A Persistent Phobia
My Fear Of Driving (Amaxophobia) And Its Ongoing Effects on My Life
Still white-knuckling it
I finally told myself it was time to do something about my acute fear of driving. The traumas that contributed to it were still fresh in my mind decades years later.
At age 17, shortly after I got my driver’s license, someone in a gigantic pickup truck started following me. I tried to lose him by speeding up, blowing through stop signs and making frequent turns, but he was obviously chasing me. He cornered me in a parking lot, took a shotgun out and pointed it at me. He shouted racial slurs and pounded on my window, demanding that I get out of the car, which I refused to do. He had blocked me in and I couldn’t escape. I thought I was going to die.
18 years later I was falsely accused of hitting a pedestrian, breaking her leg and causing damage to her internal organs. I received a letter from her attorney saying she was suing me. My insurance company confirmed that her medical records showed that she had a broken leg consistent with being run over. I thought I was an awful person. This dragged on for a year. Then I learned that my insurance company had given me incorrect information, and there had been no injuries at all. It was a year full of anxiety and self-questioning.
These were factors, among others, in my psychiatrist diagnosing me with PTSD. I was already on medications for depression, anxiety and sleep. I had already been going to therapy every week for decades. Still, I used ride-sharing services a lot and it was getting expensive.
I had talked to my husband about selling my car and using Uber exclusively, but he said if he had an accident or emergency, he wanted to know I could drive him to the hospital. But, as far as I was concerned, that would defeat the purpose. I wanted to create a situation in which I didn’t ever have to drive again. Even watching TV, whenever I saw someone driving, which was frequently, I felt guilty and badly about myself. Other people didn’t seem to have a problem driving and some even enjoyed it.
I put on my calendar a repeating entry every day at 11:00 AM titled “car” with a little automobile icon. I used “car” instead of “drive” because the idea of having to drive every day, even just to circle the block, was too anxiety-provoking, too overwhelming. Using the word “car” meant that I was allowed to just open the car door, sit, close the door, get back out and still be able to mark the task “complete,” as the reminder on my phone nagged me.
But I was having trouble even doing that. I started cheating, letting the reminder go off and then tapping it “complete” without doing anything. My husband would give me occasional reminders, but he never pushed hard, and I was grateful for that. I would hate for him to start resenting me for not trying hard enough. He always thanked me when I told him I was going to drive, so I know it meant a lot to him. I felt I was letting him down by avoiding it so frequently.
The thing was, I was still doing the best I could, even when that meant I did nothing. Maybe I wasn’t doing nothing though. I was thinking about getting in the car every day, which was difficult in itself. But I knew that was insufficient. The whole point of making a recurring calendar action was to prompt and inspire me to at least get into the car, even if I just got out again. I didn’t want to just think about it.
Was getting into the car once a day too much to ask of myself? I hated to think of myself as lazy. The word is so dismissive and has such a negative connotation about the worth of a person, not just their ability or willingness to act.
Was I unwilling to get into the car or unable to? Both? Was my desire to avoid stirring up memories of past driving-related trauma outweighing my desire to drive? Probably. Stuff that happened decades ago was so vivid in my emotional memory bank that it was crippling my functioning in an aspect of life that most people get to take for granted.
I would go for such long periods of time without driving or even turning on the ignition that, when I finally had the courage to do so, my car usually wouldn’t start at all. I wanted to hide this from my husband, so I bought a jump-start device that can be charged up with a USB cable. It worked like a charm, which was both a good and bad thing.
Good, in that I didn’t have to rely on someone else to get my car working again. Good, in that I could hide the ridiculous extent to which I was avoiding getting in my car and turning on the ignition. But not-so-good in that the device served as an enabler.
When I was able to build up my resolve enough to get into the car, turn the ignition on and pull out of the parking space, I often would just drive up and down the street of my housing development and pull back in. That was all I could bear.
About once every two or three weeks I would venture out on the road. The speed limit on our street was 30 mph and I had read somewhere that the police don’t give speeding tickets unless you’re driving 12 mph over the speed limit. But other drivers almost invariably drove faster than that and tailgated.
When I would see a car close behind in the rear-view mirror, I was presented with a dilemma: Either speed up more than 42 mph, risking getting pulled over, or, continue driving at 42 mph and anger the person tailgating me. This would invariably bring back the memory of being chased, cornered and having my life threatened by another driver and/or being accused of running over a pedestrian. And then there was the ever-present fear of having a car crash that would kill someone, which was ingrained in me from the moment I started learning how to drive.
I was in a no-win situation.
A friend once told me he was uncomfortable with my driving because he could tell I was nervous. He said I always white-knuckled the steering wheel, which was true. I did it without being conscious of it, and I didn’t really become aware of it until he told me.
Full disclosure: This is a difficult, embarrassing topic and I used the past tense to describe my struggle. I would have written in the present tense if I was being truly honest. I am struggling with this now. I am writing about it to put it outside of me, to externalize it, hopefully in a way that will help me process it better, to tell my brain that what happened then is unlikely to happen again.
