39 hours with no sleep took its toll on my body. It was is unavoidable, but a very inconvenient fact that despite my best efforts, I find sleep while on an aircraft utterly impossible. The good reason for this is that every little movement of the constantly moving aircraft is interesting to me. Not because I’m frightened, I’ve only been scared once on a flight and that was when I was the pilot.

During my private pilot scholarship course with the Air Cadets either my second or third solo landing, after a basic flight I landed a little nose heavy and caused my plane to behave like a dolphin; bouncing with increasing intensity like driving on a Zambian road. I had no idea what was happening because I was rolling on the ground rather than bouncing in the air like  you might in a missed landing, and I hadn’t studied enough to quickly diagnose the issue.

The reason I find everything interesting is because I know what is happening and it is amazing! Flying is still so cool to me.  I feel incredibly privileged to be able to fly whenever I do and even now, as much as I don’t want this trip to end, I am looking forward to the joy of flying.

The point is, even though I tried to put aside my excitement, sleep did not come to me on the flights or during my long but not-long-enough-for-a-hotel layovers and as a result I spent the majority of the first week dealing with either a bad case of jet lag or a mild case of exhaustion. Swinging between lethargy and mania, dealing with difficulty sleeping, and making ‘unusual’ decisions. Fortunately I am surrounded by people who are both very experienced with this type of thing and willing to help.

It did make me notice the strange shaped and sizes of things here more acutely. I described the size of insects and arachnids as ‘disturbing’ in my journal on my third day, but now I am quite accustomed to fauna being about two times larger than a similar Canadian species.

Another affect of the lack of sleep has been my interactions with the people here. I am usually an introspective type to a fault. The fault being that I tend to be more concerned with the impression I leave with people than those people are with the impression I left. During my week of jet lag I think that I was very hard on myself concerning my various minor social faults and in a way that I think is probably typical for us all. I detrimentally tended to highlight them and magnify their potential negative consequences, letting it affect my mood. I felt at various times like an impostor, an alien, and an ignoramus. All of which are true, but I forgot to deal with them in a manner appropriate to the degree to which they are true.

To continue to relate this week to my experiences with the Air Cadets, I think I feel like I imagine a particularly anxious Civilian Instructor would at a cadet camp. That is to say I feel like everyone I see has a distinct purpose and I am not wearing their uniform. On further reflection I remembered that as a  cadet I used to think that C.I.’s were the ones who were special and particularly needed, because the powers that be had decided they needed to be there despite not being full members of the cadre.

Letting the powers that be decide my fate has always been a challenge for me. I can think of no better environment and place to correct that than here and now.