Once Upon a Car Crash

You know, one of the many “fun” things about anxiety is that it makes everything embarrassing. Walking across the room? Embarrassing. Buying toothpaste? Embarrassing. I blinked once, and it was embarrassing (exaggeration? Maybe. Maybe not). Basically: I exist? How embarrassing.

Even though, as I’ve gotten older, my mind has learned that there’s no real reason for me to be embarrassed most of the time, and nowadays I can often tell myself “that literally wasn’t embarrassing, don’t worry about it”, my emotions still usually have other plans. So there I go, being embarrassed or anxious or what-have-you, despite actively making the choice not to be. Because (surprise!) what you know and what you feel can be, and often are, wildly different things.

Anyways, all this to say: I perceive a large portion of my life as embarrassing. The big things and the small things. The obviously embarrassing things, and then the things that probably nobody else ever even noticed, but I personally have overthought a hundred and one times in my head. Per night. I lie awake at night thinking about things that not only don’t matter now, but they probably never mattered to begin with.

So, as you can imagine, it really took some careful thought and sifting through some uncomfortable memories that kind of made my stomach lurch in rejection of my reality, to think of one memory in particular that felt appropriate to share. One that was actually embarrassing, and would have been embarrassing to someone else if it had happened to them too. Like I said, it’s all embarrassing to me, big or small, so I really challenged myself here to think about the big stuff. And, of course, my anxiety-filled brain did not disappoint. It hit me, and I knew exactly which story I had to tell: The story of how I got my first car.

Unassuming, I know. How could that go wrong? How could that be embarrassing? That should be exciting! Well, my friends, where there’s a will, there’s a way, and truly, I always find a way. Which is truly disappointing, given the amount of effort and energy I put into trying to not embarrass myself. But hey, I guess it all makes for a good story (as long I can tell my stories without physically wanting to simultaneously climb out of my skin and run away, cry, and simply cease to exist).

So, without further ado, we begin our story in the summer of 2017. I had just turned twenty-one a few months prior, and had just finished my sophomore year of college (worst year of my life. Not sure if that’s relevant to this story, but I felt the need to let you know).

I was staying with my older sister for the summer, and my mom was in town to drop me off after she helped me move out of my dorm, so it ended up that the three of us went to the car dealership at the beginning of the summer to find me a nice little car of my own. I was getting the car so that I could drive it back to college by the end of the summer, but it’s very important for you to know that I did not yet in fact have a license, or really know how to drive at all, to be honest. I was supposed to learn over the summer (and I did, though that’s not what this story is about), but up until this point, I had really only driven a car maybe a handful of times.

Cue my (lack of) driving history story time: I was born in the US, but spent several years of my childhood and all of my teen years, moving to and living in several different countries overseas, and in the midst of that, never really learned how to drive anything other than one of those little moped/scooters during those teen years, for various reasons – chronic illness being one of them. I used to be really excited about driving when I was younger, and then as I got older and couldn’t trust my brain and body to work with me, driving became something I was genuinely scared of and had little desire to do. Just getting through school and surviving life was my main priority, and learning to drive kind of fell on the back burner. Then before I knew it, I was off to college, and if I didn’t have time to learn to drive before, I definitely didn’t anymore.

I had driven cars down a few of highways, and down the occasional backroads, but those experiences were usually years apart, meaning I pretty much retained little to no knowledge of driving from one experience to the next, because I basically never did it. There was not enough memory for me to have any sort of muscle memory of driving a car. I could sit in the driver’s seat of a car and have no instincts whatsoever as to what I should do. Good times.

All of this to say, I basically had exactly zero driving instincts or knowledge at twenty-one. This is important to know.

Now, back to our story, in the summer of 2017. I knew I needed a car to help me get around at school, I knew that learning to drive would be super helpful and would benefit me in the long run (to be totally honest, having a car for my last two years of college genuinely played a big factor in me not dropping out. College was a trip, but that’s another story). It would give me independence. As much as I didn’t want to drive, I really did want to. We love a good inner conflict.

So, I went with my mom and sister to the car dealership in our hometown. We’re looking at cars, testing them out (literally had no idea what I was looking for, though). Everything was going fine. My mom is doing the test driving, obviously, and that’s fine by me. I’m just happy to get a car and I’ll take whatever.

Eventually, we find the car we think we want. I like it. It has a lot of nice features. My mom says it drives well. I trust her. Everything is peachy, as they say. We’re in the parking lot, confirming all those good old car and pricing details, talking to the car dealer, who eventually looks at me and says “listen, you should drive the car, see if you like it, since you’re gonna be driving it eventually”.

I’m thinking “I’m pretty sure I’ll like any car, I’ll learn to love whatever I’ve got”, and so I tell him “nah, I’m good”.

Now we get some pushback.

He’s like “at least just drive it around the lot”. A reasonable request.

And thus, we arrive at the moment of truth. First of all, let me tell ya, being a chronic people pleaser will make you do all kinds of fun things that you’re really not comfortable doing. Your gut (or instinct?) tells you one thing, but then you just ignore it because it couldn’t possibly be right, right? And so you understand that, in that moment, my instinct to not do something that I knew I couldn’t do was overridden by my desire to try to make someone else happy (or at least stop pestering me). So I get in the car, my older sister gets in the passenger’s side. Everyone assures me it’s gonna be fine. Even I think “hey, maybe everything will be fine”.

Nonetheless, I take an excessively long time to adjust everything, trying to prolong the inevitable, and eventually I figure it’s best to just get it over with. It occurs to me once again that maybe my anxiety is making this all out to be worse than it is and that everything will be fine. So I turn the car on, and put it in drive, and it all goes downhill from there. In my haste, I forget to keep my foot on the break until I’m actually ready to go, and naturally, I start to panic when the car starts moving before I’m ready. All logic has left me now. All I know is that I want this car to stop moving immediately. I choke out a “what do I do?!” peppered with nervous laughter. My sister, not realizing that I am truly not in control in this moment, offers the obvious “just step on the break”. Ah yes, I forgot about that. I slam my foot down on a pedal. Any pedal. And unfortunately…it was the gas pedal. We go flying forward, and slam into one of the many cars in the lot. And then…we just sit there. Frozen. Unable to believe what just happened. All in a matter of seconds that I will remember forever and ever. Amen.

Eventually, I unfreeze, put the car in park and exit the vehicle. I don’t even know how to reverse this thing yet, and I’m not about to try. I’m shocked. Horrified. Ready for the earth to just open up and swallow me so I can mourn my idiocy in the safety of the underground. But the earth does no such thing.

“Well,” my mom finally says, “at least you know for sure what car you’re getting”. Yes. The one with a big dent in it now. The dent that I made. Awesome.

Thankfully, my mom takes care of everything and I don’t have to look anyone else in the eyes, so I’m in the clear to cry my eyes out in my mom’s car. We have a family friend who works at the dealership who comes out to tell me everything is fine and the other car isn’t even damaged, and the dent in what is about to be my car isn’t even that bad. Which should have made me feel better, but just makes me cry harder because I wanted to be left alone.

Anyways, everything was fine. Everyone was fine (we weren’t even moving that fast when we hit the other car, so we were physically fine, just slightly emotionally shaken). My newly owned car was fine (just a little dent, and we got it all fixed up). But wow. I can never show my face at that dealership again (a lie, it turns out, because I have since returned for car maintenance, and when my little sister got her own car this year, and y’know what? Nobody said a word about it to my face, thank god, but we were all thinking about it, let’s be honest).

And sure, I stay awake at night thinking about it sometimes (definitely less than I used to, though). I still feel horrible when people bring it up and/or laugh about it, and wish I could go back in time and say “hey, thank you, Mr. Car Dealer, but I’m gonna pass and not drive this car around the lot because, low-key, I can’t even drive”.

But you know what? I got some good things out of a bad and embarrassing moment, too. I mean, I have my car, and he’s a wonderful car named Rocky (because we got off to a rocky start. Also after Rocky Balboa). He’s blue (my favorite color). He’s gotten me through many days and nights of driving to escape from my problems and reduce my anxiety (ironic, since driving was initially so anxiety-inducing for me), and has kept me safe and comfortable on many cross-country adventures. Not to mention, he has excellent storage and mileage.

In addition to that, I now have a very evident memory of what happens when I don’t trust my own instincts and listen to what my gut is trying to tell me. As a result, I’m getting better all the time at setting boundaries and sticking to them, and wow, is that a necessary life skill or what? Also, when people talk about accidents they have, or something embarrassing and driving-related, I now have a story to tell so they don’t have to feel so bad, because hey, we all make driving mistakes. Especially when we don’t know how to drive.

Owning your mistakes and embarrassing moments does make you feel a little bit better about them, for the most part. Sometimes when you actually hear it out loud (or read it, in this case), you realize it’s not as big and bad as it sounds in your head. This was somewhat big, I mean, I did crash a car, after all. But all in all, in the grand scheme of things, it’s really a miniscule little thing that happened that I might not care about, or even remember, in fifty years’ time. Or, that’s what I tell myself when my anxiety gets really bad, anyways.

So, there you have it. One of my many embarrassing moments. Hope you enjoyed it, because I definitely didn’t.