Dreadless: Riding the Edge of Fear

If you are new to this blog series, please start here: Dreadless: An Introduction

**Note: If you’ve been following this story so far, you’ll want to know that I have belatedly changed my boyfriend’s name to Ace in order to protect his identity.**

January, 2013. The summer before, I had started sitting in the driver’s seat, confronting my panic attacks. I hadn’t taken it any further. Today, that was going to change.

We were on a road trip, driving through Big Sur on the California coast. Tired and hungry, we’d gotten into a fight. Ace pulled the Subaru over onto a tiny pull out, sandwiched between the road, towering cliffs on one side, a steep drop-off to the ocean on the other side. He stalked off to cool down, and I stayed with the car, fuming.

It wasn’t just the fight that had me angry. It was the situation I found myself in. What if he didn’t come back? I wondered. I was over a thousand miles from home, with all of our gear in the car, parked in an uncomfortable spot. If it had been necessary, I couldn’t drive away from this situation. I couldn’t even pull out and drive the couple of miles back to the last campground we had passed.

I was scared and angry, and in that moment I made a decision. I was going to learn how to drive if it was the last thing I did.

I told Ace my decision the next morning, as we fried egg-in-the-baskets out of the back of the car, under a tarp in the pouring rain, in the same campground we had passed the day before. Of course, he had come back to the car, and we had made up and gone to make camp before dark.

When we were packed up and ready to leave that morning, Ace said, “Why don’t you drive around the campground once?”

The sharp jolt of fear that presaged a rising panic attack struck. I almost went back on the resolution I had just made. The idea of driving around the campground was irrationally terrifying.

I recalled how helpless I had felt waiting in the car by the side of the road, and I knew I had to do this, no matter how scared I was. So I did. It was terrifying, and embarrassing to be so scared. But I drove the loop without any of the imagined horrible things happening. I didn’t hit a car, I didn’t lose control of the vehicle.

A couple of days later, I drove another loop at another campground, this time with a little more confidence, if no less chagrin at how hesitant I was to go a few miles an hour on a deserted loop of asphalt. When we returned to Bellingham, I started practicing the very day after we got back, in empty parking lots.

I drove loops in the parking lot every day for two weeks before venturing cautiously onto a quiet side street. The trick we had discovered was to get me so calm about driving in one situation that I was almost bored with it, before moving onto a more advanced situation. In this way, we were able to ride that edge of fear, keeping me in the comfort zone until it was time to press forward.

Using this strategy, I learned to steer around orange cones in the parking lot. One of the things that had always terrified me was that I couldn’t quite tell where the boundaries of the car were. Ace solved this by having me drive between two orange cones, then gradually moving the cones closer and closer together, so that I would have to steer tighter and tighter to pass through this “gate.” To this day, when I am driving between lines on the road, I think of them as my gates, and when these gates change suddenly–for example, due to debris, someone drifting into my lane, or a narrow bridge, I tell myself, “stay in your gates,” and I am able to steer correctly in spite of the anxiety produced by the change.

Using the cones, I practiced staying in the gates, steering around both left and right turns, backing up, pulling into and backing into parking spaces. We found a long parking lot by the mall where I could practice accelerating. It was the drivers ed course I had always needed, coupled with emotional support from an incredibly patient partner. By the time I pushed the edge of my comfort to confront the actual streets, I had learned all of the skills I needed in order to drive safely.

When we left the parking lot, we discovered that side streets were incredibly scary to me. The closeness of the parked cars, the low visibility at stop signs, pets and children running across the street were all overwhelming. So we found a wide, slow main street with long visibility and a median separating the lanes. It was easy to turn around at each end of this street, and I drove up and down it countless times, slowly becoming accustomed to sharing the road with other cars. It was easy to pull over if a panic attack threatened to overwhelm me.

And so we continued, for several months, slowly pushing me into more and more advanced driving situations, pulling back whenever it was necessary. We used a scale for my anxiety; every time I entered a new situation, Ace asked where I was on a scale of 1-10. Sometimes my response would be beyond a ten, other times it would be four or five. If I was above five, that meant I was pretty seriously freaked out, and I would need to pull back. If I was under five, that meant we could keep pushing the boundary of my anxiety.

This process got me a long way into learning how to drive. By the end of about six months of this, I could drive safely in moderate traffic on slow city streets without completely losing my head. This was farther than I had ever come before. But the strategies I had gained to this point for handling the emotional obstacles weren’t enough to push me past the driving activities that caused me the deepest anxiety: driving in thick traffic, changing lanes, making left turns, parallel parking, backing around a corner, driving at high speeds. I reached a certain level of proficiency, and then anxiety overwhelmed me and I gave up–yet again. The things I needed to learn required larger steps outside of my comfort zone, and in order to make those steps, I would have to learn new strategies for coping with fear.

It would be two more years before I finally got my license. In the next post, Dreadless: What is Fear? I’m going to get a little technical and talk about the nature of anxiety, stress, and their effects on the body, in order to illustrate what was happening when I pushed too far beyond the comfort zone.

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: One of the biggest mistakes novice writers make is to be too nice to their characters. Consider your current project. Are you allowing your character to stay too deep inside their comfort zone? Are you pushing them far enough out to be faced with challenges that require them to change? Look at each scene in your story and ask yourself, is the character too comfortable here? Likewise, you might be pushing your character from one high-action scenario to another, without allowing them any breathing space. Characters need scenes where they are not being pushed in order to regroup, reflect on what is happening to them, and assess their next moves. Check the flow of your scenes for this kind of balance. Are high action scenes followed by reflection scenes? If not, consider evening things out a bit.

Personal Growth:

Note: At this point in the personal growth exercises, we go from theoretical to active. It is highly advisable that you have a friend available for support. If there is no one in your personal life you can trust in this role, consider contacting a professional. This is especially true if the thing you are trying to overcome involves real dangers to your person or others, as driving did for me. Even if the dangers are emotional, having another person involved can help you have perspective. When you are in a high anxiety situation, you can’t always think clearly.

In the last exercise, you pinpointed a starting place, a safe spot to start confronting the thing that you are avoiding. Pick a time and place where you can dedicate yourself to the activity. As you do it, ask the question (or better yet, have your supporter asking it) “Where am I on the emotional scale of 1 to 10?”  If you find yourself above 5, stop and do some deep breathing in order to calm down. Try again until you can successfully repeat the activity ten times (not necessarily one after the other, it can be across the span of days) without going over a 5 on the anxiety scale. Once you can do this, proceed to the next step on your list, and repeat the process.