Harvard's Silent Manias

Before Spring Break, I honestly thought that I was going to die. Unlike my carefree, confident comrades who intrepidly planned to gallivant around the world for their vacations, I became obsessed with the idea that I was going to reach a fiery end somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic on my way to Europe. After a near-miss on a flight last year, I have developed a rather acute fear of flying.

Contrary to what you may assume, my fear has nothing to do with the recent terrorist attacks—in fact, I don’t really worry much about dying in a bomb blast at all. My insane brain prefers to question the mechanical integrity of the planes themselves. After my experience being on a plane that was swaying so much from side to side before landing that the pilot had to take off again to avoid a crash-landing, I began to doubt my innocent faith in air travel. Planes stopped seeming like marvelously secure and impressive human inventions and began looking more and more like deformed aluminum cans. How exactly do these hunks of junk stay safely six miles above ground for seven hours? Just how good are these so-called well-trained pilots? I figured that I had a 50/50 shot of surviving any particular flight.

Despite my fear, I decided to plan a vacation in Europe for Spring Break. The trip seemed so far away that I was safe. Slowly but surely, however, my unease about travel grew from an ominous flicker on the horizon when planning the trip to a tangible approaching reality. As the date of my imminent departure grew near, doubt gave way to panic attacks. The attacks would hit me at random times during the day, usually beginning with a heavy lurch of the stomach. Then came the short mental picture of the inside of a plane, oxygen masks down, plummeting to the ground while the plane gave its death rattle to the background of terrified screams. Infamous crash sites would pop up: a fireball consuming TWA Flight 800 to Paris that blew up midair; the smoldering ruins of the Concorde after a botched take-off; seeing the recent crash of the plane on the way to the Domincan Republic. All the while during this photo-montage, my brain would drone with the whispered line from that Alanis Morissette song—“isn’t it ironic” that the first-time flight of an aviophobe crashes.

These panic attacks lead me to frantic research. I quickly became aware of a community of aviophobes on the internet. Airline safety junkies abound on the web, debating the advantages of different types of airplanes, rating their safety and giving far too much information for the amateur paranoiac. For example, there are websites out there that track the number of fatal accidents for each airline and the dates these accidents occurred. Some a little farther off the deep end spend their time uncovering conspiracies between government agencies and airlines to trade money for safety. But many with my affliction count accidents, track statistics and try to beat the odds in the roulette wheel of flying.

You could chalk up my experience to the ravings of a lunatic; you could dismiss me as weak-willed or yellow-bellied. But I think that my irrational, obsessive fear of flying is intimately related to the qualities that got me into Harvard. My ability to concentrate, my independence, my highly-trained skepticism all contributed to an obsessive fear that got out of hand. Once the seeds of doubt were sowed, my mind voraciously seized on the question, analyzing every potential hazardous scenario, playing out the screaming voices in ever-more excruciating detail. The focus that is usually so helpful for excelling in classes quickly became debilitating as it latched onto a destructive tendency.

Yet as I silently suffered through the last few days before the execution, I managed to maintain my composed public persona. Which leads me to ask: How many of us are privately nursing our own manias?

It is often said that Harvard students are insane, and there is no doubt that the College is not the most nurturing place when it comes to mental health. Amidst the myriad pressures of life here, it is easy to lose one’s way. But as a population, I think that we are predisposed to instability—the same compulsive behaviors that allow us to excel in the classroom by blocking out distractions can be easily misdirected toward other areas of life. Getting into Harvard is a mentally scarring process. Some of us are just better at hiding it than others.

You may not always be aware of it, but your friend who is diligently editing his paper for the fifth time may also be hiding a compulsively clean room. The nice girl next door who is a member of every club listed in the Unofficial Guide may stay up all night haunted by the idea that she is a failure. The socialite who smiles at everyone and always seems happy may be secretly sure that everyone is turning against him. It’s all a matter of degree and disguise. So, what’s your poison?

Robert J. Fenster ’02 is a biology concentrator in Eliot House. His column appears on alternate Thursdays.