I acknowledge both my unease and ability to overcome it.

A person can be genuinely afraid of flying and holding a boarding pass. Both are true at the gate. Neither cancels the other, and the airline does not ask which one is dominant before letting them on.

Anxiety insists on a single occupant — that if the fear is present the capability must be absent, and any evidence to the contrary was a fluke. It is a tidy story and it does not survive contact with what people actually do. Almost every brave thing has been done by somebody frightened who went anyway, which is the only kind of brave there has ever been.