Blog Post Ten

Fear, Breakthroughs, New Seasons

March 24, 2026

So, I have a bit of a fear of flying. I have flown since I was a young child, but this fear has grown in my adulthood. I step onto the plane, and intrusive thoughts flood my head of “what if I don’t make it to my destination?”, “What if we get caught in a bad storm and a wing breaks off?” 

I can’t say what brought on my fear, but it has grown quite a bit in the last couple of years. I used to have a mild discomfort during turbulence, and now it has grown into almost a full-blown phobia. 

People say, “but you fly so much!” 

And that is the odd part. The more I fly….the more the fear grows. But what is the real fear here? The lack of ground beneath me. The lack of feeling a stable base underneath me. Flying freely in the air to a new or different destination. 

I had to fly to Chicago for a wedding job as a second shooter for someone I work with consistently doing Hasidic Jewish weddings. Traveling for jobs has been an absolute dream of mine. Being a world traveler in my early twenties, I always thought about how to “hack” the system to travel for work. To get a job that paid me to travel. 

Now my dream had come to fruition. This wasn’t some hopeful thinking about the future, this was a reality that I was getting to live. My twenty year old self would be ecstatic knowing that I was getting to travel for a job and get paid for it.

Yet, I was well…. Terrified. 

A week before, my mind swirled with intrusive thoughts. Mostly about having to get on a plane and fly, but I have a hunch that I was only projecting my insecurities onto my flying anxiety. 

This was a new experience for me. Sure, I’d had jobs where I had to drive to and rent a hotel room. Or I have had jobs in my home state of Colorado when I was visiting or traveled for. 

But this was different because someone wanted to fly me out specifically for a job. They were paying for my travel and stay. They valued my work enough to bring me in from another state. 

This was a major step in my career. A huge achievement for me because the last five years have all been about proving my worth and chasing after jobs. And now it felt my work was being valued more than ever before. Which I am not sure if this is true or not, but the situation brought that feeling to surface. And I felt like now I really was being trusted with bigger jobs and bigger roles. 

And as I naturally think deeply, or possibly just overthink, the reasoning and layers behind the meaning of everything, I suspect my fears of flying have grown with my increasing levels of responsibility, yet lack of stability beneath me. Building my career in photography and videography has been full of passion and reward, but also deeply terrifying as it felt like I was constantly building from the ground and only climbing up baby steps. So not only physically is the ground not underneath me when I am in a plane, but it is like a wake up call to how unstable I really feel every time I get off that ground and fly. A feeling that was once joyous and incredible, now was utterly horrible. 

Someone said to me recently that discomfort or fear eventually leads to deep surrender. And something major clicked for me at that moment.

The week before my flight to Chicago, I was having intrusive thoughts and my stomach was in knots. I kept hoping that maybe I would be saved and the job would get canceled so I could just be released from this pain (and maybe my death, said my intrusive thoughts). But no, the job was on. And I was going. I didn’t care how much fear I had, this was a dream I was being gifted from the Universe and I wasn’t about to reject that. 

And so I stepped on the plane with the fear and went. And I made it alive. And I even made it back home alive. And then something released in me. I got on the plane with the fear, did the job successfully, and made it home just fine, proving my thoughts dead wrong. That I was safe. 

And the days after, I felt light and happy and optimistic. I proved that I could do something I really wanted to even with deep fear. Because this is what this entire career is about. We wish for the opportunities we dream of, and then we get them and realize the responsibility can be terrifying. 

We think that once we get the opportunities, everything will be easy and we will finally be happy and fulfilled, but sometimes, it is quite the opposite. We may get the opportunities we dream of, but now the pressure and responsibility is on. And we don’t know if we are ready or worthy of the opportunity we are finally given. Sometimes even giving it back. Turning it away. Sometimes we lack confidence in ourselves to know if we are really ready for that leap. 

But I knew this was a dream and I could not let that dream go to waste as much as I was filled with fear. And so I surrendered. 

I am a big believer in the universe giving you the opportunities you are ready for. And so this was my moment of trust. That I could be as fearful as I wanted to, but this opportunity presented itself because I was ready. 

And so as I come into this new season of my career, where the opportunities I am receiving are bigger and more exciting, I want to start surrendering more to trusting that I am ready for them. I have spent five years building solid ground beneath me, day in and day out, working hard to build that stable base. But maybe now, it is time to fly freely. That stable ground is there and I need to trust that it is solid. So, we all have to trust that the world’s got us, and if we have been working hard and consistently towards our dreams, sometimes it’s time to surrender, let go, and just fly with or without the fear.