Free I Can Barely Take Care of Myself by Jen Kirkman

and drag it back triumphantly to the cave.There is not enough legroom for that.
    After ten years of school-vacation trips to Disney World, at age sixteen I finally called it quits. And it wasn’t because I was too cool. I loved Disney World. By the time I was fourteen, I had started to wear all black to the Magic Kingdom and I posed with Mickey wearing a mean scowl, but I secretly wanted to be there while looking like I didn’t. I had tosurrender my annual trip to the most magical place on earth—or anywhere else that required flight—because my anxiety on airplanes had grown too severe. I couldn’t look forward to seeing a palm tree if it meant I had to survive a few hours of sheer terror to get to it.
    Not flying for a while didn’t cramp my high school life at all. I was happy just staying on the ground and being a teenager inthe suburbs of Massachusetts. I went to college in Boston. No planes needed. My goal was to become a famous world-traveling actress who lived on the West Coast. I figured I’d eventually just grow out of my fear of flying in the same way that I had grown out of thinking it looked really defiant to wear floral dresses with black knee-high combat boots.
    I sat out spending a semester abroad in Amsterdamduring my junior year of college simply because I was too afraid to cross the pond at thirty thousand feet. I watched classmates and friends pack up their backpacks. I stood with them as they convened in the dormitory lobby, waiting for the shuttle that would whisk them to the airport. They would board a plane without worrying about meeting an untimely death. And they would spend three monthsin Amsterdam living in a converted castle and studying things like Shakespearean Breath Control for Actors. I stayed behind with other nonadventurous people and we suffered through another New England winter, during which my greenskeeper dad would drive his sitting snowplow throughout the golf course and yell at the kids sledding, “Hey, there’s grass under there and you’re ruining it!”
    In retrospect,I’m okay with my decision to remain in Boston while some of my friends lived in the Netherlands. I’m glad I didn’t turn into my friend Shane. Shane and I had coffee upon his return and he lit up a marijuana cigarette in the middle of our local café. I grabbed his arm. “Are you crazy?” Shane looked at me, puzzled. “Dude, what?” I grabbed his joint and put it out. “Ohhhh. Yeah. It’s againstthe law. I forgot. Man, I’m just so used to being in a more culturally mature place like Amsterdam where pot is legal.”
    When I was twenty and living with my parents for the summer before my senior year of college, I decided that I couldn’t be afraid to go anywhere anymore. In case I didn’t naturally outgrow my fear, I didn’t want to be stuck in Boston for the rest of my life. So I joined a supportgroup at Boston’s Logan Airport in the Delta Airlinesterminal. The group was called—and I’m not joking—Logan’s Heroes. My fearless leader was Dr. Al Forgione, a clinical psychologist who in twelve weeks was going to rewire our brains so that we associated thoughts of flying with relaxation rather than catastrophe.
    Dr. Al handed me a small cup of orange juice and told me to take a seat anywhereat the conference table. At my chair I found a book and a collection of cassette tapes called Relaxation Exercises for Air Travel. Dr. Al said, “Flip through the book if you want, but don’t look at the pictures on page sixty-eight. You won’t be ready for that until week six.” I immediately disobeyed the doctor’s orders and turned to page 68, where I came face-to-face with a photo of a plane’scockpit. My heart went from zero to high blood pressure and I felt the classic prelude to a panic attack. I couldn’t even look at a picture of a plane? Shit. I didn’t know I had it that bad.
    At one point Dr. Al said to me, “What are you doing here? You’re too young to have any fears! These years