Stories Are Funny Things

Being a bit of a backtrack, together with a rumination or two

The view from my (office) window, June 20, 2020. Photo: Trey Graham

I promised, back in the Before Times, that I’d share some of the more colorful stories from my adventures as a flight attendant. And then I mostly didn’t.

It’s not that there weren’t any stories. (Remind me to tell you about the pantsless snowboarder.)

It’s that between my airline’s social-media policy (at first) and then the way the Covid pandemic poleaxed my life, I couldn’t find ways to tell many of them.

Tell the truth, I lost the urge to write. Or I lost the appetite for hearing myself talk. Somewhere between the end of Trump and the beginning of Biden, I started feeling like I wasn’t worth listening to. Looking back now, in the fall of 2023, I can see the curves of a depressive spiral that would eventually bring me to where I am now. (More on that later, I think.)

But in early 2020, as the pandemic started to unmake us all, it felt less like depression than like simple disorientation. The airline training I’d just pu…