If you are new to this blog series, please start here: Dreadless: An Introduction.
Oregon, somewhere south of Portland, May 2015. I’ve had my license for less than a month. I’m lying in a hammock under two fir trees at the far end of an enormous rest area. It’s so big that I can barely hear the freeway from where I lie.
My head is pounding, I’m alternating between chills and sweats, and my stomach hums with barely contained nausea. Even the dim light of the cloudy day seems too bright. A squirrel scolds me from the tree above, and the noise sends shards of pain through my brain. I’m caught in the clutches of a migraine, trying hard to calm myself down and nap my way through it.
You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do, I tell myself over and over. Every time I have that thought, the pain subsides. Every time the anxiety builds and spurs the pain again, I think that thought.
Ace is making some food by the car, checking on me now and then while I take care of myself. We are on our way to California. When we left Bellingham this morning, I told myself that I had to drive on the freeway today for the first time. I know how to drive now, I have my license, I can’t let Ace shoulder the burden of driving the entire way to California himself. But I’ve never driven on the freeway before, and the idea of it still terrifies me.
By insisting to myself that I had to do it on this particular day, I worked myself up into a massive state of anxiety that culminated in a migraine. The only way to talk myself back down was to give myself permission to be. To simply be, and not “have” to do anything.
This incident brings to light the final point I’d like to make in this blog series: Sometimes in order to accomplish something, you have to give yourself permission not to do it. Six months after I lay in that hammock and gave myself permission not to drive on the freeway, to never drive on the freeway if I didn’t want to, I learned how to drive on the freeway and drove by myself to California and back. I stopped at the same rest area, headache free this time, and took a picture of the grove of trees that sheltered me through the migraine.
It’s a fine line between permission to be and avoidance. Here’s the distinction: Avoidance is a step in a cycle. When you are avoiding something, the pressure builds on you to do it and in order to avoid the pressure you avoid the thing, or maybe you try, fail, and keep avoiding it. With permission to be, you step out of the cycle by stating clearly your intention not to do the thing, or at least not to do it now. You can say, “I’m not ready for this yet. I’ll try this again at such and such specific time or under these specific conditions.”
This kind of permission takes the pressure off, which frees you from the cycle of destructive emotions. It also raises several important questions about the task in front of you:
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What are your reasons for doing it?
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What are some valid reasons not to do it?
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What would happen if you never did it?
When you ponder these questions, they can give you a clearer perspective on the role of that thing in your life. Often when we have a lot of emotion built up around something, we attribute unrealistic expectations to that thing. We expect it to solve all of our problems, not just the main problem that it will actually solve. Learning how to drive opened a lot of doors for me, changed my identity from a dependent to an independent adult, and gave me a huge boost of self-confidence. It did not make me richer, more beautiful, or a better person. As Ace loves to say, “Aren’t you glad you learned how to drive? Now you get to sit in traffic like the rest of us.”
And while I’ll never regret learning how to drive, I dislike in some ways how it has changed me as a person. One of my struggles against learning how to drive was the ethics of burning fossil fuels and the negative ways in which cars impact our infrastructure and lifestyles. Now I often drive somewhere I would have walked or carpooled out of necessity before. If I hadn’t learned how to drive, I would be much nicer to our planet.
I digress, but my point is that it can be helpful to examine the reality of the thing you are trying to do, and understand that if you don’t do it, you will still have value and validity as a person. It’s ok to give yourself permission to be exactly who and what you are right now. It’s not ok to avoid changing things you’d like to change, and beat yourself up for avoiding them. And it’s important to be able to distinguish the two. If you continue to feel shame and guilt about not doing the thing, you are avoiding. If you negotiate to do the thing under specific conditions and then break that deal to yourself, you are still avoiding.
Once you give yourself permission to be, you may actually find it easier to approach the thing you are struggling with. With the emotional pressure eased, and the shame of failure gone, you’ve stepped outside of the cycle of negative emotions that leads to avoidance. You may find yourself saying, “I don’t have to do this thing, but I do want to do it.” And you might find it easier to negotiate an approach to the thing in the future. I gave myself permission not to drive on the freeway on that road trip, which then made it easier to approach the matter of driving on the freeway at home, under familiar conditions, in a comfortable time frame.
Permission to be is also in line with the concept I mentioned in an earlier post, staying within the comfort zone. When you give yourself permission to be, you accept your starting place, which might be as elementary as sitting in the driver’s seat of a parked car, and you accept the pace at which you need to move, which is your own pace, not determined by anyone else’s standards.
When I learn to drive on the freeway, I started on an onramp that remained a separate lane from the freeway all the way to the next exit. In this way, I could practice getting to speed and checking to see when to merge, without actually merging with traffic. I drove a loop over and over until I was comfortable enough to actually join freeway traffic. It took me more time and caution than it might take another driver before I was comfortably driving on the freeway, but I was ok with that, because I had given myself permission to be.
In the next post, I’ll wrap things up with a recap and a look ahead. Stay tuned for Dreadless: In Conclusion.
In case you want to take something away from these posts other than just my story and some advice, here are a couple of activities you can use to apply the strategies I learned while overcoming my fear of driving. Please refer to the disclaimer in Dreadless: An Introduction.
Storytelling: Unfortunately, we can’t usually give our characters permission to be, as that would make for a pretty boring dramatic arc. Ask yourself what would happen if the character didn’t achieve his or her goal. You don’t need to actually have the character not achieve the goal, but by imagining what will happen if they don’t, you reveal to yourself what is at stake in the story. Chances are that the consequences of failure will be much more dire for your hero than they would be in a real life situation. If you can, find a way to show the consequences of failure to the reader, so that the reader can clearly imagine what is at stake, to keep them rooting for your character all the way through.
Personal Growth: For whatever challenge you are facing, answer these questions:
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What are your reasons for doing it?
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What are some valid reasons not to do it?
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What would happen if you never did it?
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