I’m an adult that can’t drive
There I was, little fifteen year-old me, behind the wheel of my dad’s very large, mildly broken Chevy Avalanche. It was getting dark and we were behind the Wal-Mart in one of those little one-street neighborhoods for townhouses. I was freaking out and doing terribly, and the nervous feeling only got worse when I looked to my dad for some form of reassurance that this was a normal thing to be bad your first time driving, only to see him staring out the window aggressively smoking a cigarette. Eventually, he told me to pull over and even though I was only driving about ten miles per hour, I forgot which one was the gas and which was the brake, I lost that 50–50 chance of getting it right and drove up the curb and almost hit a fire hydrant. I barely avoided peeing my pants–not because of the crash itself but because of my dad yelling at me–and my dad didn’t talk to me for two weeks after.
Needless to say, this was a pretty traumatizing situation and I was very reluctant to go back to driving ever again. But I had to because state laws or some bullshit said I had to take driver’s ed. So here I was, reluctant, but still willing to learn. It wasn’t too bad. It was very reassuring that my instructor had his own brake, for one, and he was used to teaching really bad drivers, like myself, to be less bad. Luckily at this time, my mom had a car that wasn’t a pickup truck that I practiced on. I was out of the country when I turned sixteen, but was planning on getting my license when I got back. Except the worst happened–my mom’s car was broken and the only option was that stupid truck. Obviously, I stopped prioritizing driving right then and there. There was no way you could get me to operate that clunky, large, metal death-machine.
The years went by and I still didn’t get my license. In high school, I lived close to a lot of my friends and whenever I needed to go somewhere, they also needed to go to that same place so it worked out. And getting rides from people in college was easy because 1) everyone was so close together all the time, and 2) a lot of people don’t have cars on campus so the ones that do have a lot of empathy. But here in the suburbs, it’s not like that. Everything is too far away to walk to for most of us, so we need cars.
To succeed in living here without a license, you have to have good friends. Like really good friends. The ones that even if you annoy them, will still pick you up from work for you if your other ride bails through. You have to have a network of friends that like you enough to take you from place to place. Hell, you need friends that will like you enough to drive across town to pick you up and hang out with you. And because of my lack of driving abilities, I’ve lost a lot of friends over the years. I’m seen as more of an inconvenience than as a friend, so I’m just kind of let go. A good Twitter presence still, though. It’s very secluding, not having your license.
To the ones who still have a social life despite living in a car-centric community (and I know there are a lot of you), I’m so jealous of you. You’re lucky. For the rest of us, we either have to learn how to deal with being immobile and alone, or face our fears (and our dads) to buck up and finally learn how to drive.
