At 16 years old I got a driver’s license, becoming one of the nearly 233 million other Americans who already have one. From there, I began driving every day to work or school because public transit is inaccessible, walking is too far, and biking is almost a guaranteed death sentence in most cities in the US. But despite having to drive this often, I still don't like it.
I’ve slowly come to hate it really. And not just the kind of hate where I loathe the daily crawl on the freeway during rush hour, thinking about how I could be in my favorite PJ’s that has the one hole in the armpit but I just can’t throw it away because it’s so comfy.
It’s more of an anxiety where my brain is telling me to not step foot in that car because it may be the very last time I do it.
But because car anxiety is so hard to articulate in a country where driving is just what everyone does, I just pretend it’s the former — otherwise I think people would never let me drive them anywhere ever again and I would become a hermit.
This irrational fear of driving — also called amaxophobia — involves thoughts that all come down to me dying somehow. On less manageable days, it’s as simple as my brain telling me that the car will explode into a great ball of fire at some point during the drive. It’ll be so catastrophic that I end up as a short segment on the local news before being forgotten about by the general public like most stories, big or small.
Other times, it’s less straightforward. Some days, my mind plays a scenario that traffic will be terrible that day. I’ll be hours late and will be disciplined for it. But this will just be the beginning of my bad boy streak as I continue to keep showing up late as I slowly morph into a delinquent, showing up with a leather jacket and slicked back hair like I stepped out of the movie Grease. It will get so bad that my job has no other choice but to fire me.
I’ll run out of money and get kicked out of my apartment when I miss my first rent check.
Eventually, I won’t be able to afford food either and I’ll starve.
Then I’ll die.
All this thinking because my brain doesn’t believe that I’ll make it to work on time despite always making a point to being to everything — and I mean everything — at least 15 minutes early.
Thankfully, driving has gotten slowly better now that I moved to a smaller city about a year ago. It’s a city so small that the biggest news in recent memory is that we’re getting an olive garden, so traffic is virtually nonexistent. If traffic ever did get bad, it would probably be because we’re undergoing a natural disaster and we don’t have much time left to live anyway, much less get in our cars and drive to work.
But the end times are not upon us — yet. So I’ll keep getting in that car and driving to work, pushing back those fears and manifesting that an aerial shot of my car never ends up on the nightly news, a photo of me next to the wreckage.