I’ve always been anxious. When I was younger I was afraid of big things. What if I hated college, or people hated me? What if I ended up unemployed, got a divorce, was diagnosed with cancer? So many bad things were possible. I saw these things happening to others, and I saw them move on with their lives, but I never believed I had the moxie to be a “survivor.”

Eventually things I was afraid of happened, and I handled them. I now have more faith in my survival skills, and am no longer as afraid of major life events.

Unfortunately, anxiety must go somewhere, and I’ve developed an unusual list of fears. Things like severing a finger off while cooking and bleeding to death in my kitchen, or having my face bitten off by an angry dog, or cutting my foot off with a lawn mower, or riding in an elevator when the cable breaks. All feature in my nightmares.

Many of my fears are ridiculous, comprised of things that are so unlikely to happen that it’s laughable. But one of the more real fears I’ve developed is of flying. I’ve flown a lot, and long distances, but these days when on a plane, every noise, shudder, and bump leaves me sweaty and my breathing shallow, sure that the plane will immediately fall out of the sky.

My job requires me to travel, so I can’t just stay on the ground (as some have suggested).  Instead, I get on the plane and go. It’s become a model for how I want to deal with other fears as they arise – be afraid, but do it anyway. Don’t stop living life when life is scary. I wish I could say that the anticipation of fear is scarier than the thing I’m afraid of, but I can’t. I’m still terrified of flying, but at least I’m going somewhere.

Tanzi Merritt has made a career out of words. She spent several years working as an academic reference librarian and a community college library director, teaching students how to locate and evaluate information as well as to choose reading materials purely for pleasure. A career shift landed her in the position of sales and marketing coordinator for a technology consulting company, where she translates things written by software engineers into words that the non-developers of the world can understand. In her free time, she sits on a number of nonprofit boards, reads, knits, crafts, listens to (and sometimes makes) music, obsessively watches documentaries, buys art, and frequents lots of local restaurants and craft breweries.

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