Tonight’s cover photo is actual footage of me peacing out from all the insanity of the last month (or many years, depending on how you look at it).

Just kidding. I think.

My husband is on the second leg of his flight to his usual yearly winter work trip, and gets back this weekend. He has an additional multi-day work trip next week, leaving like a day and a half after he gets back from the first one. He has similar travel for work mapped out for early spring, another usual yearly part of his job. To add to this, my in-laws also flew to Florida today to visit family for about a week.

And there have been more plane crashes in the last few weeks than we’ve seen in years. The FAA is in shambles. I haven’t felt so anxious about the idea of loved ones flying since the first few months after 9/11, and to be frank, I didn’t even know anyone back then who would find themselves on airplanes anyway. By the time I took my first post-9/11 flight at age 15, in 2004 or so, everything had become obsessively secure. I have been on flights since then and have not once felt the fear I feel now about being on planes (whether it’s me on them or others). Fear of flying is a legitimate problem for plenty of people. A lot of the time, people don’t trust the science of it. I generally love flying, but my problem at the moment is that I don’t trust the people in it. Or, rather, I don’t trust the people in power cutting way back on what’s needed in order for us to all be sure everything is safe.

So anyway, my husband left this morning for his work trip, and in doing so, it feels like he both took part of me with him (which is how it always feels), but also put my heart in my mouth. He’s supposed to get to his final destination in the wee hours of the morning my time, and I don’t know if I will manage to sleep before hearing he is safe and sound.

My therapist likes to remind me that grief begets grief, trauma begets trauma, pain begets pain. If I am feeling something about a specific instance, my body and mind remember other instances I’ve felt that way, and decide to underscore that feeling for me, ten thousand fucking times. So what I’m feeling isn’t just anxiety and angst over my husband being on an airplane and not being with me and my inability to know whether he’s safe and sound. It’s also feeling the anxiety and angst that my fellow Jewish people and I have been experiencing for over 500 days, in our grief and pain and hope against hope that the hostages taken brutally by Hamas terrorists on October 7th, 2023, will someday soon come home. I’ve been asking myself how to handle my anxiety about my husband being on planes, and it boils down to the same question I’ve been asking myself about the hostages for over 500 days.

How do I carry that?

If anyone has any answers out there, please do share them, because I genuinely don’t know anymore.