As Chicago fell away and the dark outline of Lake Michigan took over the view from the window, I started to cry. This is not the usual response I have to flying away from Chicago O’Hare. I loathe that place and flying away is the event I’m looking forward to most. But I have been dreading this trip for the last few weeks. I, who live for travel, have not wanted to travel. As the day to leave came closer and closer, the gloomy feeling and increased malaise got worse and worse.
This was the trip we’d been planning since 2019. We’d been talking with Julie and Dave about meeting in Italy for 4 years now. Usually John would be leading a study abroad in Italy anyway, they could just come over when the kids got out of school. We talked about doing it in 2020, but we all know how that turned out. We had finally purchased tickets in June of 2021 with supreme confidence that COVID would be taken care of by then.
I, who live for travel, did not want to travel.
Everyone was envious that we weren’t going just somewhere sunny for spring break, but that we were going to Italy. A once in a lifetime trip for most people was coming up and while there were still some COVID precautions like masks and a form to fill out, we didn’t even have to produce a negative test to get in to the country. That took a big part of the stress off of us because it would have meant that the trip was done before it started for one or more of us.
We had everything ready to go back to Europe. The vaccine cards, passports were checked numerous times and we even had plenty of time to get to Chicago to fly out. There was nothing to stress about and maybe that was my problem….did I need to be stressed in order to feel excited about it? I don’t want to think that is the case. Was it because we were going to places I had been multiple times before and I need the exotic or new to be excited? I don’t want to think that is the case either. And we’re talking about Italy! Never a bad meal, fabulous history and art, amazing scenery, beautiful language….everything I love about travel.
Did I have a premonition of something going horribly wrong? Would I be that person who said, “I didn’t know the plane would crash, I just knew I couldn’t get on it.”? I’m pretty sure that’s not me either, but I knew that if someone said that the flight was cancelled or Italy had shut its borders or any other calamity that meant we couldn’t go, I wouldn’t be that upset. What is going on with me? Even John and other friends were wondering what was wrong with me. Oscar was told to be especially good for this trip because of my attitude. I thought about getting the EMDR tappers out and I also thought that I would just put away my attitude and suck it up, pretend throughout the trip.
What is going on with me?
But, like the brain does, it processed it when it was ready. As nothing came up and we had a smooth trip to Chicago, got through O’Hare security and got on a plane on time, I figured that I was just going to have to pretend to be happy on this trip. When the plane taxied for 20 minutes through the maze that is O’Hare, I just focused on making sure that Oscar was ready to clear his ears with the pressure change. Then we took off and I started to cry.
We’ve travelled a lot since COVID hit. Through the US, even internationally to Iceland and the Bahamas, but we haven’t been back to mainland Europe since the world as I knew it changed irrevocably. We had a pandemic close the entire world, there’s a war raging in Ukraine and this trip felt like returning to the scene of the crime. Italy was the epicenter for COVID becoming really present in our world and a reason for us to return home from Europe in March of 2020. I didn’t know that so much of the pent up trauma from all of these events was wrapped up in returning to Europe. But it was, and that’s the nature of trauma that so many don’t understand. It’s just in there and you might not have thought that it was a big deal, or you might have known that what was happening was a big deal, but you had handled it. You might think that you’ve dealt with it, that you’ve pushed it far enough down, that you shouldn’t feel this way….but it stays there and waits for you to really deal with it. And getting back up on that horse was what I needed to do to finally deal with it.
