A Driving Failure

Confronting Snowmelt and A Phobia

There’s a position you have to hold your arms in while driving, which then angles your diaphragm a certain way, but for a long time I didn’t recognize that. I only knew that driving felt painful enough to give me panic attacks. I naturally assumed I was overly nervous about getting behind the wheel, to the point of probably having a phobia. It was quite a plot twist to learn I actually had thoracic endometriosis, and a number of things irritated it, including driving.

Since my surgery to remove it from the pleura of my right lung, thoracic side of my diaphragm, and mediastinum in February, I don’t get that awful feeling when driving.

But the problem remained that I hadn’t driven in years, so I had the whole typically teenage process of getting a license ahead of me, at age 41.

There are other layers of personal history in my teen years, when I attempted this the first time, some rather difficult to relive. I took Drivers Ed my junior year of high school, but my soon-to-be-retiring high school drivers ed coach was kinda phoning it in, to where he literally took me out a few times while reading the paper and listening to Walton and Johnson (this really gross and sexist southern radio show where two white men performed as black or gay or poor characters and laughed about it), then signed the completion certificate and nonchalantly instructed me to practice more with my parents. Meanwhile, my parents, as fundamentalist Christians (and generally neglectful individuals who could barely take care of themselves, much less ten children) never once took me driving and upped the ante by outright forbidding me from getting my license until I decided to obey them, an edict that stood until, in an additional act of disobedience (and desperate self-preservation), I moved out at age 17.

At 17 I started practicing driving with my then-boyfriend, now ex-husband, in this janky old red Crown Victoria that had a missing rear view mirror and a broken speedometer. That’s also around when my undiagnosed but already severe endometriosis started really acting up. In addition to recurrent abdominal pain so bad I later told a college health center nurse that it felt like my guts were stapled together (“maybe it’s cysts, try birth control,” she said) I got bouts of this odd painful cough that I thought was a sinus infection, and random panic attacks when doing dishes, folding laundry, or driving, physical discomfort that increasingly became as impossible to ignore (and I did try) as it was to understand.

Meanwhile my younger siblings saw what had happened to me with the driving mess and got their first jobs at a local car wash where they had older coworkers help them, so I was soon the only one in my family with a driving problem. Rather than that leading to a supportive environment (which to be fair, we had no good example on how to build), my lack of skill in that area made me the butt of jokes. My now-ex joined in and made fun of me - for years - over backing into a trash can once when practicing in that no-rearview-mirror car.

So for years I just stopped conversations about driving as quickly as I found alternatives to actually driving. Every now and then I’d summon the bravery to practice again, or get a learners permit again, but I’d get the panic attacks and pain and waves of shame, and with these repeat bad experiences I became even more avoidant. In time I felt ridiculous for being in my late 20’s, then 30’s, and now early 40’s, and still not a driver. Like I owed the world an explanation of how I didn’t do something I didn’t know how to even talk about without uncovering thick layers of misery and grief.

Anyway, clearly it’s been super fraught for me. But after the lung surgery this year solved the chronic pain component, I decided to be practical and finally do it. I drove with a neighbor a bit and then I took a drivers ed class where I found a driving instructor I really felt comfortable with. A chill and likable guy who works as a DJ and in a medical marijuana business in addition to teaching new drivers, we’ve had great conversations about food and parenting and where to line up your side view mirror while parallel parking. I found my confidence growing, my worries about what other people were doing on the road receding, and my focus on what I was doing becoming more clear.

Lately I’ve been doing school dropoff and pickup, driving to the library, basic things like that. I’ve mostly felt ok, if still a little green.

But I decided I was over this driving phobia that wasn’t really a phobia and ready to take the road test. Or at least this is how I was feeling when I registered and paid and put in on the calendar.

In hindsight it might not have been best to schedule it in the no man’s land between Christmas and New Years, when my kids are home, I’m helping watch a neighbor kid, our daily routine is shattered, and I probably haven’t had more than an hour go by in a day without someone touching me and making a demand.

But driving test day arrived nonetheless, rainy and gross, roads filling with dirty puddles of melting Christmas snow, and there were no refunds, so it didn’t matter that I woke up with a stomach ache and a bad vibe. I texted my drivers ed teacher with a couple questions and almost did another last-minute hour of drivers ed practice in the morning to settle my nerves, but the schedule on his end didn’t work out. To complicate matters, my husband also hadn’t taken his ADHD medication the day before, so getting my family out the door was like pulling teeth, dealing with two small children and one disorganized petulant man who didn’t see the point of anything I was asking for. I drove us all to the RMV safely, but arrived for my test frazzled, needing to pee, and not on my A game.

It didn’t get better from there. A bathroom break set me back in the testing line. I had been asked to get there early, but then waited an hour longer than my scheduled time. My kids were whining and squirming and grabbing me while pushing buttons and turning dials in the car. My husband was giving me unwanted and confusing driving advice until I irritatedly asked him to stop. The squeaky sound of old windshield wipers that needed replacing - something I’d already asked my husband to do - annoyed me more with each passing minute.

I watched the person before me, an adult man older than I was, fail his test and walk sadly back to his car.

I got out there. It didn’t go any better for me.

I went from calmly chatting with the RMV tester about mom life, and learning about a situation she had where she was pregnant for 28 weeks and didn’t know it (I always learn everybody’s weird life stories, I swear!) to driving and just feeling completely mentally off about it.

I can’t really explain it as anything more than that I choked. It was a spectacularly bad bout of test anxiety leading my otherwise full brain to suddenly go blank, my stomach churning while my body and mind both fumbled, until it all suddenly seemed to envelope my soul too, becoming some negative larger-than-life spiritual experience.

I didn’t know whether to turn the wheel left or right. I didn’t know what direction was left or right. I did know I failed right away, after awkwardly trying to parallel park twice, and then I just dragged myself through the rest of the test, anxiety ramping up with each awkward moment and thoughtless mistake.

I was fully aware my performance wasn’t good, but afterwards I felt even more crazy, looking at the written report. It read like I was a total road menace, and I didn’t see any reflection of my abilities in it.

I had not passed the bar of being a good assertive properly communicative driver - which you clearly should need to do to be to get a license - but I hadn’t done any of these actively dangerous things scribbled on the paper in my hand. I knew I had backed up at a bad angle, but I had not almost crashed into a fence. I understood I had pulled up too close to a stop sign but had not run a stop sign. I had forgotten a turn signal during my three point turn, but I never neglected to look around behind me carefully before moving the car, each and every time.

The extreme report added salt to my wounded and already salty attitude and more salty tears to what had already begun dripping down my face as I returned to the relative safety of my own car.

After my loss I (safely) tucked tail and drove to my in-laws house for lunch, hands shaking and eyes watering. On the way there my husband heard the brunt of it. I told him about how he wasn’t supportive and I didn’t get what I needed from him to help keep my nerves in check, and I had felt alone, neglected, set up for failure. I also said a couple mean things - ones that are particularly painful for someone who has ADHD - namely that he was exhausting to be around and not smart. When we arrived I asked to be left alone.

I sat out there by myself in the car with a pain body, this piece of shrapnel jaggedly making its’ way out. Little me and teenage me and hopeful college grad me and embarrassed middle aged woman meall alone together with my failure in a haphazardly-parked Honda CRV outside my in-laws house, ugly crying it out.

I looked up to see another thing I really didn’t want - my mother in law walking out to me, approaching the window, and asking me what I was doing out there. Then, when I rolled the window down and briefly explained I’d failed the driving test, she looked at me with caring eyes and said “you win some, you lose some - not good to cry, so don’t be stupid, come in, have lunch.” Having been a married-in member of a Vietnamese family for a while, I can recognize the Asian equivalent of a pep talk when I see one now. A statement containing considerable love, if not all the right words, and an understandable if not exactly healthy post-war discomfort with expressing emotion. I’d just received some mothering.

A few minutes later I straightened out my parking job a little and entered the house to my husband and his parents eating noodles and roast duck while discussing what the correct Vietnamese word for sensitive is (clearly in reference to me), then got bombarded by a herd of small concerned children - my own and their cousins - all repeatedly asking me why I had cried and what was wrong. My sister in law gave me a hug. “Everybody fails the first time” she said.

Soon I had children cuddling me and patting me and saying “I love you” while I too ate noodles and my mother in law told me about her own experience failing the driving test the first time. Then later in the evening my neighbor told me about hers, while my husband made me hot chocolate. He had accepted my apology for yelling at him, and promised that he’d pay for the next round of testing and drivers ed fees without complaint.

I sat there, sheepish. And suddenly I realized something.

Often the worst case scenario for me - the deepest fear I have often had as a survivor and a person who began adult life too early - is not being in control of myself and therefore having a situation I should have had control of spiral out. I’ve lived a life where even when it happens, it feels like it’s slim margins and there is no room to choke.

So the thought of losing face, folding under pressure, failing in front of people, and leaving room for untrue criticism to seem realistic in the midst of legitimate criticism all seem horrifying to me. I’ve relied on perfectionism and an insane level of mental scenario-running along with very strategic choices to avoid these sorts of moments whenever possible and hurried along to correct them when I haven’t.

But often in life, I have also powered through until I can’t anymore. I have avoided until I can’t anymore. It contributed to my delayed diagnosis. It contributed to me staying in certain stressful or unhealthy situations longer than I should. It contributed to me being rigid and unyielding with people that I’d like to show generosity and warmth to. It contributed to me being unable to join my family, my kids, my close friends, and my own self on solo trips, because I couldn’t even frigging drive there.

It hasn’t been good.

The real phobia was never an external one, of the physical act of driving, but an internal one, towards certain kinds of vulnerability, the ability to practice and get it wrong, the possibility of entertaining failure and loss and having that then be part of my identity.

Yet this clearly all happened. I had failed. I had been marked down. I had had everybody know. However, there I was. Still here. Still me. Still standing. Downright miserable about what had happened, to be sure, but recovering.

I put on rubber boots and took a walk out in my garden with a small bucket of kitchen scraps for the compost. It was slippery and unpleasant with slush, but the world held signs of being alive, containing beauty amid its harsh sloppy state, if you knew what to look for. A half rotted melon I’d thrown into the backyard the day before, vaguely in the general direction of the compost bin, was, as I suspected, being consumed by hungry wildlife desperate for winter sustenance. Its’ bright orange flesh so busy with teeth marks that within a few days it was likely to only be a husk, if that.

I went to the front yard, picking up a few pieces of trash as I noticed human and dog footprints on my hellstrip pathway, proof that even in the winter a few people and pets and wild creatures have been using it. I wondered how many passersby have seen the way snow settles in tiny circles on beebalm seedheads, or how the frost highlights different jagged angles of spent goldenrod stems, or that sunset color the rosehips start to glow after a few frost cycles. The footprints show that at least others were there - I had made room for them in my winter garden - so at least they could see it, and it was available, whether or not they did.

I thought back to how trauma works, and how it gets in the way of creating opportunity if you don’t deal with it. The way it keeps things mowed down, overly ordered, but at a price to where memories and often even whole swaths of the personality, the self, are walled off and frozen in some time capsule, pockets of difficult life experience that not only don’t sustain thriving but can thaw and burst open to ruin things at the most inopportune times. If you don’t know what’s happening it can seem like a retraumatization, part of an ever-widening list of experiences to be neatly avoided, or a weirdly outsize or overly sensitive reaction that makes you feel crazy.

Yet often these triggers and episodes of re-experiencing are the beginning phase of what can become solid healing. The start of feeling the recognition and grief that later lets you move forward.

Dripping with hot tears that wash away the cold feelings of inferiority that have dragged you away from so many actual accomplishments and dreams and connections. Expelling some toxicity you’ve carried, heavy with shame, that kept you trapped places you didn’t want to be because you feared being trapped with the failure of learning to go.

Feeling the loss of things that much younger you never even got and re-parenting yourself through them is the work.

I am not 16, but if I was 16, or I had a sixteen year old, I’d probably give her some space to cry, feel her disappointment, and then have a meal, a hug, hear some stories of people who had a similar upsetting experience and then went on to become ordinary adults, ordinary drivers, people who are clearly not road menaces. I’d remind her that we’ve all forgot many of the inaccuracies told about us by critics in times of vulnerability, while remembering the truths known internally, and learned to surrounded ourselves with people who appreciate us for who we are on our good days, in our element.

If you’d have told me, even a year ago, that I would be publicly talking about the level of driving avoidance I’ve had all these years without having first fully corrected it - and having the license to prove it - I would have said never. In fact, I’ve long believed I would quietly remedy this remedial issue and then just pretend it never happened.

But sometimes you don’t want to keep your journey to yourself. You stumble upon these learning experiences and unforgettable moments in some sloppy snowmelt, a warm sweet light shining out of your own gnawed-on soul, subtly appreciating elements discovered in the opposite of what you wish you could be doing in the messy middle of a disappointing day.

I found myself proud of what I had done. The bravery and confrontation that have gone into taking this test and getting ready to take it again, even daring to imagine I can drive like I am the only one in the car - because soon I will be - safe and responsible, taking myself and my babies wherever we decide to go.

So here I am, sending the email asking to test again in two weeks, getting behind the wheel again today, and openly sharing how hard this has been.

Because if this is what I can do now, overwhelmed on a gray winter day at the tail end of a very full and wild year, imagine what I’ll be able to grow and build come springtime.