Just before the flight

I am currently preparing for another trip. Unfortunately, as usual, this requires me to fly. Living on an island, we have the choice to swim or fly, but I am panicking already. Some people claim that things should get easier the more times you do them, but in my case it’s not like that. I wasn’t in the least scared on my first flight because I didn’t know what to expect. After taking more flights, instead of being more experienced, I started to panic more. I heard that people, as they get older, get more clever, but with me I

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I am currently preparing for another trip. Unfortunately, as usual, this requires me to fly. Living on an island, we have the choice to swim or fly, but I am panicking already. Some people claim that things should get easier the more times you do them, but in my case it’s not like that. I wasn’t in the least scared on my first flight because I didn’t know what to expect. After taking more flights, instead of being more experienced, I started to panic more. I heard that people, as they get older, get more clever, but with me I get worse and worse. When I even start to think about flying, about being stuck in an enclosed space in the sky for three hours, even my writing gets worse. I wrote a lot about this weird phobia in the past and here I am writing about it again. Some psychologists think that writing can be therapeutic, so maybe it’s time to analyse my flying phobia. Let’s start from the beginning.

The most important thing to start with is probably my first flight. I heard that if your first experience of something is really bad, it can stay forever in your brain. In my case it wasn’t that bad, I was flying from Wroclawia to London, sitting beside a very cute old English man, trying to have a conversation about football and the Pope despite my poor English. I almost didn’t realise that I was flying, it was like being in a goods carriage. So, my fear doesn’t lie here. Maybe it was a bad experience from childhood. When I was very, very young I never dreamt that I would be flying. Yet once, with my sister, we illegally snuck in to the cinema and saw the film ‘Alive’. It was a real story about people who survived an airplane crash in the mountains. But I don’t think that this story flipped something in my brain. We didn’t take it that seriously, we probably didn’t understand what was going on, so my psychoanalysis of an event from childhood doesn’t reveal the reason.

I definitely won’t be a psychologist. The only thing I can do at the moment is not to eat too much before the flight, have great music to minimise the screaming of scared passengers and another thing, which I have already done, don’t sleep before the flight, so instead of thinking about potential catastrophe, in my dreams I can see a lovely bed with a nice fluffy blanket. So now, I should drink three coffees, check five times that my flight is today and keep my fingers crossed. I hope that this time I will have some kind of re-birth and when I return from Poland I won’t be afraid, I will be like a lover of flying, maybe even this time I will just pretend to myself that flying is a good thing and I will buy some small replica plane and when I return home, I will leave it in a place of honour in my house and every time I look at it I will think that flying is enjoyable.