Thrive is a space where I write honestly about navigating life with full presence — the joy, the grief, the beauty, and the fury. It’s about refusing to shrink, refusing to be silenced, and insisting on a life that is rich and real even when the world is doing its level best to make that hard. Especially then...
I didn’t notice it was gone until I was somewhere it used to live.
Somewhere over the Atlantic, high above open water on our plane to San Juan, you have plenty of time to look down — I realized I was just… looking out past Dan through the window wondering if that island was Nassau or something. I was not white-knuckling the armrest. Not running calculations about worst-case scenarios. Not quietly cataloging my exits or reminding myself to breathe. I was just sitting there, watching the water, probably thinking about where we were eating next.
And for a moment I thought: wait. Where did the dread go?
Because it used to be everywhere.
After a very bad landing at Reagan airport (incredibly high winds we shouldn’t have tried to land in) flying, for years after that, was an exercise in controlled dissociation. I would board a plane like I was walking into something I had agreed to survive, not enjoy. The moment the wheels left the ground, something in my nervous system would issue a full-scale red alert. Not a casual flutter of nerves — I mean the kind of anxiety that makes your vision narrow and your hands go cold and your brain start offering you extremely unhelpful statistics about altitude and how fast planes fly.
Old girlfriend: “Randy, that’s just silly. Plus, look at it this way, if the plane goes down, you will be in heaven and get to see Jesus!”
Me: “I’m not afraid of the afterlife. It’s all the screaming while on fire and plummeting 35,000 feet at 500 MPH. I don’t want to show up in heaven having shit my pants and in a million different charred pieces.”
We didn’t date much after that conversation.
While on my first cruise, our honeymoon cruise, being over open water was worse in some ways, because it was slower. The ocean doesn’t just happen to you — it sits there, vast and indifferent, waiting. I was on a ship in beautiful weather with people I loved, and some part of me would be underwater already, doing the grim math about how far away from the ship we would need to be to not be dragged down with it as it sank. What if something went wrong? Why does the captain think it is cool/fun information that we are over water that is 16,000 feet deep? What if Dan somehow didn’t make it to the life boats? Dude can’t swim! What if the engine stopped? What if — and this was always the throughline — what if I couldn’t do anything about it?
That was the thing, really. That was always the thing.
Sidenote: about halfway through the second day on the ship I fell in love with cruising and ignored my ever present dread.
It wasn’t about planes or water or ocean depth specifically. It was about helplessness. About being in a situation where the worst could happen and I would have no way to stop it, fix it, or protect the people I loved. That terror is a PTSD signature I’ve carried since long before I had language for it. The brain that learned early that danger arrives without warning and sometimes there’s nothing you can do — that brain does not love flying at 35,000 feet. It does not love being three, (or hundreds) miles from shore; a teeny tiny dot in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico.
I’ve been doing the work on living with PTSD for twenty years (when I was diagnosed). Real work — the kind that involves a good (real) therapist, specific skills, specific practices, the whole unglamorous toolkit of trauma recovery. Grounding techniques. Cognitive restructuring. Learning to interrupt the spiral before it becomes a vortex. Learning to locate myself in my body instead of in the catastrophe my brain was already narrating. None of it was a cure. All of it was useful. And for a long time, “useful” meant: I could get on the plane. I could cross the bridge. I could take the boat. I could do the thing — I just couldn’t quite be there while I was doing it.
Something has shifted.
I don’t know exactly when it happened. I suspect it wasn’t one moment but a thousand small moments I didn’t notice adding up. The work, compounding quietly over years, the way good investments do. And I think — I know — it has something to do with Dan, our daughter, a job I love and celebrate.
There is something about having a family — your own, chosen, real — that recalibrates the math of fear. The old terror was rooted in a kind of isolation brought about by my thinking I was “called to celibacy” and would never be a part of a healthy life-giving family. That I am the only one whose going to be there for me. I have to be vigilant because no one else will be. I have to hold everything together because if I don’t, it falls. That is the math of a child who learned too early that adults were not reliably safe, that security was not guaranteed, that love could disappear.
But I am not that child anymore (I turn 58 next month). And I am, for the past ten years of my life, not alone.
When I’m sitting next to Dan on a plane, something in my nervous system does a different calculation. It doesn’t spiral into what if we crash? The plane is the plane and we’re together. The worst thing I used to fear wasn’t death, really — it was helplessness, and the specific horror of helplessness is its isolation. But when you’re with someone who loves you and whom you love back with your whole heart, helplessness stops being the same thing. It becomes we are in this together, and somehow that’s a completely different emotional country.
I watched the ocean from the deck of that cruise ship and felt nothing but wonder. On our way home, I crossed a very dreaded bridge without remembering that it goes over a lake that is rumored to have the most alligators in all of Florida in it. I sat on a plane and drew on my iPad with barely noticing when we hit the normal turbulence all plane rides go through, which, if you knew me ten years ago, you would understand is genuinely miraculous.
I don’t want to make it sound clean, because healing is never clean. The work isn’t done — it doesn’t get done, exactly, it just becomes more integrated, less effortful. There will probably be other moments, other contexts, where the old fear surges up and I have to find my feet again. That’s how it goes. I’m not cured of having a past.
But I was present on this trip in a way I haven’t always been able to be. Not managing my fear — actually present. Actually there, in the water, in the air, on the bridge, in my life.
Twenty years of work. One good marriage. And the slow, quiet grace of a nervous system that finally, finally started to believe it was safe.
That’s not nothing. That’s everything.
If any of this resonates and you’re doing your own work around trauma and anxiety, know that the slow road is still a road. Twenty years isn’t a long time to heal — it’s the right amount of time for me to heal. You’re not behind. You’re right on time.
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