It Was 4:55am and I Was Spiraling

It was 4:55am in Montreal, and I was panicking.

We had just arrived at the airport, minutes past the airline’s 75-minute check-in cutoff. Our flight to LaGuardia was scheduled for 6am, and my partner was denied a boarding pass. I had already checked in online the night before. Due to some complications, he had to check in at the airport. The agent, unbothered, rebooked him on an 11am flight with a layover in Minneapolis. I still had my seat on the 6am, but the idea of flying home without him sent me into a tailspin.

I tried everything. I asked. I reasoned. I tried negotiating with the agent, arguing our case, desperately hoping something would budget. None of it worked. Meanwhile, my heart was racing, my stomach was in knots, and I felt that hot, helpless frustration you only get when you know you’re completely at the mercy of someone else’s rules.

With no other alternatives with the agent, we gathered our stuff and my partner’s new ticket, and proceeded through security and customs. Because we both have Global Entry and PreCheck, we managed to speed through the process. By 5:30am, we were standing at our original gate. The gate agent glanced at the system and immediately booked my partner for our original flight. No drama. No delay. In the end, we both boarded the same flight and landed in New York as planned.

Still, the entire morning was needlessly stressful, filled with mounting frustration, and a frenzied mental calculus about backup options. It wasn’t until we were cruising at 30,000 feet that I had space to reflect.

The irony is: had I just accepted the situation calmly and tried our luck at the gate, it likely would have worked out anyway. We probably would have conserved our energy and avoided the chaos. But in the moment, that kind of perspective was impossible to hold. It’s hard to remain calm when your instincts are to scream for control.

This made me think about how often we react that way in life, zooming in so tightly on a single obstacle that we lose our sense of proportion. So many situations likely will resolve themselves if we just breathe, move forward, and allow room for possibility.

Travel has a funny way of becoming a mirror. What showed up this morning wasn’t about an airline policy, it was about my own relationship to uncertainty. It’s a reminder that the anxiety we carry with ourselves is often heavier than the reality we face.