Travel Anxiety

It has come to my attention that I've been saddled with having travel anxiety within my professional day job life. Which hurts on a few levels.

The first level being that I, in fact, did have an intense fear of flying up until my late 20s. I had flown on a family trip to California in first grade. On subsequent summer trips back and forth across the country, my truck driver father and capable mother opted to just drive it. This provided great experiences of national parks and interest points and wild landscapes that enriched my childhood.

After 9/11 happened, as a generally anxious teenager with an overactive imagination, I could not reconcile the threat of catastrophe with getting to far-flung places in an incredibly short amount of time.

Entering into adulthood with a move across the country, I was up against still being afraid of airplanes, having no disposable income, and being in a nightmare relationship with someone who made the prospect of leaving that person alone for a few days completely undoable.

When I worked at a birding magazine, I was casually offered a trip to Uganda by the editor. I didn't have a passport yet, though, and my worse half was having a health crisis with no one else to support him through it. Also, a trans-Atlantic flight to Africa sounded Really Scary.

Later, the opportunity arose to speak about marketing and eco-tourism in Belize. After much trepidation and tears on my part (as well as a relaxing agent slipped across a table toward me by my uncle), the magazine's owner and main figurehead agreed to go with me. At the time, unbeknownst to anyone, he was gradually beginning to die of pancreatic cancer. I'm both sorry and glad he joined me, even if he was incredibly disappointed in my inability to network while experiencing intense landsickness following the world's bumpiest boat ride to Laughing Bird Caye.

The first leg of the journey home was in a very small passenger plane from the south of the country back north, launching from a trailer-sized airport and literal air field. Each cloud felt like a boulder as we traced the coastline. The magazine owner and I fist-bumped when he saw the white wings of a king vulture above the jungle.

My fear of flying was essentially cured.

My travel log expanded to such exotic locales as Costa Rica, Florida, Texas, and Wisconsin while at that job. Each destination, I was either in the company of a more capable colleague, or greeted and shuttled by the entities that arranged my journalistic visits.

Which I think was completely necessary in retrospect, because of the following challenges I have and chalk up to my various flavors of neurodivergence:

• I cannot navigate my way out of a brown paper bag.
• I cannot drive in city traffic and high speed congestion.
• As much as I love systems in general, trying to understand new public transit systems while out of my element invariably results in tears and bad mistakes.
• I'm better at verbal communication than I've probably ever been, but dang if my foolish milquetoast American ears don't struggle with accents of any thickness.
• Being low support needs does not equate with having no support needs.
• Hell is other people in even the best-planned airports.

Fast forward two jobs and without going into too great of detail, and I was expected to travel to a major European city during a high tourism event that swells the population exponentially. My neurodivergence is known to and allegedly embraced the folks who had decided this, and the best support offered was joining up with another attendee traveling from elsewhere with her family. The past two years, I had been plagued by mobility issues stemming from the fact that the two-week course I was given for a tick bite with a bullseye did not save me from developing Lyme arthritis. I couldn't walk correctly for the entire month of July 2024 because one knee and then another and then the first kept swelling past the point of basic function. The flares were unpredictable in their timing and severity, and having one happen while alone abroad would have been devastating to my mental and physical health. Never mind safety and comfort (no way could I hold a swollen knee in a bent position or angled under a seat on a flight of any length). And, on top of all these considerations, I was also expected to be a professional adult and functioning human while running a conference and its associated, probably non-English tech (neither of which tasks had been mentioned in the job description, I might add).

None of this was doable. I couldn't convince myself it would be okay.

I boldly stated that I would instead support the conference remotely, from home, in the wee hours of the morning. Circadian rhythm interruptions are probably also not neurodiversity-friendly, but any hope of meaningful accommodation on this matter had gone out the window some time before. I stayed up, miserably working Zoom instances, for three days while other remote attendees made appearances, dipped back into slumber, then roused for the end. I would up getting sick within the week, and my Lyme arthritis flared to the point that I could not walk without a cane.

All of this now somehow equals travel anxiety.

Does it?

They sound like reasonable concerns to me and the people I've explained the situation to. Coming from the entities who have the most impact on my livelihood, it's a label that could have dire consequences. Which might be an anxiety in itself, albeit one that is incredibly well-founded in a late-stage capitalism hellscape.

Sigh.