Quote:
Originally Posted by Jinn
I've felt far more unsafe riding in a car with female drivers than I ever have in a plane.
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Clearly, you've never ridden with me in the driver's seat.
(And no, that is not a euphemism, lol.) Driving is my passion, and I take great pride in being a damn good driver. There are few things that I feel as confident in as I do in my driving. Weird, eh? Especially considering the statistics--and yet, it's because I'm the one in control. It so affects me that when someone else is driving a car (where I am a passenger), I very often become nauseous after a short time. The nausea goes away immediately if I ask to drive the car for a while, since I'm back in control again.
I think that is the major fear behind the airplane thing. As I've grown up, I've realized more and more how totally out of control it is to fly around in a metal tube in the sky, trusting a couple of people up front (and faceless mechanics on the ground) with my life and the manner of my death. There was a time when I loved just trusting those people to get me from point A to point B... not much anymore.
At the same time, I would love to become a pilot myself and take flying lessons, because then it would put me in control. It is not necessarily a fear of the action itself--flying--but the fear of someone else fucking it up and ending my life as a result of doing something stupid and preventable. I never have the same fears about driving, even though it's far more likely.
As for confronting it: Well Jorge, I don't do anything to avoid flying. I keep right on buying the tickets, stepping onto planes, and doing what I have always done. Fear has almost never stopped me from doing anything--in fact, it usually pushes me to keep right on doing it, because I dislike irrationality and the fact that it might keep me from missing out on something for a stupid reason. So I do it anyway. But the anxiety is still there--and what bothers me isn't that I am afraid, but that I was not afraid for 25 years of flying, and it has become more of an issue in recent years. My anxiety level in general has increased in recent years, and I think it is probably all related, somehow.