Towards the end of my Air Force career as a U-2 pilot, I was scared of flying every damn day and was experiencing some pretty terrifying mental health episodes while in the cockpit, alone, unarmed, and unafraid at the edge of space in the world's most notoriously difficult aircraft. It started with a traumatic surgery to remove a bone tumor that Air Force medical completely bungled (no surprise there), which triggered an underlying genetic predisposition for bipolar disorder. But I didn't know that at the time. All I knew was that after the surgery, which left me with permanent bone/nerve damage and chronic pain, I no longer looked forward to flying--I now dreaded it.

All I could think about was how everything would go wrong. How I'd lose my engine at the worst possible moment on takeoff, fuck up the flame-out landing, be forced to eject, and be pilloried by my community for being such a shitty pilot.

On one high flight, I experienced a dissociative episode after climbing above 70,000 feet, in which I had no idea how "I" got there. Not in the literal sense--I knew I had just taken off and climbed up there--but in a more abstract sense. Like who was the me that had become a U-2 pilot? How in the hell did a totally incompetent fuck up like me manage to make it this far? I remember looking at the boost pump switches and having no fucking clue what they did. What they did, what they were for, how any of the switches integrated with the aircraft, how the human being at the controls related to me. The only way I continued was by reminding myself that I had done this hundreds of times before and nothing bad happened, even though it felt like someone else had done this hundreds of times before, and the episode passed in 15 minutes. I knew something was wrong, so to satisfy that concern I called the flight doc the next day, thinking I may have been hypoxic. I told him only a few of the actual events because I knew I'd be grounded, and when he said I wasn't hypoxic, I felt great, like I performed my due diligence to rectify whatever the hell had happened, even though I intentionally avoided discussing what had, in fact, happened.

On another high flight, this one at night, I had a full blown panic attack. I was over San Francisco, with Lake Tahoe on my left and a spectacular sunset on my right, when suddenly everything felt absolutely wrong. Like I didn't belong there in the upper reaches of the atmosphere, like I didn't belong in the jet, like something terrible was about to happen. This time I couldn't ignore the overwhelming urge to get out of the aircraft and be safely on terra firma, so I called the Airboss, said I was having digestive issues (a plausible excuse when you're wearing a $250k space suit), and flew VFR direct back to base.

On what ended up being the last flight of my life, I took a T-38 solo on my favorite training route up and down the Pacific coast of California, cruising over the beach cliffs at 2000 feet and lighting the afterburner over the San Francisco Bay. When I landed and shut down, I realized that somehow--despite the mechanism designed to prevent exactly this--I had clipped into the ejection seat without the "silver key" that armed the parachute. Had I injested a bird over the coast at 2000 feet--something that very well could have happened--my parachute would not have automatically deployed upon ejection, and I would've had only a few seconds to realize that and manually deploy my chute. But I knew in my current mental state that I would not have figured that out and I would've perished.

NONE of that was enough for me to seek help. But what happened after I hopped out of the T-38 cockpit on that final flight was. I received a text from my mother, informing me that my cousin, who had been diagnosed with bipolar, had hung himself, leaving behind his wife and two young daughters. He was a few years older than me but I was vaguely aware of the issues he was dealing with. I couldn't help but notice some similarities with my own issues, and I wondered if that was going to be me in five years.

So I called my flight doc and told him I no longer felt mentally fit to fly. That started a long, drawn out process of mental health treatment in the Air Force. It isn't anything like the rumors suggest. After months of working with behavioral health, they transferred me to mental health, diagnosed me with bipolar type 2, prescribed me lithium, and initiated a med board that resulted in my medical retirement three years ago.

I will never fly again, but I am totally okay with that. I am in a much better place now. Lithium sorted me right the fuck out, but I only needed it for a year. I'm now a civilian in grad school, trying to start a new career in my 30s, and have never been better.