Who will save me from my brain?

Overcoming a lifetime of phobias

I’m not quite sure when any of them started, though they do say that’s normal.

I have a memory of my mother putting me to sleep in my childhood bedroom. The lights are off, but the door to the landing lets in a greenish glow. I see her expression change in this glow as she snatches something off the pillow next to me. Throws it across the room. She will later tell me - once the frantic body has been captured properly with glass and card - that it was just a spider. But the just doesn’t correlate. For her to snatch it like that, for her not to want to hold it for longer than that moment, it must have been a monster. 

Flying came at me faster. At seventeen, sitting on a Boeing headed for New York, I had my first (and only) panic attack. The floor was about to disappear from beneath me and stay gone for eight hours. And during those hours, what was to stop anything or anyone from ending my life? A v of fat-bodied geese wedged in both engines? An inexplicably drained fuel tank? A mad person getting out of their seat and opening the emergency door over the Atlantic, sucking us all out with them like dust particles? 

I spent those eight hours with my eyes squeezed shut, crying without making any noise. New York City hardly registered, acting as a waiting room for a far more significant experience: the inevitable flight home. For the next six years, I took a hefty dose of valium every time I got on an aircraft. I still thought I would die each time, but at least I’d be blissfully unaware of the impact.   

When I list off all my phobias, I sound like I’m reeling off channels on a television. You’ve got all your basics: arachnophobia, aviophobia, claustrophobia, heights… Flying and spiders are the only ones that have ever caused me real distress, but it does make me roll my eyes that my threshold to find things frightening is so pathetically low. Because, aside from laughing about my various interactions with spiders over the years (my brother has the same phobia, and we have literally climbed out of windows rather than walk by them on the stairs), pathetic is how it makes me feel. 

On dating apps and across the squeaky airport linoleum, I look at pilots like they’re gods. And they don’t need to be Captain Sully landing on the Hudson. They just need to fly one of 100,000 daily commercial flights safely from A to B, and my admiration and awe spiral. My friend Hannah once picked up a big hairy spider with her bare hand and chucked it casually out the window. I remember not being able to thank her enough, breathless at her bravery and chivalry.  

When you are a phobic person, you’re always at the mercy of being rescued. And when you’re the sort of person who also values independence and self-preservation, you end up living in tiresome opposition with these values.  

In the end, I got so bored with my fear of flying that I cured myself. I listened to hours of hypnosis and carried a book with me on flights that explained every noise and jiggle. Yesterday, I flew back from Palermo to London and fell asleep mid-flight. Ten years ago, I used to ache with envy at people who could sleep on planes. Now, after enough sun, wine and pasta, I am one. And in an unprecedented move this summer, I also managed to get rid of a big spider in my bedroom by (you’re allowed to laugh) taking out my contact lenses so I couldn’t see it as clearly. 

In the end, this mind is a mess of my own making. As a child and a teenager, I let it run away with itself, finding fear in corners most people wouldn’t even clock. But, as an adult, I’ve decided that it’s my responsibility to clean up the damage. I’m sure that for other people, it’s not as simple as choosing not to be frightened anymore. But I’d had enough of myself. I didn’t want to be scared shitless over something harmless. I wanted to see the world without the shadow of panic walking just behind me. Perhaps most importantly, I understood that no one was coming to do this work for me.

I am the pilot. The glass. The saviour.

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