The Night Before My First Flight, I Refolded One Shirt Three Times

The pale blue shirt lies on the edge of the bed, folded for the third time. Sleeves stacked, collar square, and still I pick it up, shake it out, and fold it again.

The wall clock says ten at night. The suitcase has been open since seven. Down the lane someone is pulling a shutter closed, and a dog barks twice and gives up. Tomorrow at five in the morning I leave for the airport, and I am forty-one years old and have never once sat inside a thing that flies.

I fix air conditioners for a living. I am used to ladders, to crawling into low ceiling spaces, to standing on a tin roof at noon. Nobody thinks of me as a person who is afraid of things. So when the work trip came up, three days of training in Da Nang on a new unit, I said yes right away, quick and easy. Then I went home and stared at the e-ticket on my phone three evenings in a row.

If you have ever been fine for a whole month, and then on the night before a first-time thing your hands start doing pointless jobs on their own, this is for you. It will not tell you to stop worrying. It is just one night, one morning, and two small things I managed to do.

One thing first. This is not a trick for getting over a fear of flying. I do not have one, and I am not sure what I had even counts as fear rather than plain heavy worrying. It is also not the story where I board and discover there was nothing to be afraid of. I boarded, and there were minutes that were truly unpleasant. What I am telling you is how I sat next to those minutes, not how I beat them.

Ten at night, and the third fold of the shirt

After the third fold I went to check the documents. ID card, ticket, charger. Then back to the suitcase, to open the small pocket and make sure the charger was really in there. It was. I zipped it, unzipped it, and looked once more.

My wife stood leaning in the bedroom doorway, a spoon in her hand from tasting the soup.

"How many times is that you've checked?"

"The last time."

"You've been saying that since nine."

I laughed, but it was the kind of laugh that lets you skip answering. She was right, and inside me there was something hard to name. It did not feel like fear exactly. It felt like an itch I could not reach.

At first I thought the cause was simple: I was afraid of forgetting something. But if I forgot the charger I could buy another in Da Nang, no big deal. I knew that, and my hand kept unzipping the pocket anyway. Which meant that what I was afraid of was not the charger.

Sitting with it later, this is how I saw it. All my working life I have had a sure way to do each job: read the gas, read the pressure, listen to the compressor before I dare say what is wrong. A flight is something I cannot measure ahead of time. Nobody lets you climb on and try it first. When you cannot check the big thing, your hands go and check the smallest thing within reach, and the shirt and the charger were within reach. Every time I opened that zipper I was trying to buy a little certainty from the cheapest shop available. And certainty bought like that lasts only a few minutes. That is why every check was "the last time," and why not one of them ever was.

My wife suggested something that sounded perfectly ordinary. She took the sticky note off the fridge and handed me a pen.

"Write down everything you need to bring. Pack once, following the paper, zip it, and that's that."

I did it, not believing much. Here is how, if you want to try.

Ten minutes is my number; yours may be shorter or longer. The way to know you did it right is not feeling lighter. That night I did not feel lighter. The way to know is this: after zipping, I still felt the itch, but my hands no longer followed it. The paper had a time written on top, and that line was saying, in my place, that the job was done.

The first time, it felt slightly absurd, like arguing with myself using a pen. I still lay awake until nearly midnight. Some people feel themselves going around in circles less from the very first evening, and some need a few tries before they notice; I was in the second group, so I will not tell anyone not to be impatient. A few weeks later, for a short job elsewhere in the province, I tried it again, and the "last check" shrank on its own to a single one: write the time, done. That trip was nothing special. I just noticed my hands unzipping things less.

On a day so busy there are no ten minutes, it folds down to one thing: pack, take one photo of the packed case with your phone, and that evening look only at the photo, not at the inside. The photo plays the part of the paper.

There is a place where I went wrong, and I went wrong there on the very first night. I promised myself "one more check, then I write the time." That promise sounds very reasonable, but it opens the door to a second and a third, because each time I thought "this one was not careful enough." It is attractive because it looks like carefulness, not like worry. What I changed was dropping the words "one more." Check once, from the paper, line by line, then zip. If you later feel something is missing, write it on a different sheet for the morning. Do not open the case at midnight.

If this sounds like the night before an interview, or the night before visiting someone in hospital, then the checking loop is not only about airplanes. I wrote another piece about worrying at three in the morning, for the nights when it travels further than the suitcase.

Gate eleven, and the ticket in my hand

The airport that morning smelled of iced milk coffee from a small counter next to the waiting seats, and of suitcase wheels rolling over polished tile. I sat on a metal bench with my backpack clutched to my chest like a small child.

"What if." Those two words began running the moment I put my bag through the scanner. What if the plane shakes. What if I feel suffocated and cannot stand up. What if I make a scene in front of strangers.

I spoke to it quietly, the way I would speak to a friend on the same trip.

"You plan to worry about all that before we even take off?"

"I have to worry first, so that if something happens I'm prepared."

"Prepared for what? Do you know yet what you're preparing?"

It went silent. It did not know. It only knew how to worry, and had never once known what it was preparing for.

Right then I thought the "what if" sounded like it was rescuing me, but really it was just sitting beside me, reading aloud things that had not happened. It ran in a time I was not yet in. I was sitting on a metal bench at gate eleven, not yet airborne, not yet shaking, with nobody watching. Everything "what if" said lived fifteen minutes from now, an hour from now, in a place I had not reached.

So the job was not to make it shut up. I had tried making it shut up, and it only got louder. The job was to pull myself back to a place that had certain things in it, however small: the ticket.

I took the ticket out of my shirt pocket. Thin paper, one corner crumpled because I had been squeezing it. I read it line by line, slowly, like reading a warranty card.

Three minutes is enough for a one-page ticket. The way to know you did it right: you can hear the announcement over the speakers without hearing it out of fear of missing the flight, just hearing it. The first time, I finished the seat line and the "what if" was back before the next one. I read again, it came back, I read again, five or six rounds. Nothing special happened. Some people find the printed words slowly turn into something to hold on to; others find it a little funny to be reading a piece of paper they have already read a dozen times. Both are normal.

After that trip I used the line-by-line reading elsewhere: my mother's appointment slip, an invoice I had to match before a meeting. About a week later I noticed that I was opening the paper to read instead of opening my phone to look up more news. I would not call that progress, only a new habit sitting in the place of an old one.

On a rushed day, it is down to one thing: read the gate line and the time line, just two lines, in your real inner voice. Fifteen seconds.

The trap here sits inside the phone itself. Waiting, I badly wanted to open it and read about the flight: news, a few videos filmed inside cabins. It sounds like preparing myself. Really I was only giving the "what if" more to eat. I lost one sitting that way, ten minutes before the gate, and came away with ice-cold hands before I understood. Since then I keep a small rule: the phone opens only to show the time and the gate number. If my thumb keeps looking for other things, I pick up the ticket instead.

The person next to me on the waiting bench was a young woman in earphones, a paperback in her hand. She pulled out one earbud when she saw me flipping the ticket over and over.

"Your first flight?"

"Yes. How did you know?"

"People who fly a lot don't read their ticket for the tenth time."

She smiled very lightly, put the earbud back, and said nothing more. I felt lighter because of how she said it, as an ordinary thing, something everyone goes through.

If you try these and it still feels rough

This happened to me, so I will say it plainly.

The first reason: you pack, you read the ticket, and the "what if" is still there. I sat in the aircraft seat as the engines began to whine, felt my legs lock and my hand clamp on the armrest. Reading the ticket in my head did not help either. What I did then was something else: I looked out of the window for something large and slow, a cloud or a vehicle crawling along the ground, and kept looking until it was out of sight. That did not make the worry go away, but it gave my eyes somewhere to rest. Many people find it fits; some do not. Try it, drop it if it is not for you.

The second reason: you are doing both of these like an exam. You read the ticket the right way, write the time neatly, then feel you have failed again. Neither one is graded. If one day you forget to write the time, or you read the ticket while your head is somewhere else, that is fine. It is only a small anchor, not a test.

And if neither reason fits you, if you try these and going away from home is still more than you can bear, you did not do it wrong. Some worries need a person to sit with them, not a sheet of paper. The last section says when that might be.

I landed in Da Nang a little after eight in the morning, hard sun, a smell of sea mixed with exhaust fumes. I sat on a stone bench in front of the arrivals gate and called my wife, keeping it short.

"I'm here."

"Did you check the suitcase yet?"

"No. But the charger's in there, I think."

We both laughed. The words "I think" sounded strange coming from my mouth, and also light.

Next time you pack, try leaving one shirt alone, folded exactly once, and let it stay there.

When to seek professional support

This article is a story about one night and two small things. It cannot replace treatment, and I am not promising the worry will disappear or that every flight will feel lighter.

But here are a few signs you should bring to a professional, rather than carrying them alone:

• Worry about a specific thing, like travelling, has made you cancel plans again and again over several months
• You lose sleep night after night over worry, for weeks, and during the day it still weighs on you
• At times your heart races, you cannot catch your breath, or your chest feels tight; see a doctor first to rule out physical causes
• You think about hurting yourself, even if it is just a passing thought

The last point cannot wait. Speak with someone you trust, today. The Emergency Support page explains what holds true in moments like that.

Seeing a professional does not mean you are weak. Just as a technician like me needs someone else to listen to a machine whose sound he cannot place himself, you may need someone to listen to what you have been hearing alone.