The National Monument and myself pose for a picture together.
Maybe you don’t know me very well yet, and if you don’t, let me help you get to know me better. I am short. Like, really short. Not “little people” status, but only about half an inch away. I’m four feet, ten-and-a-half inches tall. See, God built me with a purpose: to be close to the ground.
Airplanes aren’t too conducive to my main goal of constantly staying in contact with ground. In fact, I’m terrified of them. Not of the airplanes themselves. Not even of terrorists so much (although my fear did spike after 9/11). No. I’m afraid of…falling.
Of being acutely aware of how much control I lack over my own body as I plunge thousands of feet to the ground at breakneck speeds, encapsulated in a hunk of metal that will surely crumple with the weight of this fall. The impact doesn’t freak me out nearly as much as the fall, though.
I’m not sure why. It doesn’t make much sense, does it?
I don’t like being unable to control my own surroundings. I don’t appreciate when others can’t control their own bodily functions. For example, a fellow classmate submits to a seizure. I leave the room, unable to witness another body completely and utterly helpless. And there we have it; the reason I will never, ever be a member of the medical profession. In a plane, I secede all control. *shudder*
So in order to avoid a fatal heart attack due to anxiety, I do a few things prior to a flight. I take Xanax. (Recently upped the doseage, yay!) I drink alcoholic beverages. I pray. And I practice breathing.
Today, I also read a book: “Lose Your Fear of Flying” by Sonoco. I have no clue who Sonoco is – when I Googled it, it came up as a company. Enjoy looking that up if you care enough – I don’t. The book was mediocre, but actually did help calm me down a bit about the impending flight. Barely 90 pages long – if even THAT – I read it in less than 30 minutes. It was a basic run-down of how the plane functions – in super simple laymen’s terms (which I really appreciated).
The noises heard during takeoff, flight, and landing were described in detail. How exactly the plane lifts off was mentioned. Short explanations (3 in total) describing why turbulence occurs were given. And then a short section on the landing.
This was all information that I’ve heard before – since I now have a friend in the Air Force who actually WORKS on planes and has been calming me down about my irrational fears for the past 12 days. But for some reason, reading it again honestly does make me feel better.
I did have to read the turbulence part over (x3), since that really does affect my state of relaxation (or paranoia) the most. I didn’t quite feel satisfied with the short explanations, but after doing a bit of extra research, I realized that longer explanations were unnecessary because turbulence really is a simple, run-of-the-mill thing to pilots and the flight crew.
I also read a blog by Shawna Redden, who was a passenger on Southwest Flight 812 (the plane that had an in-flight fuselage rupture, AKA a big hole) that made me feel incrementally better. Even with a plane that dropped 25,000 feet in only 4 minutes and that lost breathable oxygen…she survived with a smile. ☺ Check out her vantage point of the harrowing emergency landing:
http://thebluestmuse.blogspot.com/2011/04/southwest-flight-812-i-prefer-my-plane.html
Anyway…while I’m not exactly looking forward to the flight tomorrow (especially since I recently downloaded a Smithsonian App that has previews for its TV show about plane crashes)…I’m not panicking. …Yet.
And that’s the way the hippo heckles.
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