I got my license when I was twenty-five years old. I got my first learner’s permit, my high school graduation went by, my second learner’s permit, then my marriage, part-time jobs, a move, full-time jobs, a divorce, a new apartment, a new learner’s permit, a pandemic, my first independent apartment, and still no driver’s license.
So many reasons for it and they hurt to talk about. Please keep in mind that I’m adding context to my life so you can better understand, not blaming my issues on things in my past. My closure depended on understanding which things in my life were and were not my fault.
We moved around a lot when I was younger due to my parents’ divorce. I didn’t make any long-lasting friendships at school because of this, although there were some nice people. So my social life suffered quite a bit, and unfortunately my parents thwarted my attempts to make friends whenever they could – not because they were bad people, but (I believe) because I was already so far behind the curve that I was choosing to try and socialize with other socially inept kids.
If I look back, I can see what they were worried about. The people I was ending up around were the ones that no one else wanted to talk to – like me. But not the churchgoing, slightly shy and easily intimidated kinds of socially awkward kids that were wholesome and still learning. These kids were kinda sketchy.
My parents were also just generally sheltering. I forgave them but it had an impact. I was incredibly naive and uneducated on the world or the dangers in it by the time I turned eighteen. Completely unprepared for the world. It hurts. The world still hurts.
Anyway, when I turned sixteen, everyone expected me to get a CAR!!! And a LICENSE!! And FREEDOM! But I was still such a small, scared person – and I had nowhere to drive to. Where am I gonna go, huh? Out with fri- wait no, I don’t have friends. Out with my boyf – nope, I don’t have a boyfriend. To my job? I work a mile from my home. There’s nowhere to go. There’s no one to go anywhere with.
And also, driving scared me a lot. I had taken driver’s ed, and it was awful. I had a terrible experience, I continuously hit the gas instead of the brake, panicked in traffic, and I scared myself. I didn’t feel like I was ready to operate this vehicle. I was going to kill someone, or me. I didn’t feel like it was time yet.
I didn’t feel like I was ready.
My heart is beating faster just talking about all this. It was a huge problem in my life that my family just didn’t understand. Every time I saw my grandparents it was all about my license, when are you getting your license, you need your license. For years just pestering me about something I had already said I didn’t feel ready for. Why didn’t anyone care about my mental state?
And this should have been a huge red flag for me about certain family members, to be honest. The part where my comfort level didn’t seem to be important to them at all. It was just mind-boggling to them that I wouldn’t want to put my life and other people’s lives on the line just to appease a social norm.
And I did have to wrestle with morality here, this isn’t a lie, even though my aunts and uncles and grandparents would scoff when I said that. You can kill people with a car. Wouldn’t you have to think about it before getting a firearm? I wanted to think and feel ready before I took on this responsibility. I didn’t want everyone else to be telling me I could do it, I wanted to wait until I had an inside voice saying I could do it. I wanted to make sure I was 100% aware of what I was doing. Had the instincts I would need.
And I didn’t. I knew I didn’t. Even when I was younger I knew things weren’t right.
When I was married my then husband would drive us places, and I could tell it was a burden on him. But he had said when we moved in that my license wasn’t an issue for him – he said a lot of things – and he never held driving against me. He would mention it as a struggle, but it seemed to be the only thing that he didn’t try to use against me.
Maybe it was because he got his license at twenty-four. Maybe he had gone through what I went through. And honestly, our home life was so difficult, I barely had the confidence to go to work, let alone go out and fight the dragon again.
I told people from the time I turned twenty, that I didn’t want to learn to drive in someone else’s car. I didn’t want to risk damage to someone else’s property, I wanted to own a small car that I could drive around and if I messed up and hit someone, chances were that I would die and not them. I wanted to learn how to drive on my own without someone in my car, so I couldn’t accidentally kill them.
And these were real fears. These things kept me awake. I wished with my whole heart there was a way to drive without someone with me.
Sometimes I would tell people, I wish there was a simulator I could drive in. Something just for the first few hours. Where I could see if I had what it took. But there was nothing like that available, and I just waited. And took the criticism and skepticism of my family members and people in my life, heard them laugh at me, and waited. And went through life taking the bus to work.
And waited.
I had a job at a mid-size department store – think gifts for middle-aged women and a lot of greeting cards – and it started out okay. It was one of my first full-time jobs and it involved stationery and that was a huge passion of mine, still is.
I had just moved to my new apartment – my first place all by myself – and life was starting to settle in. I had a new boyfriend that I was a huge fan of – still am – and had enough money to cover all my own bills.
Everything was great – except I was still taking the bus, and winter was closing in. The stop I got on was right outside my apartment, but it stopped about a quarter mile before my work. And I didn’t have good winter boots.
But I was determined to get it done. Take the bus, talk the talk, walk the walk. If I’m determined to be self-sufficient, that’s what I’m going to be.
My boyfriend didn’t mock me or belittle me for wanting to do all this, for putting myself through it, for making my life more difficult because I was struggling with my own mind. He didn’t check up on me about things, or pester me, or talk about how driving out to see me was getting to be too much.
He moved from his hometown a little further up the highway about a year after we met. It hurt my feelings, because he had been talking about moving closer to me to make it easier to see each other. But he moved further away. I realized his priorities weren’t what I thought they were. I was really hurt.
For a few months – maybe six months, seven – I took a bus and two train lines to go see him. The journey was anywhere between two and three hours long – if my trains were on time – and it was absolutely worth it because I loved seeing him and I loved that he wasn’t driving out to get me every time we hung out.
He felt bad that I took the train, but I didn’t mind even a little bit. And we’d spend the weekend and then he’d either drive me home the 1 hour or drop me off at the station. It was a lot for both of us but it was worth it to get to spend the weekend with him. I was staying there for the weekend when I got the call to interview for my current job.
I wasn’t hugely bothered by taking the train out to see him, but it definitely took a lot of time. My trains were late sometimes, and I missed connections, or there was just no train coming for some reason. It was embarrassing, and I could tell even though he didn’t judge me he was worried.
I’ve decided to make this a three-part post because it’s so long. I’ll post the second half within the next few days. Thanks so much for reading this far. This is a tough subject to talk about but it’s nice to just say things like they are.