The Sky Doesn't Want Me

The Sky Doesn't Want Me

I can still taste the metal in my mouth when I think about flying. It's not rational—I know this. I've swallowed every statistic, memorized the safety records, repeated the mantras like prayers. But the body remembers what the mind tries to forget, and my body remembers everything.

People don't understand. They tell me it's safer than driving, safer than crossing the street, safer than the goddamn bathtub I stand in every morning. One in ten million, they say, as if numbers ever stopped a heart from racing. As if probability could calm the animal panic that floods my veins when I imagine stepping into that narrow tube of pressurized air, thousands of feet above the earth where I belong.

The irony claws at me—I grew up in the sky. Every weekend, my father's small plane cutting through clouds like it was nothing. The hum of the engine was my lullaby. I wasn't afraid then. I was fearless in that cockpit, a child who believed in invincibility because I hadn't yet learned that the world could take everything away in an instant.

But then came the day that changed me. I was young—too young to understand, old enough to remember. The commercial flight, the engines screaming, the sudden abort that threw us all forward in our seats. In that moment, I felt nothing. No fear. Just confusion. It was only later, when I saw it on the news, when I heard the adults whispering with that particular gravity reserved for near misses, that the fear crept in like poison.

That's when I realized: I could die. Not someday, not eventually—but now. Today. Tomorrow. In the hands of strangers who don't know my name, don't care that I have people waiting for me on the ground, don't understand that I need to be in control because the alternative is drowning in the terrible uncertainty of it all.

I'm a control freak. I own that now. And flying is the ultimate surrender of control—strapping yourself into someone else's machine, trusting someone else's training, betting your entire existence on systems you can't see or understand. It's madness. And yet millions of people do it every day without a second thought.

So I'm fighting back. Not heroically—I'm not conquering anything. I'm crawling, inch by miserable inch, trying to reclaim something I lost without noticing.

I started small. A desktop wallpaper—the interior of a Boeing 737, the perspective from a passenger seat looking toward the cockpit. Every time I opened my laptop, there it was. My pulse would spike. My breathing would shallow. I'd feel the walls closing in even though I was sitting in my own room, safe on solid ground. But I kept it there. Day after day. Until my nervous system finally admitted defeat and stopped treating the image like a threat.

Then came the videos. Hours of them. Takeoffs and landings filmed from window seats, the wing flexing under pressure, engines roaring like beasts, the ground dropping away or rushing up to meet the wheels. I'd sit in my recliner with headphones on, immersing myself in the sensory assault, forcing my brain to normalize what it wanted to categorize as danger. Exposure therapy, they call it. I call it self-inflicted torture that might, might, save me someday.

I devoured every resource I could find. Online courses for fearful flyers. Books with reassuring titles that promised freedom from this prison I'd built for myself. I read them obsessively, highlighting passages, taking notes, treating them like sacred texts that might contain the magic words to break this curse.

And I avoid the news like it's contagious. The media loves a plane crash—loves the drama, the horror, the spectacular devastation of it. They play the footage on loop because it's so rare, which means they have to milk every second of terror when it happens. I know what they're doing. I refuse to let them hijack my progress with their sensationalized trauma porn.

The statistics still don't help, even though I've memorized them. One in four hundred thousand. One in ten million. It doesn't matter when you're sealed inside that metal cylinder with no escape route, no emergency exit that leads to the ground right now, no way to stop the process once it starts. You're committed. You're trapped. You're powerless.

I know I need help. Real help. The kind that comes with a degree and an office and weekly appointments. But I'm trying. Each flight—when I force myself to take one—is a battle I hope to lose a little less decisively than the last.

I'm not cured. I'm not even close. But I'm here, still fighting, still trying to remember what it felt like to be that fearless child in my father's plane, when the sky felt like home instead of a graveyard.

Maybe one day I'll get there again. Or maybe I'll just learn to tolerate this terror long enough to see the people I love, to take the trips I dream about, to live the life I want instead of the smaller, safer one my fear keeps trying to build around me.

For now, I'm just trying to breathe. And sometimes, that's enough.