THE THIEF OF WINGS

Terror. From the inside. My entire being held captive by an invisible enemy. Unseeable fingers clenching my throat, making it difficult to breathe. Heart pounding, dizzy, cold sweat, chest tight. I contemplated boarding the plane at Chicago O’Hare. The plane that would take myself and my daughter to a place I’d dreamed of since I was a small child: England. But I knew I couldn’t do it. I also knew by now, age 52, the difference between a heart attack and a panic attack, but my brain somehow did not and it kept telling me “You’re going to die. You need to lay down. Your blood pressure is dangerously high. You are going to collapse.” The boarding desk was off kilter, the people hurrying around me were buzzing like colorful high-speed ghosts. Then the nausea came. 20 minutes until boarding time. Should I call for medical help? No, I’ve been through this a thousand horrible times. But what if I’m wrong this time? Something seems WRONG. I am not well.

My daughter looked at me and knew. She reached over and grabbed my clammy hand with her delicate fingers. Her hand felt cool. A piece of reality. Comfort. Understanding. “You’re okay.” She said. “No...I’m not okay.” I replied. But I could not tell her that I couldn’t do it. I could not board that plane. We would not see London, or Stonehenge, or Castles. We would not realize the dream we had saved up three years for. How could I tell her? A lump formed in my throat. A sorrow.

We had made it from Portland, Oregon to Chicago O’Hare the night before, planning to catch a connecting flight but we were both exhausted and anxious. She had never flown in her 23 years, and I hadn’t been in a plane since a decade before when I was seated and headed for Dallas Texas but became so intensely anxious that I bailed off that plane just before takeoff. So we stayed the night in Chicago in favor of catching a plane the next day. This day. This plane. 

The monster that is anxiety. Inherited from both of my parents, and passed on to two of my three children. Most of my life it didn’t even have a name. Most of my life it was as terrifying and humiliating to talk about as it was to suffer with it. Mine had grown so severe at one point that I was house-bound for nearly a year. “Agoraphobia” I remember the psychiatrist saying. And I laughed. How could that even be possible? I’m educated, intelligent, hard-working, outgoing, and friendly, and I love to explore places. Or, at least I did. Until I couldn’t. My world had grown smaller and smaller, with the borders of my anxiety moving closer and closer, like a black and suffocating fog bank on all sides of me. Eventually, going anywhere brought on intense panic. The monster didn’t care if I was any of those things, or all of them. A friend at the time said “I’m afraid you’ll be one of those people who is trapped...house-bound, forever.” No. No. I would fight it with everything I had.

Resources were scarce back then, in the late 90's. But I managed to find some. And I worked at recovery. I took frightening chances and stretched the borders of my comfort until I could stretch no more. I refused to be a victim of anything. I would not be prey to the monster. I would not let this evil win and take my life away. I refused to be held hostage in my home by this inexplicable and diabolical force called “Anxiety.”

I knew the best way to defeat any enemy was to learn everything you could about it. Be familiar with your adversary. Understand it. Sit with it. So I did all of that. I am still grateful to the doctor who told me “It’s not actually all in your head. It’s very physiological. It’s very much ‘all in your body’.” He understood. My fairly long list of phobias included medications of any kind. So I did my best to avoid that, but I also was not willing to lose this battle if it came to that. In the end, it was a combination of an anxiety work book, a very low dose of Zoloft for a short time, and unyielding resolve that pulled me through.

A decade later, I still had a handful of phobias but I managed to power through them. I had returned to a life of working full time, teaching at our local college, going on road trips, enjoying everything I had before, and more. Then my best friend died suddenly at the age of fifty. She was a hospice nurse and we both always talked about all the great places we would go when we retired. Patty. My touchstone. She was the funniest person I’ve ever known, and she also suffered with anxiety.

Patty went to Vegas the year before she died and called me from her hotel room. “For (bleep’s) sake. I’m suppose to be having the time of my life, finally off work for more than a day, and there we are, walking across some completely unnecessarily high sky-walk thing when it’s like all the drinks hit me at once. Except I hadn’t started drinking. And then I froze. The husband thought I was being funny because we had visited the wax museum...so he starts shoving at me, you know, nicely. I guess trying to un-freeze me. Our group went ahead. I swear I stopped breathing. Entirely. I think so anyway. I was waiting for the husband to do CPR. Thank God I married a paramedic. Realized it was panic. What am I gonna do? Get back out there as soon as I stop shaking. I didn’t come this far to sit in the hotel.”

And I didn’t come this far to sit in the airport. “We could go to Nebraska instead” I offered feebly to my daughter through the lips that anxiety had turned to sandpaper. My tongue stuck clumsily to the roof of my mouth. I could see the planes, like matchbox toys all lined up on the tarmac but it was like looking through a telescope. This monster, it really messes with your head, as well as being “all in your body.” My daughter stroked my hand. “It doesn’t matter what we do, mom. Or where we go. I’m going to wander across the hall for 10 minutes and you decide. And whatever you decide is what we will do because this is a BIG trip, you know? Maybe too big? We’ve never left the country. We don’t know what we’re doing. Maybe we kind of planned too much?”

I couldn’t think straight, but I COULD think. And I’d had anxiety for so long that I understood its implications. Such as bailing off a five hour flight to Dallas and having to drive for three days instead. A dark cloud of utter defeat along for every mile of that drive. Things like that. So I viewed this situation through the lens of reality. We fly to Nebraska. We rent a car. We have no real plan, it’s just that my mother was born there and I thought I might like to see it. Who really wants to see Nebraska unless their mother was born there? So there we are...in my thoughts...in Nebraska in some hotel room, taking two full days on the phone to cancel every single reservation we had so carefully made for the past year. I am depressed and defeated in Nebraska. My daughter is my “support person" but she has just given up her dream trip. Then we go home. Without the memories that we both had been daydreaming about for many months. And with whatever explanation might seem appropriate to friends, family and co-workers. Maybe the truth. Then the pity with that. Then...the entire rest of my life...framed in “I almost went to England once...”

My daughter returned and sat down next to me. She reached for my hand as I sat staring out the freakish telescope of my anxiety. “Hey mom. The plane boards in five minutes. Just wanted you to know.” I nodded. “I can’t do it.” I said. She rubbed my hand. “It’s okay. I know.”

I looked at her. “I can’t NOT board this plane” I said.

Her eyes opened wide. “We’re not going to Nebraska?” she asked me. I shook my head. “Would Patty go to Nebraska? No, she would not. Not even if her mother was born there. But that’s not the thing...the thing that made the decision. And I don’t feel less anxious either. I just know I cannot spend the rest of my life saying “I almost went to England once.” And with that, I grabbed my bags and joined the line at the boarding gate. I had to stand against the wall, and my heart was beating out of my chest and I felt clammy and my head swam. I even knew I might die right there, but at least I would have died trying. On board, and out of my mind with anxiety, I curled up with an airsick bag clutched in one hand, and my daughters hand in the other. She rolled up inside her oversized sweater and we put our heads together and breathed in unison. Anxious mother and child.

Halfway across the Atlantic we took a selfie and captioned it “No going back now.”

Our anxiety fled into the Bermuda triangle or something. We came out of our oversized hoods and retired the barf bags, which we hadn’t needed anyway. We got lost in the wonder of the clouds at sunrise over London. We found ribbons tied to holly bushes in the English Lanes. We marveled over the magic and the mysteries of life at Stonehenge. We scaled the spiral staircases of castles from Kent to Wales and beyond. We stood in the Ashdown forest with the wind in our hair and my daughter, from atop a stump, with arms open wide and her face to the sun said...”How could anything be so deeply and profoundly beautiful if it hadn’t once been lost?”

That was one of the happiest moments of my life. 

If you struggle, don’t give up. Life is never sweeter than when it is given back.