At 30,000 feet, after the pilot announces cruising altitude and turns off the seat belt sign, people change. It’s a small shift, a quiet adjustment, intangible even to them.

In the 90’s and early 2000’s, before the proliferation of personal media devices, airlines showed outdated movies and cancelled television shows. You purchased your headphones for two dollars and plugged into the armrest to watch on a screen overhead, or one embedded in the seat in front of you. Movies like Hope Floats, Forces of Nature, He Said, She Said, television shows like Who’s the Boss, Charles In Charge, Full House, and when you were lucky, early episodes of Seinfeld, or Will and Grace. Anything cheap. There were a lot of commercials.

Those programs had a strange effect on many passengers.  People, otherwise hardened by life, cynical by nature, non-criers, sobbed during movies that once made them scoff. They laughed hard at out of date humor. And no one was more shocked than they. I heard a woman tell her story, a New Yorker who flew from L.A. and back again frequently. She sobbed during Pretty Woman and even harder at Notting Hill. She could not explain the mutation. A friend of hers, a man, confessed the same happened to him. Was it altitude? Was it something in the water? Was it that she was alone and allowed to just feel her feelings. Sort of, something like that last one. A psychologists explained it this way: Untethered from her life, her career and her relationships, her subconscious crept to the surface and found a crack through which to escape. I never experienced this. I’m a crier. And I definitely feel my feelings.

When I step on a plane and I’m headed somewhere I want to go, I experience relief. Unbound from my anxiety and frustrating jobs, I relax and sleep for hours, dreaming nothing. Typically my dreams are more fraught than my thoughts even on my best days. Winding through a maze of emotional IED’s, my psyche drags up the most desperate sludge. When I wake, yesterday’s anxieties are replaced by new ones, or old ones, they’re all on a loop. The last one I remember today fused my former church life with my current writing ambitions. The theist to the atheist as represented by two specific men in love with one another and not with me. Obvious, right? Unable to penetrate a career in any carnation (I once wanted a career in the church) I nibble on its crumbs, volunteering for nothing, while I languish in humiliating jobs.

On Saturday I worked a retail makeup event. I received a complaint. The big boss woman, alpha woman, confronted me about it in front of her client, the current client in my chair, and my co-workers. The complaint: The client approached me, wanted her makeup done because her artist cancelled on her at the last minute and she was going to her sister’s wedding. I was affable, we chatted genially. At the end of the application she seemed fine. She could have asked me to fix the problems.

However, the nature of the complaint isn’t important. Complaints happen and when they occur the bosses act like it’s the apocalypse. No one ever asks the employee what happened. I see it all the time. However, in 13 years, I haven’t seen a boss confront the employee in front of everyone. As I stood in shock, she said of the new client, “I need to see her when she’s done. You need to clean up all this fall out here and blend this out. There shouldn’t be any harsh lines.” Her voice boomed.  I nearly burst into tears. I wasn’t even half-way through the application. My client was embarrassed for me.  I went to the back, pulled myself together and made it through the rest of the day. I’ve been simmering since.

The way this alpha woman treated me felt like rubbing alcohol on an open wound.  Insult to injury because the day prior I had worked on an article about Wonder Woman for 17 hours then submitted it to a handful of publications. I felt it was strong and timely, something I never have time to write. I thought it had a good, no a great chance of getting published. Hours later the terrorist attacks in London occurred. Perhaps my article got lost? But I think it’s more likely that it wasn’t good enough, clear enough…something. These pubs are still posting essays on Wonder Woman. It earned 103.1 million at the box office this weekend.

When I worked in restaurants I cried all the time. I received bad tips and complaints. I was a pretty bad server. But I’m a good makeup artist. I haven’t received a complaint in years. I’m new with this company, they don’t know that and they don’t care. Anyway, it’s a bad omen. And here’s the thing. I don’t think I can recover from it. I hold onto things and they get bigger. I sort of revel in not forgiving, letting the anger grow into rage and the rage into hate. It makes me move. Otherwise I get too comfortable in uncomfortable places. And I want to move.