Biggest Fear

What is your biggest fear? The mind-numbing, life-altering scenario that totally screws up your world and leaves you feeling paralyzed?

Some writer friends of mine were having a discussion tonight at dinner about a recent writing exercise they underwent; each wrote their biggest fear down on a piece of paper, which was then passed to a random person, who then had to write out a description of the effects of that fear - from the perspective of the person that fear originated from. Make sense?

My chosen fear would have been "dying in a plane crash." This wasn't always the case... my childhood involved annual transatlantic flights in summer, and I don't remember being afraid... just cranky, exhausted, and vomity. Every.single.time. But anxiety really reared its ugly head at me for the first time on a flight, perhaps two years ago. Suddenly I couldn't handle the lack of control - lost all capacity to reassure myself that everything would be all right. It would rush at me, all at once; the loss of pressure, the disappearance of contact with the ground, and that I was, in fact, strapped in to the guts of a man-made machine hurtling straight at the heavens, with nothing I could do about it.

It makes me think of the opening scene, or one of the opening scenes, in Garden State - where Zach Braff sits in a medically induced coma, zombie stare straight ahead, as the people around him react normally to a midair emergency, oxygen masks bouncing through the house of horrors.

For the most part, that's how I react outwardly when I'm afraid on a flight. It's only if you look at my whitened knuckles, peer inside my mouth at my clenching and unclenching jaw, that you realize that I am in the middle of a massive panic attack... attempting all the while to follow the breathing exercises everybody suggests. They don't do shit. You know what surefire method gets results? STOPPING THE GODDAMN TURBULENCE. I know, I know, turbulence doesn't cause crashes. But I get to read every week about some poor fucker who went to the plane bathroom at the wrong time, the turbulence hits, and whammo, dude flies up at the ceiling and will never walk again.

When I was a kid I used to have nightmares that consisted of all of my relatives dying in a plane crash, but that's different - the fear there was losing the people I loved. This is a fear of the physical... the lack of control. If I had the cash, I'd definitely take flying lessons, if only to understand what was happening up in the air. I've heard that helps. What's your greatest fear?