I Can Barely Take Care of Myself, Jen Kirkman [the false prince txt] 📗

During takeoff my dad remained silent, fully focused and staring straight ahead, like he was trying not to get seasick on a boat. He gripped our shared armrest. He gritted his teeth and said over and over in a forced singsong, “Here we go! Here we go!” As the wheels left the ground, I realized that I was in the hands of two parents who were anything but grounded themselves. My dad was terrified of flying and the tour of the cockpit had been more to calm his white knuckles than mine. My dad clenched and my mom prayed. I was sandwiched in a chorus of “Here we go!” and “Hail Mary, full of grace . . .”

In that moment, I knew I was going to inherit this rosary-saying woman’s fear and this cockpit-touring man’s denial. It couldn’t be stopped. And the exotic people wearing blue eyeliner upstairs represented a fantasy world, an alternate universe in which I felt I should be living but that I knew was impossible. Later in life, my various therapists have called this sort of thing “conditioning.” My mom calls it “We weren’t that bad. You have such an imagination.”

From then on I could panic on airplanes even if the view was fantastic, even if there was no turbulence, even if the flight attendants were actually smiling that day, even if the pilot said, “This is God. I will be your pilot today and I swear to myself—we will not crash.” I could panic even sitting in first class, where they serve warm cookies and champagne. Distractions and logic do not help temper what my psychiatrist explains to me is just some overintense fight-or-flight response that is left over from my caveman DNA. I have nowhere to put my adrenaline on flights, since my inner caveperson cannot club the wild beast that is chasing her and drag it back triumphantly to the cave. There is not enough legroom for that.

After ten years of school-vacation trips to Disney World, at age sixteen I finally called it quits. And it wasn’t because I was too cool. I loved Disney World. By the time I was fourteen, I had started to wear all black to the Magic Kingdom and I posed with Mickey wearing a mean scowl, but I secretly wanted to be there while looking like I didn’t. I had to surrender my annual trip to the most magical place on earth—or anywhere else that required flight—because my anxiety on airplanes had grown too severe. I couldn’t look forward to seeing a palm tree if it meant I had to survive a few hours of sheer terror to get to it.

Not flying for a while didn’t cramp my high school life at all. I was happy just staying on the ground and being a teenager in the suburbs of Massachusetts. I went to college in Boston. No planes needed. My goal was to become a famous world-traveling actress who lived on the West Coast. I figured I’d eventually just grow out of my fear of flying in the same way that I had grown out of thinking it looked really defiant to wear floral dresses with black knee-high combat boots.

I sat out spending a semester abroad in Amsterdam during my junior year of college simply because I was too afraid to cross the pond at thirty thousand feet. I watched classmates and friends pack up their backpacks. I stood with them as they convened in the dormitory lobby, waiting for the shuttle that would whisk them to the airport. They would board a plane without worrying about meeting an untimely death. And they would spend three months in Amsterdam living in a converted castle and studying things like Shakespearean Breath Control for Actors. I stayed behind with other nonadventurous people and we suffered through another New England winter, during which my greenskeeper dad would drive his sitting snowplow throughout the golf course and yell at the kids sledding, “Hey, there’s grass under there and you’re ruining it!”

In retrospect, I’m okay with my decision to remain in Boston while some of my friends lived in the Netherlands. I’m glad I didn’t turn into my friend Shane. Shane and I had coffee upon his return and he lit up a marijuana cigarette in the middle of our local café. I grabbed his arm. “Are you crazy?” Shane looked at me, puzzled. “Dude, what?” I grabbed his joint and put it out. “Ohhhh. Yeah. It’s against the law. I forgot. Man, I’m just so used to being in a more culturally mature place like Amsterdam where pot is legal.”

When I was twenty and living with my parents for the summer before my senior year of college, I decided that I couldn’t be afraid to go anywhere anymore. In case I didn’t naturally outgrow my fear, I didn’t want to be stuck in Boston for the rest of my life. So I joined a support group at Boston’s Logan Airport in the Delta Airlines terminal. The group was called—and I’m not joking—Logan’s Heroes. My fearless leader was Dr. Al Forgione, a clinical psychologist who in twelve weeks was going to rewire our brains so that we associated thoughts of flying with relaxation rather than catastrophe.

Dr. Al handed me a small cup of orange juice and told me to take a seat anywhere at the conference table. At my chair I found a book and a collection of cassette tapes called Relaxation Exercises for Air Travel. Dr. Al said, “Flip through the book if you want, but don’t look at the pictures on page sixty-eight. You won’t be ready for that until week six.” I immediately disobeyed the doctor’s orders and turned to page 68, where I came face-to-face with a photo of a plane’s cockpit. My heart went from zero to high blood pressure and I felt the classic prelude to a panic attack. I couldn’t even look at a picture of a