I’m currently sat at the airport, waiting by gate 9. Our flight has been affected by the snowstorm that has been hovering over Europe since the year began. Western winds continue to pick up and the videos that took over my For You page of passengers stranded in Amsterdam are no longer news.

I look through my purse and try to pick the perfect book. Grief, war, fear of flying. None of those themes will do. Not now, anyways. I will look for the darkest topics as I scroll on Reddit, and look for documentaries once I am comfortably in bed. Now, however, I need rose-tinted glasses. I decide to buy one, something to heighten the spirits and lower the panic that struck when I first woke up and remembered “the flight is tonight.”

No hagas montañas de granos de arena by Rafael Santandreu. Don’t make mountains out of sand grains. If there’s any commonality between everyone I have met, it is that sentence. I have been advised to relax plenty, and that is always the last word. Predominantly because I do not have much to say in response. They are right, and I am right, and “end of discussion.”

I used to be one of those people that refused to read self-help books. The principle argument took turns between the fact that it could not truly be considered reading, and I did not want to look at my personality as a textbook case study. With age, and with growing fears, I have realised that to be untrue. Santandreu released a book titled Sin Miedo, (Without Fear) years before I decided I might need it. Two years after the fear of flying, trains, cars and metros took over my time. My step tracker hit many records during that time frame. Reading his work and the multitude of testimonies, all from people who had it worse than me, helped. 

Exposure. That is all that he revisited. Every chapter began with a patient’s phobia, and it ended with exposure as the solution. Some had fears of choking and would sit in his office as he waited for them to eat a banana. Some were afraid of leaving their home and were tasked with daily walks around the corner. As long as they kept getting further, having to turn around and return did not matter. Some took years to overcome their fears. Others never did. And none of them stayed at home due to the sense of control that avoidance granted. That was all I wanted. 

“You have to be so tired of living this way, that the worst outcome you have planned in your head still beats a life without living” 

I found that to be outrageous. How could I face death in the name of living? That can never work, I thought. The entire basis of my fears were to avoid death, and I did not want to understand how facing the possibility allowed me to live fully. As soon as I trusted that he understood the underlying fear, I trusted his advice.

I had to face the worst-case scenario in my mind to realise that the worst guaranteed outcome, was continuing to live that way.

I am still sitting by gate 9. My flight has been delayed 3 hours. And I can’t wait to get on that flight. That, and pitching three stories to respected magazines are the only things I’ll remember from the beginning of the year. And it is entirely because fear is the only fear that brings me this close to feeling fully alive. I grasp on to life, as my senses pick up on everything they were developed for. The alertness of my body as my back tenses is the only way that I can feel complete and utter peace when they relax. That relief could never happen without its contrast. I crave the fulfilment that only doing something my brain cannot imagine can grant. They really were right, the only way to get over it and through it.

“What you fail to realise is that there is a whole way of living, and it’s just around the corner. You just don’t know it because you haven’t turned the corner yet. And I’m waiting for you there.” 

I wrote that quote down and placed it in my wallet, protected by the plastic pocket. I have since changed wallets three times. Funny how I thought that I would always need to carry that.