Capacity building

I recently travelled to Egypt for a diving holiday.  Seems such a straightforward and harmless statement doesn't it?  I went on holiday - just popped onto a plane and got off in another country, got my transfer to the accommodation and Bob's your uncle!

Here's how my experience really went:

We piled into the car at 4.30pm on Good Friday and took to the road.  Apparently, the rest of the UK did, too.  Even though I wasn't driving, the ensuing 2 hours, 45 minutes of motorway driving left me exhausted:  The driving conditions were poor, with rain, darkening skies and roadworks and breakdowns everywhere.  When travelling at speed, I find the rate of visual input completely overwhelming, but I am also plagued with anxiety which furnishes me with constant, detailed and realistic visualisations of potential incident after potential incident.  The truly exhausting part was having to hide all this from my son, so that he wasn't affected by my anxiety.

Fortunately, I have had plenty of experience of staying in hotels (required in several of my previous jobs) so I am not as affected by strange accommodation as I might be.  The grossly decorated lobby with its alarmingly squishy carpet was airy and open plan, so I was able to relax somewhat - only the constant visualisations of horrific plane crashes from the neighbouring Gatwick Airport to concern myself with...

An early morning rise for check-in saw the return of my favourite coping mechanism:  Panic humour. Being hyper aware with anxiety means excellent comic timing, and there was a wealth of material in peoples' reaction to the ludicrous management and staffing in the check-in queues...  A welcome distraction from the looming flight.  By the time we entered the departures lounge and it's wealth of noisy, smelly, crowded food outlets, I was exhausted and staring at the joins in the flooring materials whenever possible.  Still aware of the importance of 'staying positive', I kept up the cheery exterior and focused on my son, who was taking everything in his stride, considering it was his first trip abroad... only my husband was aware of my mounting anxiety.

The bus journey to the plane seemed to take forever - showing every possible angle of the plane that was to be our transport to Egypt.  I forced myself to endure it, inwardly chanting things like "no, the rivets are supposed to look like that", "don't look at the engines" and "you don't know anything about what well-maintained landing gear looks like", and trying to remember air travel versus air accident statistics to put my mind at rest.  This self calming continued on board - "they look competent".  "At least the pilot seems mature"...  The facade nearly slipped when my son insisted I sit next to him in full view of the tiny window for the 5 hour journey.  A matter of minutes later, I found myself in the ridiculous position of 'whooping' for my son's benefit at the excitement of the take off, whilst simultaneously crushing my husband's hand in terror!

As soon as we were allowed, I got out my chosen book and put on my mp3 player at top volume, determined to distract myself from anything that might remind me that I was in a plane.  Sadly, my book choice could have better, beginning as it did, with an explosion at an airport...  Luckily, my son's tablet battery lasted almost the entire flight, so I didn't have to keep up the facade for him, but my husband's hand suffered every time there was a little turbulence...

The next five hours are, thankfully, already fading from my memory - a nauseating cycle of anxiety, trolley avoidance, speculation and visual scenarios until our imminent arrival at Hurghada was announced. Any relief was short lived as figures for the statistical likelihood of failures on landing began whizzing though my head, despite my understanding of the overall safety of air travel.  After a bit of waiting around, security checks and baggage collecting, we made our way to the exit to meet our transfer. I was practically a zombie by now, all my coping mechanisms exhausted, so the hour and a half break-neck drive to our destination (with no seat belts and a tendency for our alarmingly young driver to drive at on-coming vehicles even when blinded by their full beams) passed relatively quickly.

I did not sleep for the next 3 nights.  This seems to be as a result of the anxiety of this type of travel - I usually just crash after too much social interaction - sleeping for longer than usual, but foreign travel requires another magnitude of effort.

The journey back was somewhat less stressful, buoyed as I was, by having survived the journey there!   Why put myself through it?  Well this isn't simply a fear of travelling...  I know it will improve, as everything does, with familiarity - my capacity for dealing with travel will improve.  It is only now that my son is old enough to have qualified as a diver that we can all go together.  I am immensely pleased to be a diver and able to see the amazing sights under the Red Sea, as the memories generated by the holiday in between these terrifying episodes have to be amazing to justify the effort!