One of my proudest professional accomplishments is earning platinum status on Delta Air Lines last year. And my platinum card marks one of my proudest personal achievements as well, because I am a former fearful flyer.
Professionally, my 75,000-mile milestone reflects a growing international reputation: I’ve been invited to deliver plenary and keynote lectures in Toulouse, France; Belo Horizonte, Brazil; and Newcastle, Australia. I’ve explored exchange programs with colleagues in Hangzhou, China. My travels have facilitated collaborations with foreign scholars and an eminent British photographer. The Brazil trip led to my first article published in translation. And you might recall essays I’ve written recently for The Chronicle Review about a conference on literary tourism in Leeds, England; the world’s first academic Monty Python convention, in Lodz, Poland; a new museum about the Gestapo in Berlin; and a film festival in Dubai.
The professional value of international connections is self-evident (indeed, my department’s tenure manual describes “international reputation” as a standard for promotion). The intertwining of my personal difficulties and motivations is more complicated.
I’d unraveled a rich psychoanalytic self-analysis of my aviophobia, though the therapist who treated me considered such insights irrelevant for cognitive behavioral therapy, which is used to remediate fear of flying. But even if she was uninterested, I’ll share the story here, because it has significant professional bookends.
I date the root of my phobia to a flight I took from New York to San Francisco in 1987 to attend the Modern Language Association conference. I had gone on the job market, although I hadn’t finished my dissertation. With the cockiness my Ivy League education had instilled, I applied to a few “second-tier schools” to practice interviewing and garner a few offers in anticipation of the tonier positions I expected to come my way the following year.
As MLA approached, I received exactly no interview invitations. The job market was a lot tougher, and I was a lot less irresistible, than I had imagined. Over the next year, I reconfigured my job search accordingly, and the story has a happy ending, as I mark my 23rd year of teaching at a university that I love (though not, as originally planned, in a bucolic New England hamlet).
But at the time, I was in a deep funk. I flew to MLA anyway; the ticket was nonrefundable. The flight was very turbulent, especially over the Rockies. When I arrived in California, I was a basket case. If I exaggerated the correlation between the trip’s real bumps and its symbolic ones, well, I was an English graduate student in an era of rampant theoretical overdetermination. The combination of professional failure with the ominously accompanying aerodynamic disturbance marked the onset of a nearly 20-year escalation of flying anxiety.
Each flight got scarier and tougher, leaving me more and more exhausted. I became increasingly mad at myself for indulging irrational anxieties: I knew flying was safe, but that knowledge didn’t forestall the bundle of terror I created.
An increasing number of “triggers” provoked my fears: Turbulence, however light, was the worst, but others included the plane’s banking on departure and any noise or vibration that I hadn’t noticed before. Claustrophobia played into the mix as well. When I boarded the plane and glanced into the cockpit, if the pilots looked too young, or too old, that made the trip worse. Once, on a short flight, the pilot never came on the public-address system to welcome us aboard. I was sure the crew was too busy handling some crisis, and I became increasingly panicked throughout the flight, expecting the plane to go down any minute. As I deplaned, I screamed at the pilot for skipping the customary announcement. He thought I was insane.
It turns out that I had been having panic attacks on airplanes for years before I knew what they were. At my first meeting with my therapist, she immediately diagnosed my nausea, sweating, chest pains, and lightheaded disorientation. She gave me a photocopied handout describing panic attacks and ways to recover with breathing exercises, muscle-relaxing techniques, and mental refocusing. I had never known that such a condition existed, and I was stunned to find such a simple explanation for what I thought were heart attacks and blackouts.
I acquired a set of tools to cope with my phobia, and a prescription for Xanax. My therapist sent me to the airport to watch, for hours at a time, planes take off and not crash. She gave me a mantra: “Turbulence makes me uncomfortable, but it is not dangerous.”
Therapy was not a silver bullet. It still took me many years before flying became manageable. But I started on the slow journey back from complete panic. I gradually weeded out a number of the triggers. Dramamine helped with some of the motion-related reactions. I accepted, and came to expect, how it would feel when the plane made its turns during ascent. I tolerated the bumpiness when the plane went through clouds or storms (because I could see what was causing the bumps), though clear-air turbulence remained inexplicable and terrifying. Ever the academic, I learned everything I could about meteorology and the physics of aviation, trying to understand turbulence and thereby defuse its debilitating effects on me. Knowledge was power.
In 2005, Oxford invited me to present a keynote address. An interesting fact about Oxford speaking invitations (from my limited experience): They don’t ask whether you’ll agree to come, they simply inquire whether it’s more convenient for you to lecture in February or May.
Of course I agreed to go, but thinking about the trip petrified me. I had forsaken trans-Atlantic travel for a decade. My parents said they would fly with me to England. Seriously. The flight was tolerable, and the payoff was, of course, intense, probably the high point of my scholarly career up to that point.
I didn’t realize at the time that this figured as a keen counterpoint to my MLA flight of failure in 1987, but in retrospect, and despite my therapist’s lack of interest in deep-rooted psychological causes, I suspect that just as my professional despair had precipitated the onset of my flying phobia, my triumphant Oxford lecture signaled the beginning of the end of this debilitating condition.
Beyond the clichés of broadening one’s horizons and becoming a global citizen, it is hard to describe the immense value of what feels to me like a newfound gift—the ability to fly fearlessly. Alain de Botton describes the psychological pleasure of taking off in The Art of Travel: “The swiftness of the plane’s ascent is an exemplary symbol of transformation. The display of power can inspire us to imagine analogous, decisive shifts in our own lives; to imagine that we too might one day surge above much that now looms over us.”
In the depths of my neurosis, every moment of the takeoff (the most dangerous part of a flight!), every surge and thrust and roll, terrified me. In my personal awareness of the symbolic transformation that a plane’s ascent represents, I’m even a little thankful that my years of fear taught me to be so keenly attuned to every moment. Now I savor all the more gratefully the experiential uplifting that accompanies each soaring departure.
