I awoke the same way I wake up every morning – groggily, reluctantly, mind entirely absent of anything except how cold and bright and horrible the whole world outside the bed is, my internal awareness ignorant of anything except how annoyed I feel. But the door had been opened and the light streaming in forced more of my mind to come to life, and once the fog of tired malaise had lifted enough for solid thought to form beneath it, the first of these lit up my whole brain like some damned firecracker.
I had a driving lesson today.
Now that statement is guaranteed to bare no real sense of malice to any of you reading this. Most of you, I’m sure, haven’t had one such as these in a while. And even if you remember what they looked like, I’m willing to bet you can’t truly remember what they felt like. Everyone feels some level of nervousness while learning that makes no sense to them once they’ve months and years of licensed motoring under their belt. It’s a universal experience.
That being said, I want to tentatively offer myself up as an exception to the rule. I don’t get nervous about driving. Not one bit. You see, there’s actually not a lot of room in this strange mind of mine, so there’s no way for nervousness to make itself known. It doesn’t even fit in there. No, I feel no anxiety about taking the wheel, because my mind is too utterly preoccupied with terror.
When I was 17, everyone my age I knew was either learning, about to learn, or (more likely since I’m a March baby) had already got the whole business done with, card acquired. I had no such desires. I didn’t care. Why would I learn if I had no wish to actually drive anywhere? The bus took me to school and back, my parents could lift me places without too much issue. On the rare occasions I wanted to go to far off locales like Belfast I’d just get the train. Driving offered me no promise of convenience, and I didn’t anticipate it being very fun either. It just looked dangerous.
But I still felt it was culturally expected of me to try, so I asked for money for lessons for my birthday, and I got myself added to the family car’s insurance as a name driver. That was near the end of 2021. By the summer of 2022 I had gotten in the driver’s seat exactly zero times, so my parents, not wanting their investment in my learning to just, you know, sit there, insisted I start. So along comes Victor.
Victor is a family friend who sometimes teaches people to drive. Not for money, he just finds it fun. He taught my Dad, in fact (actually, this is a good part to mention that he, his brother and his sister didn’t learn until they were well past their teens – Uncle Paul was 28).
I had a horrendous time. Our car is a bulky, fat, old Nissan Qashqai. It is, I’ve since found out, the car model most frequently needing attention from a mechanic in the UK. My family’s specific specimen of this esteemed motorcar race comes in fuck-off black, though other dismal colours are available.
It drives like a boat. Ever action, pedal, wheel or otherwise, takes a strange amount of time to manifest in reality. Ever time I turned the accursed beast it would pause for a second to see if it agreed with my judgement. Up and down the country lanes of Greater Coleraine we sped, Victor and I, him giving me helpful epitaphs like “Remember that every car is a lethal weapon”* while I went white-knuckled staring unblinkingly ahead, knowing full well that any actual hazard worse than a speed bump would be undoubtedly pulverized by the refurbished tank I was driving. For six lesson we did this, and because of the growing fear I was developing of the whole business I learned less and less each time.
Then one day I hit a car. It wasn’t really that bad at all, the other car was in a blind spot down the road when I went to pull out from the house and the both of us were equally slow to react, and it left a dent you needed to squat right down and squint at to see. But I lost what tiny modicum of trust I had in my driving abilities then and there, and our lessons stopped.
Then a year went by – I love it when stories say that, it makes the reader’s mind instantly wonder – well, at least this reader’s – what happened in that time that wasn’t worth writing down or even summarizing; why did nothing plot or character relevant happen for such a long span, leading to the further wondering, naturally, as to what parts of your own life – that fell right now (and naturally so) to be important and necessary – will one day become a “six months passed” in the story of your life – where I didn’t drive at all. I meant to this summer but for aforementioned reasons I couldn’t bring myself to do it. If I could collide with someone on a quieter road in friggin’ Coleraine, then what horrific, news-worthy pile-up was I going to manifest in Belfast, where everyone gets to where they need to be through a complicated series of unbroken lane-dives.
But I booked myself some lessons for when I’d be back in God’s Own Cesspool Town. And long story short, this time I learned. Better car (this one isn’t haunted by the vengeful ghost of a canoe), another great instructor, and the presence of pedals on his side meant I could actually attempt things that I’d previously been scared to death to consider. I learned a lot, and by the end of lesson 10, Terry told me I was just about test ready.
But in October I realized that I had until May to get the stupid license or I would have to do my theory all over again (that test being a whole other story involving hubris, mistaken instructions, comically extreme failure, and worst of all, Ballymena). So I booked my test for the end of this very month, and sorted out three consecutive Saturday lessons, two hours each.
Sometime near the start of this week there came a voice from deep within, and it spake thusly: “How on earth do you plan on getting in a car at all after a 5-month hiatus, never mind try to prepare for the test proper?”
I tried to ignore this voice, given how rude and unhelpful it was being, but by gosh did it have a point. All week the fear began to creep into me. On Friday it was with me from the moment I awoke too, and I actually did worry that the day’s activities would be ruined by me succumbing to paranoia. Luckily it was such a great day I managed to forget all about it, until I awoke today.
… I’ve structured this whole post like it’s going to lead up to some crescendo, some dramatic resolution. I felt sick all morning, almost vomit-ready at one point, and boy did I pray I’d remember, and also, you know, not kill anyone. And not only did I not commit even the teeny-tiniest act of manslaughter, I drove better than I did in September**. Far better. The only mishap of the whole two hours was a singular stall near the beginning. I did every manoeuvre perfectly first time, and there were long stretches where he didn’t need to tell me anything except where to turn next. As I got out he said he was surprised because anyone else he’d taught who took a big break had taken longer to come back to where they were.
How to end this then…
Frank Herbert was right to call fear a mind-killer. It destroys your ability to think, so see anything clearly at all. My fear of driving isn’t gone just yet, but it’s greatly abated. And it’s very much God’s doing that this has all gone so well, given how much I’ve prayed over this. And the thing is, the mind can’t just kill the fear. You can’t fight it, nor can you just push it to the back of your mind. You have to act despite it, even because of it. The moment I slipped Terry’s car into 1st and pushed away from the house I was locked in, and the fear was beaten not by me but by reality – I could drive, I did remember.
Perhaps there’s also something to be said for how those we love can remove our fear, but that sounds like a big topic for what’s already my longest post yet. If you’ve stuck with me to the end, I hope you enjoyed this and took something from it, even as it weaved and rambled like a boy in a Qashqai. Peace out, and see you next week.
- In all seriousness Victor did the very best anyone could given how terrible that car was for a learner and how paranoid I was becoming. There are tips he gave me that I’m still using.
** This isn’t exaggeration, several problems me and Terry hadn’t resolved when I left for Uni (not fully releasing the hand-brake and hesitating too much on roundabouts) were entirely absent today. This also shows how good God is, but also reinforces a theory of mine that I learn best when there are breaks away from the thing I’m learning. I’ll write more on this topic some other time.