You’re. Safe.
Two words.
Two words that I once repeated like a mantra, just to get out of bed.
Two words that I learned as a child to be anything but the truth.
Two words that I clung to, in the hopes that one day they would feel true.

When you’re a little kid, your nervous system develops as you do.
You learn early on what is considered safe and what is considered by our subconscious as “danger”.

Your nervous system constantly scans what’s happening both inside your body
and around you, and then it decides how to respond.
Your nervous system decides if you should relax or be on high alert.
It decides if you should slow down or speed up.
It decides if a situation is safe or threatening.
The nervous system is constantly scanning for danger or threats, and it is very good at its job.
Sometimes a little too good…

The nervous system has two modes essentially.
“Fight or flight mode” which exists in our sympathetic nervous system,
and “rest and digest mode” which exists in our parasympathetic nervous system.

But what does it mean for you when your nervous system is stuck in fight or flight mode, all the time?
What happens if your body is constantly being told that there’s danger when there isn’t?

If your nervous system is in constant fight or flight, you are not operating yourself, you are on autopilot, and you will essentially just be along for the ride.

I look at this the same way as landing an airplane.
If you aren’t active and dynamic with your control inputs, the wind is going to take you for a ride.
If you don’t counteract crosswinds and you let the plane fly you, the chances of a successful landing are slim to none.

I began to look at my life this way and I realized I had been on autopilot for 33.5 years.
That was eye-opening.

After this mind-blowing realization, I asked myself some hard questions.
Why have I been on autopilot?
When did I learn to live in fight or flight mode?
Why did it take me a third of my life to realize this was happening?

I went into a grounding meditation to search for the answers.

To no surprise, turns out I learned that fight or flight mode was ‘normal’ when I was barely old enough to be able to hear and decipher tones of voice.

By the time I was walking and somewhat talking, I knew how to read a room.
If my mom had a certain look on her face, it was bad.
If my dad did or said something she didn’t like, bad.
If she was watching a show and I made a noise, bad.
If I was in my crib crying out and she was too tired, bad.
If the sound of my parents yelling made me cry, they’d start blaming each other for making me cry instead of looking at me, a helpless scared child, and saying “hey, she’s scared, let’s table this and come back to it when our baby isn’t here listening to it all.”
They did their best considering they were kids at the time too, but I realized that I was very much affected by all of that subconsciously.

The fact that I can vividly remember these little blips in time tells me that the emotions associated with them stuck into my nervous system and I have been carrying them ever since.

I zoomed out and looked at the big picture of my entire life.
As an adult where I could finally make my own choices and let people in and out as I saw fit,
I was still choosing the worst ones for me.
People who were constantly disappointing me, betraying me, and disrespecting me.
I was choosing partners and friends who were essentially keeping me in that fight or flight mode.
Programmed as my “normal” all these years.

I would always ask myself and wonder why people treated me this way.
At the time, I assumed I just sucked at choosing the right people.
The truth was that I didn’t trust myself, and I was just along for the ride.

Even though my sympathetic nervous system was just out here doing its job,
it had no way of sorting out real danger from perceived danger,
because in my mind, there was no difference.
Danger was danger and it was all around.
I trusted everyone else around me to make decisions on my behalf.
I never stood up and said “No, I want this instead.”

Unfortunately this led to many tumultuous events throughout my life.
Walking around constantly on edge is exhausting and depressing, plus it attracts people who will prey upon that weakness and lack of trust in yourself. (100% can confirm)
I knew there was a lot of healing to be done, but being in multiple toxic situations made it nearly impossible.

I felt so unsafe in my own head back then, I decided to do something that literally forced me out of it.
Enter stage left: Aviation.
I’ve probably spent upwards of 60k on my flying lessons to this day, however,
I’d say about 20k of that was me crawling out of my own hell.
I was not retaining anything useful, just flying.
My nervous system was all out of wack at that time.
I had overwhelming anxiety, trauma, and fear, (unrelated to flying) but feelings nonetheless.
Those feelings were perceived by my nervous system as danger.
This caused me to not trust myself while flying, at all.
Then there was the actual danger of flying an airplane without having any prior knowledge whatsoever.
What if I stall? What if I spin? What if my engine quits? Will I just be a statistic? Can I really do this?

When I first started flying, all I felt was danger.
If I’m being 100% honest, I didn’t think I’d get to a point of soloing the airplane, ever.
I just needed the outlet back then.
I needed to force myself to be so ridiculously scared and uncomfy, that I felt less scared and uncomfy later on when I was at home getting screamed at by my abusive toxic ex.

As I learned more about my airplanes systems, what the forces are that keep us flying, all the ins and outs,
the perceived danger became easier to differentiate between the actual danger.

No one knew it at the time, but my flight lessons were quietly saving my life.
During this era, I decided to scrap my old reality and draw up an entirely new one.
Brick by brick, hour by hour, I rebuilt.
Each milestone with flight was a nod from the universe that I was making the right moves.
I was pivoting towards something new and cautiously but confidently moving in that direction.
I was learning myself all over again from the inside out, while learning this airplane from the inside out.

With the help of my awesome flight instructor, aviation taught me how to begin to really trust myself.
I cannot articulate how priceless that lesson was for me.
I cry thinking about it, truthfully.

Even though I had come so far, there was still a shred of doubt when it came to trusting myself fully.
Well, maybe it was a bit more than a shred.
There was a time a few months ago where I had … let’s say a “close call” in my airplane.
I asked the universe to show me how capable I really am as Pilot In Command of an aircraft.
I asked the universe to show me that I would be able to get myself out of a bad situation.

I’m sure we’ve all heard that saying “Be careful what you wish for..”

Well, low and behold my universe genie was listening to me, as she always does, and she said,
“O.K. bet.”

It was my second local solo at my home airport.
My landings that day were alright, not my best.
I very specifically remember being in my head that day.
As I ascended on the upwind I said out loud
“Get it together, you need to do this, get out of your head and fly this airplane.”

That was the first sign of a potentially hazardous situation.

Everything was normal as I began my decent onto final,
until I rounded out too high and forced the nose down over the runway.
Bad.
The nose wheel bounced and I didn’t immediately initiate a go-around procedure.
Very bad.
I’m eating up a ton of runway, the nose bounces a second time.
Holy shit this is so bad.
I hear my flight instructor on the radio trying to remain calm but his voice is shaky.
He’s watching me from the ground.
“FULL POWER GO AROUND” he says.
I robotically respond “Full power going around” and initiate a go around procedure with a seriously small amount of climb out space between myself and the tree line.

Problem was, that was wildly scary and it was something that had never happened to me before in the airplane.
I had never bounced on landing to a point where it put me in a porpoise.
I remember being on the downwind and looking at the runway knowing I had to land on it at some point.
I started to panic, then something took over and brought me back to center.
I remained calm, but the chaos wasn’t over yet.
I went to turn base when I realized somehow during my go-around that the auto-pilot accidentally got engaged.
This meant I wasn’t able to turn in a coordinated way, due to the controls fighting me to keep a certain heading.
Since my autopilot actually had gotten mistakenly engaged before, during flight early on in my training,
I was able to diagnose the problem right away.
I disengaged the autopilot and flew the shit out of that airplane until it was on the ground safely.

This wasn’t something we had practiced, this wasn’t something an acronym could have saved me from.
This was a demonstration of me not just being “along for the ride”.
I trusted myself, took controls, and ultimately saved myself from what could have been a really bad situation.

Thanks universe, now I know.

For the first time in my life, I’m able to look back and see a different person than who I am now.
I’m able to see visible progression towards living a life where my nervous system isn’t in fight or flight.

I was able to use learning to fly as a catalyst towards learning to regulate.
Along with this came the ability to really differentiate between perceived danger and actual danger.
Nervous system fluctuations became less frequent.
Certain things that used to really trigger me, no longer seem to affect me at all.

Someone recently asked me how I stay so “unbothered”, and it made me laugh.
I’m not unbothered, I’m just able to sort out what warrants an emotional reaction versus what doesn’t.
I can easily eliminate myself from situations that don’t make me feel good.
I don’t need to fear being alone, because there is no actual danger in that.
As a child, I was taught that alone = isolation, sadness, despair.
As an adult I’ve taught myself that alone = self love, self awareness, SAFETY.

I can create that safety within myself.
I can allow people in who truly make me feel safe.
I can let these walls down for the first time in 33.5 years.

And it all started with a flight of discovery.
That flight opened things up for me that no one will ever truly understand.
During my journey of discovering the skies, I’ve discovered new worlds within myself,
and it’s been so, so beautiful.

I’m conscious of the fact that this era is my story being rewritten first hand.
This is a time in my life that I’ll tell my children about someday.
I zoom out and see that I’m currently writing their future bedtime stories.

Through this current reality, I’ll be able to teach them how to trust themselves over anyone else.

When I look at them, tiny and helpless in my arms, I’ll whisper
“You’re safe”
and they’re going to feel it.