The Wheel is a Liar

The idea of driving is a beautiful ghost. It haunts me with visions of freedom—windows down, hair whipping, a ribbon of asphalt unraveling toward a chosen horizon. It’s the promise of control, of being the master of your own momentum. I desperately wanted to host that ghost in my body. I wanted to be a good driver.

The reality is, the ghost is malevolent, and I am its unwilling vessel.

I cannot drive. More accurately, the act of driving is a séance that summons chaos, and I have finally stopped trying to be the medium.

There was a time I tried to force the communion. I would sit in the driver's seat, my hands cold and slick on the wheel, and try to bend two tons of metal to my will. It was like trying to command a demon. My anxiety would rise, a static shriek in my ears, distorting my vision. The car felt less like a machine and more like a possessed entity, sensing my fear, drinking it.

I am lucky to be alive. I say that not as a platitude, but as a stark, clinical fact.

My memories of driving are not memories; they are near-death premonitions that already happened.

The time I hydroplaned, the world outside dissolving into a gray smear as the car decided to dance, not drive.

The countless curbs I mounted, the mailboxes I kissed, the sideswiped trees—all because my brain could not translate the space around me into a language my hands could understand.

The worst one: spinning on a black-ice-slicked highway, a horrifying, silent pirouette in the dead of night. The lane for oncoming traffic was, by some miracle, empty. It was a void waiting to be filled with the crushing metal of a semi-truck. We missed that fate by inches. The silence after we stopped was louder than any scream.

I totaled cars. Beautiful, expensive, borrowed cars. I turned them into accordions of scrap metal, each crash a costly exorcism that never took. My family paid the financial price, but I carried the spiritual debt.

My counselors called it "exposure therapy." They said I had to face the fear. They didn't understand—I wasn't facing a fear; I was feeding a monster. The fear was the sanest part of me, the part screaming, “Stop! This is a violation of physics and fate!”

My body was built wrong for this. I was born with a tilt, my entire frame a crooked foundation. My depth perception is a liar. A stop sign could be ten feet away or a hundred; my eyes send conflicting, panicked reports to a brain already in meltdown. My glasses correct vision, but they can’t correct a fundamental, horrifying disconnect between my mind and the physical world.

So, I have surrendered. And in this surrender, I have found a profound and terrifying peace.

I gave up the ghost. I exiled myself from the driver's seat.

The consequences are a quiet horror of their own. I am a prisoner of logistics, dependent on the schedules and goodwill of others. I feel the weight of my own limitation, a social failure for a thirty-year-old.

But the trade is simple: my independence for my life.

I no longer white-knuckle a steering wheel, my heart hammering a frantic drum solo as an eighteen-wheeler’s shadow swallows my car. I no longer have to pretend that blaring music can drown out the primal shriek of my own terror.

Sometimes, the beautiful ghost still visits. I fantasize about a cherry-red Mustang, purring under my command, a symbol of effortless cool. But now I see the fantasy for what it is: a siren's song. My Mustang would be a hearse.

Understanding this is my real accomplishment. It’s not a skill of the road, but a skill of the soul—the self-awareness to look into the abyss of my own inability and simply walk away.

I do not drive anymore.

The wild, reckless independence is gone.

In its place is the quiet, solid truth of the passenger seat.

I am alive. The world is safer. The sacrifice was not a loss, but the wisest deal I ever made with the devil on the road.