my mind and I also hope that it helps others realize that it’s ok to talk about what holds us back because my battles with my own inner demons may help others who are facing similar challenges – we are all fighting some sort of battle.

At around 9:50 PM on May 9th, somewhere in the middle of Wyoming on State Route 212, I got out of my car, looked up, and saw more stars than I had seen in my entire life. Billions of little lights sprinkled across the darkest sky and for the first time in a week, I felt at peace with everything around me.

The older I have become, the more I experience on this little time we have on Earth, the more I have grown to hate flying and it’s becoming a serious problem.

I have flown a lot, 60,000 miles last year, 75,000 the year before; I can get on a plane and be just fine. But the problem is getting on the plane and what happened that evening in Seattle of May 8th overcame my ability to fight through my emotions.

For me, the anxiety of flying starts several days before I travel. I sleep less and don’t eat as much as I should; my wife notices mood swings and other abnormalities from my generally optimistic-lifestyle.

I exacerbate this issue by looking at the weather along the expected flight path as cold/warm fronts means turbulence and turbulence means my heart rate blasts through the roof and I honestly think that flying will shorten my lifespan.

Love it or hate it, the Apple Watch has helped me become a healthier person but it has also given me a window into my flight anxiety. While writing this post, my heart rate is about 54 Beats Per Minute (BPM) while flying, my heart rate averages 92 BPM.

This is not healthy or sustainable and I need to figure out how to overcome this issue.

When I was being driven to the airport on the 8th, my Uber driver noted the lightning off in the distance and that we were supposed to get a few more storms later that night.

My anxiety starts to show its ugly face.

I get to the airport, make my way through the security line without issue and arrive at my gate 30 minutes before boarding. But there is already a problem, while the plane is at the gate, it’s broken.

I don’t know what is broken but we are being told it will be about a 45-minute delay.

My anxiety at this point is loading up a patriot missile targeted directly at the logic portion of my brain.

After 45 minutes, they tell us it will be another short delay as they try to fix the problem (they never told us the issue) but that didn’t matter to me, I was starting to lose my mind.

I am a very rational person; I know that flying is incredibly safe. Driving to the airport is the most dangerous part of flying and I have looked at every flying stat easily accessible; flying, especially in the US, is about as safe as it gets and 2017 was the ‘safest’ flying year on record.

The Delta employee says the plane is fixed and they are ready to start boarding…I decided to check the weather one last time.

Storms in Seattle, storms over Montana, low-pressure over Chicago with storms expected in the morning.

And this flight, which was overnight, meant that I could not see out the window…something that has helped me cope with flying in the past.

The anxiety missile hits my logic and reasoning like a nuclear bomb and decimates my ability to function. I couldn’t move, I was frozen in my seat watching people stand in-line to get on the plane and here I was just sitting, staring, and emotionally stoic.

Until I came back to reality and realized I had to make a decision, was I going to get on this flight or was I going to sit in this airport forever?

I called my wife, several times, as she was sleeping as a normal person would be doing 3 A.M., and hearing her voice after waking up was a sigh of relief and also the tipping point. An emotional breakdown probably doesn’t do it justice but talking to my wife, who was calm and rational about the entire situation, helped me deal with what was now a series of neurons firing out of sequence and pushing me to a place I had never visited.

We talked for 15 minutes, or what felt like an hour, but as the line became shorter, I had to decide if I was getting on the plane. And after trying to muster the courage to get on that damn plane, suck it up for 4 hrs to get home, I left the airport.

Anxiety had won; I had failed.

I went to a nearby hotel after renting a car, slept and the next morning began my journey – by car – alone.

At this point, the idea of driving 2,000+ miles by myself was more appealing than flying in a steel tube towards turbulence. But when I woke up the next morning, I was hoping that last night was just a dream but instead, I knew instantly that it was not and that I had a real problem on my hands and I’m not talking about the drive.

Flying is a part of my life and the older I get, the worse it has become. I have had some terrible flights but the idea of not getting on a plane seemed ridiculous. But as I got married and more importantly, had a child, the idea of never seeing them again has overwhelmed the logical sense of my brain.

When flying, all I can think about is turbulence. What if during maintenance they didn’t see a bolt that was weakened by fatigue or what if a fan blade detaches and knocks a hole in the side of the plane like it did to a Southwest flight resulting in a person literally being sucked partially out of the window?

There is no logic to this line of thinking but it’s what happens to me on every flight and it’s why my heart rate is elevated.

The odd thing is that after driving 1100 miles to Rapid City, South Dakota, I couldn’t sleep despite being incredibly tired.

Side note: Idaho and Montana are insanely gorgeous to drive across, I did enjoy this portion of my trip. South Dakota and a small section of Wyoming? Not so much.

The reason I couldn’t sleep is that once I got into my hotel, I knew that I wouldn’t be driving the rest of the way home. I booked a flight from Rapid City to Minneapolis and then Minneapolis to Cincinnati and oddly, I was ok with this.

I hate losing and I don’t say that timidly; knowing that I could beat my anxiety but didn’t was demoralizing. I didn’t say embarrassing as everyone I talked to kept saying ‘don’t be embarrassed, everyone has a fight they are battling’. But I lost this fight, and I had to prove to myself and quickly, that I could win.

I don’t think I have a fear of flying, I most certainly do have a fear of falling out of the sky in a steel tube but the next morning I was able to get on two different flights and make it home.

I did not enjoy the flights but I was able to get on the plane and overcome my anxiety; I won this round.

In Seattle, there was the perfect combination of plane issues, weather problems, and flying at night – this cocktail sent my mind into a dark place and I couldn’t recover.

Telling my wife and all those around me was important, talking about issues like this, even if mine is minor, is how we overcome them. I am lucky that my demon is flying and not gambling, drugs, or something else but at the same time, it’s still a problem.

My wife and family were a huge help; my wife and father-in-law looked at flying out to meet me somewhere to help with the drive home and others checked in on me as I was driving to make sure I was ok.

The one person who didn’t call or ask how I was doing is Paul, that’s because I didn’t tell him about my ‘problem’ until I was already home. And there was one specific reason for this:

I knew that if I told Paul he would have driven with me the entire way home.

I didn’t tell him because I knew he wasn’t prepared (nor was I frankly) for the extended days traveling and I didn’t want my problem to be his problem.

When I did finally tell him, he said exactly what I expected; he would have joined me on my journey as any good friend would do.

The point of me writing this is to open up about mental health issues that we all too often keep repressed inside our heads because it’s not kosher to talk about our problems.

Many have heard me saying that I do not enjoy flying, but no one, not even my wife, knew how much stress it was causing me but with this post and my episode in Seattle, there is no turning back.

And frankly, that’s a good thing. Being open and figuring out how to move forward is the healthy way to approach these problems; keeping them to yourself only feeds the demon.

Tagged with Brad, Mental Health