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Today, I met a friend for lunch. I was super excited because I’ve been on this journey I’ve written about, where I’m making an effort to make friends as I get older, and part of that journey is meeting up more often with my friends in person. The meeting place we picked was a delicious pizza place not far from where I lived. It was only about 8 miles away, with Google maps saying that would be about 20 to 25 minutes of driving.
Not too far, right? Not too bad, right?
Wrong. For me, the drive from Arlington into Cambridge involved one too many rotaries, narrow roads, and crazy off and on ramps, and I white-knuckled my drive all the way to lunch and back.
Looking back, I guess I can kind of trace when I first began to dread driving. My very first car that I got when I turned 16 was an indigo blue Hyundai Excel. I loved that car, and I was a super careful driver. The high school wrestling team chose to go for their daily run right as I was pulling into the school parking lot. You look away from the road for one second, one second, and boom, rear-end fender-bender.
I was a much more careful driver after that, of course, but that was not to be the last accident that I was in. Fast-forward a few more years, and my parents are driving me and my sister home from college. It’s an eight-hour drive, and we’re so close to being home. It’s late, and, suddenly, bright orange traffic cones appear out of nowhere. My mother swerves to the left a little too sharply, and the left side of our car begins scraping against a concrete barrier. The pressure of the impact causes our car to flip over twice before landing off the side of the road. Everything happens in slow motion for me, and I can actually feel the moment that we’re tumbling in the air.
Thankfully, none of us left that wreck with any serious injuries, but to this day, whenever I drive close to a concrete barrier, I can feel that anxiety build up in my gut.
Of course, I’ve moved to a place, the Boston area, where there is no traffic grid, only curving and narrow roadways. And while the roads aren’t really paved over cow paths, they are a whirling, swirling nightmare. My final car anxiety note happened when I first moved here. We lived in Cambridge, and I had to drop my husband off at Harvard for an evening class. That shouldn’t have been a challenging drive at all, right? Oh, how wrong I was; nothing but one-way streets and deadends. As I found myself having to reverse down a one-way street to get back to the right direction, I swore to myself that that was it, no more driving for me!
And I managed to make it work for a while. We always tried to find places to live where I could either walk or take public transportation to work. And then, when remote work happened, I could stay home and not drive to my heart’s content.
As I’ve gotten older, I’ve realized that driving isn’t something that I’m always going to be able to avoid, but with GPS, I’m slowly getting over my fear of driving. And, given recent studies, with younger drivers not really being into driving either, I’m at least not alone in my dislike.
How about you? Do you love an open road? Is driving your thing? Or do you dread it as much as I do? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
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