How I Learned to Drive (Again)
Image: R.A. Williams “Fifth Avenue in the Afternoon: New York’s Idea of a Pleasure Street” (1892) , NYPL Digital Collections
I don’t remember why I let my driver’s license lapse, but I suspect it was because I lied to myself that it didn’t matter. This was extremely out of character because I am preternaturally obsessed with all other forms of personal documentation: not only can I tell you when each of my two passports and my Global Entry expires, I have calendar reminders set so that I can start the renewal process on the earliest date possible. I got my enhanced Real ID earlier than anyone I know. I relish being the organized girl at the DMV, who shows up fifteen minutes early with her file folder of paper documentation, plus digital back-ups. It hasn’t happened yet, but one day, so help me God, a TSA agent will praise me for my cool swiftness. True, I was licensed in Indiana, and switching to a New York license sounded like a whole thing, but there must have been some messier mishegas at work here because I otherwise pathologically seek validation through bureaucracy.
No, it had to do with driving itself, an activity that hems me in with self doubt. I used to associate driving with freedom: not needing a ride from my parents, belting Tori Amos lyrics with the windows rolled down (WITH THEIR NINE INCH NAILS AND LITTLE FASCIST PANTIES), getting cheese fries at the drive-through! But in the twelve years or so since I’d last been behind the wheel, cars have - it seemed to me - swollen in size. If you’ll forgive the Andy Rooney-nature of this rant: everyone is up so high up now! The reliable sedan that got me through high school and graduate school would be absolutely dwarfed; it feels like no one can see me at all. Plus every car now comes equipped with a surround of iPads, like the Starship Enterprise? And what’s going on with these retina-melting LED headlights turning every highway into a rolling convoy of quasars? And let’s not even talk about the cyclists who text, okay? You know who you are and that you suck.
And then, of course, there are the dreams, which started in my early 30s. Stop me if you’ve heard this one: you’re cruising down the highway at top speed, you move your foot onto the brake but the car continues to accelerate into the somnolent abyss? You’re rolling downhill, stomping as hard as you can but it’s no good, until you wake up in a cold sweat. It’s hard not to interpret anxiety dreams as omens (I also have a separate theory that interfacing with technology is impossible in dreams). Facing your fears is always hard, but facing new fears that seem to have appeared out of the unconscious is a special kind of challenge.
It’s one thing to be able to interpret the psychic meaning of a dream like this - lack of control! Life is terrifying and uncertain and none of us are promised anything! - but it’s quite another to do anything about it, especially if there’s no particularly pressing reason that you have to. Plenty of New Yorkers don’t drive. Plenty of New Yorkers who DO drive certainly shouldn’t. Down in the dregs of my dark heart, a patriotic fire burns for mass transit: the MTA is both a shadow of the glory it could be and the finest mass transit system in the goddamn world. My husband enjoys driving and is good at it. Also, I do not, strictly speaking, have a car.
All of these are good reasons not to drive, and all of them are why I decided I need to fix this fear before it goes any further and I am frozen in amber in the passenger seat. Worst case scenarios always involve lack of choice: with every passing year, I could feel the lack of my license cementing itself further as I morphed into A Person Who Doesn’t Drive.
I use prescription drugs to deal with my fear of flying (oh you thought I only had one irrational, annoying fear?) and they work an absolute treat, as do YouTube videos where pilots talk you through their routines in their dulcet Chuck Yeager drawls. There’s a great Reddit group for aviation enthusiasts, and you can even listen to air traffic controllers all over the world - I especially like Dublin because they always say “good morning” to their inbound flights.
Most importantly, I read Mark Vanhoenacker’s wonderful book Skyfaring: A Journey with a Pilot, which is a love letter to air travel that strips away the sordid indignities and makes you feel the immensity of the miracle of flight. There’s an enthralling chapter on “sky countries” - the geography of the air above us. When you fly, you pass along a series of invisible beacons (ancestors of the actual beacons that were lit to guide the first trans-continental mail flights of the twentieth century). These are called Waypoints and they are like highways that exist at every altitude, says Vanhoenacker, “the smallest nuggets of aerial geography, and in some sense the only such unit that matters once you leave the runway.” They are charming: when you pass over Detroit, for example, you fly through Waypoints MOTWN and WONDR. Vanhoenacker so loves the sky that he has helped me love it too (and I, in turn, am helped by Klonopin).
If my fear of flying is about lack of control, then my fear of driving is really the opposite: driving puts me far too in control for my liking, especially on the wild roads of New York where everyone tells you confidence is the first and perhaps only law. I diligently read the New York State Road Manual in preparation for my written permit test and I know it will come as a shock to some of you, but many of the rules outlined in said manual, such as turn signals, seem to have fallen squarely into the realm of the optional for New York City drivers. People shrug these things off with a worldliness that I envy but can’t imitate - although I can jaywalk with the best of them. The first driving instructor that I tried only exacerbated my fears by insisting that my lack of confidence was due to my personal refusal to pull a U-turn on 2nd Avenue at his behest. I knew if I were really going to learn again, I needed someone who would believe my fear is real.
And then I met Everlina. There are times in this life when you come across someone who makes everyone around them rise up to match her competence. Her calm could shame a Zen Buddhist. Before each lesson, you receive a text confirmation which includes a thorough briefing on the thoroughly sensible rules and regulations inside in her Honda Civic (phones off, no vaping, cancel if you’re sick). She never raises her voice, she tells corny jokes and waves to people with cute dogs, and she taught me a new way to parallel park. Midway through our first lesson, she told me, “you can drive” and I could hear angels singing through the clouds. When we were finished, she led us in a brief meditation and then gave me a hug. Her very presence is the control - or the attempt at control - that I’ve been looking for. (Message me if you want her info). This Wednesday, we’ll take the highway.