The airplane nightmare

Of all the people in the world struggling with their weight, I fully appreciate what Kevin Smith is going through with all the hullabaloo over Southwest Airlines. True, I wish he would shut up a bit about it instead of continuing the spectacle, but the man is quite literally living one my biggest fears.


I am not afraid to fly. Heights don't really bother me, and though I am not a huge fan of enclosed spaces, I've never suffered any kind of episodes as the result of claustrophobia. Yet airplanes scare me, and it has nothing to do with terrorism or concern of a drunken pilot.


My airplane fear stems from 28 years of being overweight, especially the last 10 or so as an overweight adult. See, there is nothing worse than getting into an airplane seat next to a stranger (especially a coach seat, which are apparently designed with Lilliputians in mind) who is visibly upset to have you as a seatmate. It has nothing to do with who gets possession of the armrest. It has everything to do with size, and I've seen the reaction too many times.


I remember my flight home from Israel with particular dread. Despite the fact that there were 40 people in my group, most of whom I'd developed friendships with, I found myself seated next to a pair of unfamiliar twins. Skinny, bratty, late teenager twins, to be specific, with their IPods plugged firmly into their heads and no sign of friendliness offered by their listless faces. As I approached my aisle seat, the twin sitting in the middle seat quite visibly rolled his eyes at me. He didn't have to say anything to get his message across. He might have thought he revealed nothing with a simple eye roll, but to oversensitive Matt, he was saying "great, a 12-hour flight with fatty."


The feeling is the same as getting onto a crowded elevator. When you're big, you pick up on the subtle glances people make toward the maximum occupancy signs. You hear the snickers, the "oh crap, the cable's gonna snap" whispers exchanged between riders. You enter a state of self-consciousness that is brutally overbearing, like you've suddenly become a monster simply because you're the overweight guy riding up multiple floors.


And when you think it's all in your head, a celebrity has an experience like the one Kevin Smith had on Southwest, and you read the vicious, craven comments left anonymously by people who apparently never made it out of the middle school mentality.


For anyone unfamiliar with Smith's story, here's a brief synopsis: the filmmaker caught a standby flight and was forced to fly coach. Southwest, apparently, has a policy that requires significantly overweight passengers to buy an extra seat on flights, as determined by a person's ability to lower the armrests on their seats. Smith, who is overweight but by no means a late-year Brando, disputes whether he successfully lowered the rests. He says he did, the airline said he didn't, and off the airplane he went. Yes, to use the headline that everyone else has regarding this story, Southwest decided that Kevin Smith was "too fat to fly."


I've always enjoyed Kevin Smith's movies. I love him as Silent Bob, the quiet sidekick to the mouthy Jay who manages to say the most meaningful or blunt thing in every movie he's in. But if it were me in Smith's situation, I think I'd be handling my shame quietly instead of lighting up the Internet with angry rants the way the director has responded. Part of me is pleased that he's sticking it to the airline, but the other part of me is worried he's just breeding more awful comments from the people who love opportunities to make fun of overweight people.


Several months ago, in one of my first postings of this blog, I wrote that one of my goals was to get on an airplane without seeing the eyes roll of my seatmates. Smith's experience is quite literally the epitome of what I feared, and a big part of my motivation for taking on this weight loss challenge.


I'm roughly 40 pounds lighter now than I was on that flight from Israel. Would that twin still have rolled his eyes at this version of me? I don't know. I haven't flown in a few years, and there are no flights scheduled in my immediate future. It's probably one of those situations where I won't know until I'm back on a plane sitting next to a stranger.

But as long as the threat of the feeling of dread remains, I'm going to stick to this plan, if for no other reason just so I never get the Kevin Smith treatment.