"Plenty of strikers can score goals," he said, gesturing to the famous old stands casting shadows around us.
"But a lot have found it difficult wearing the number 9 shirt for The Arsenal."
Freedom of movement and all that. There's likely a players' association. For example, if I want to hire a writer who is represented by the Writer's Guild of America (WGA), I have to negotiate through the WGA. But I also have to set up a separate LLC to conduct those negotiations. Me dealing with them directly, just through my company, doesn't work. All the players, metaphorically, report to Andorra, Luxembourg, Monaco. From there they board flights to all parts of the world, safe in the knowledge that they are about to get paid ridiculous amounts.
It really, really isn't, you know? Because it's not about fear of death, it's about fear of actually flying. It's an irrational fear based on one's position and environment that provokes a physical reaction. This is why no amount of telling someone how safe flying is makes any difference. They know all that stuff, but are still suffering. It's no different to fear of heights in that regard. The person with a fear of heights is not shítting themselves because they think they'll die, they're shītting themselves because their brain is sending panic signals throughout their body due to their location and they can't control it.
This is what people who don't suffer these afflictions simply don't get. They seem to think that people develop these fears through some logical sequence of decisions and that, by deconstructing that logic, they can be 'cured'. It doesn't work like that.
You aren't not scared of flying because you have rationalised the situation, balanced all probabilities and come to a rational conclusion. You're not scared of flying simply because you're not scared of flying and it has never occurred to you that you should be. You're just lucky enough not to be wired up that way. It's the same thing for those of us who are scared - it's just how we are.
"Plenty of strikers can score goals," he said, gesturing to the famous old stands casting shadows around us.
"But a lot have found it difficult wearing the number 9 shirt for The Arsenal."
"Plenty of strikers can score goals," he said, gesturing to the famous old stands casting shadows around us.
"But a lot have found it difficult wearing the number 9 shirt for The Arsenal."
Certainly. My first experience of flying was when I was 10 on an old BAC-111 to Majorca. I was fine. I didn't like take-off (still don't), but for the rest of the flight I was calm.
My fear of flying didn't develop until my early 20s, really. It was a flight back from Ireland, I was badly hungover and suffered what I now realise to have been a mild claustrophobic panic attack . After that, the floodgates were open. Deep down, I associated flying with the feelings I had experienced on that one flight and to some extent still do. The fear is not of crashing, it's of being in the environment where one experiences those feelings. Now of course, there is no better way of ensuring that one experiences those feelings than by harbouring a fear of doing so, but the human brain is a fúcker like that and breaking that cycle is easier said than done.