Dreadless: Start Where You Are

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

It was a cool June day, several months after I had realized that the only way to break the cycle was to stop avoiding the issue of learning how to drive. I had been out for a walk. I had been thinking about driving a lot lately although I hadn’t actually gotten around to not avoiding it. Mostly an avalanche of anxious thoughts like, Why don’t I know how to drive yet? Am I ever going to learn how to drive? What if I were in a situation where I really needed to know how to drive?

On the way back to the apartment, I passed our 2001 Legacy Subaru parked on the street. My boyfriend (I’m referring to him as Ace here to protect his identity) had bought it four years prior so that I could have an easy car to learn how to drive in. The VW Vanagon we owned before that had been really difficult to shift, adding just one more obstacle–or excuse. But in four years with an automatic, I still hadn’t learned how to drive.

As I stood there on the sidewalk and thought about getting into the car and sitting down in the driver seat, I had a sharp fear reaction. It was similar to the intense fear of seeing a huge spider. I had had this kind of reaction before, when I imagined myself driving in traffic. But I hadn’t realized how deep my fear truly was.

Recalling my realization about changing my behavior, I pulled out my keys and opened the driver-side door. My heart beat faster as I eased myself down into the seat and closed the door behind me. My chest constricted, and it was difficult to breathe.

I was having a panic attack, and I hadn’t even started the engine.

I closed my eyes and tried to calm myself by taking deep breaths. It sort of worked. At least, I was able to breathe normally again, but by the time I got out of the car, I was shaking.

It took about six months of occasionally sitting in the driver’s seat, doing things to calm the panic and diminishing the negative association, before I was ready to finally learn how to drive.

By that time, I actually knew how to drive. I had made the attempt enough times that I had the necessary skills. I had memorized the Washington State Driver’s Manual several times. I knew how to start the car, how to apply gas and brake, how to steer. If I had been able to start where my skill level was, I would have easily driven in light city traffic.

But instead I had to start where I actually was, and that was as elementary as being able to sit in the driver’s seat. Because if just sitting in the car gave me a panic attack, experiencing that level of fear while driving in traffic would have been dangerous. This was not an easy thing for me to accept. I wanted to start where I thought I should be, which to me was an already proficient driver.

And I think this is probably true for any endeavor blocked by similar emotional obstacles. If you try to start where you think you should be, you will fail, and your failure will reinforce the emotional obstacles. If, however, you have the patience to go all the way back to the very beginning, to the place where you actually are able to face the emotions, and succeed, then that success, no matter how tiny, is a seed from which to grow a positive association with the activity.

I think that at that point, with the emotional baggage I was carrying, even starting out in a parking lot would have been too much. I would have had a panic attack, lost control or made some minor error, and the cycle of emotions would have overwhelmed my determination to stop avoiding the issue. But the only way I could fail at sitting in the driver’s seat was to not do it. And that ensured that every time I approached my problem, I experienced success–a very minor success, true, but even a tiny success is better than any kind of failure.

However, I would never learn how to drive by simply sitting in a parked car forever. I needed to take my success and push it just a tiny bit, without going too far and encountering failure. In the next post, Dreadless: Riding the Edge of Fear, I’ll talk about how I pushed the Comfort Zone in order to make forward progress.

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: If you are writing complex characters, their goals will probably change over the course of the story. They will have an overriding goal that shapes their story (like getting my license was for me) but they will also have smaller goals that determine their behavior in each scene (like being able to sit down in the car without avoiding the issue). Sometime if you’re having trouble with a scene or with your story structure, it’s because the goals of the character are not well-defined. Make an outline of the shifting goals of your character, with a focus on scenes that are not working out well. How do the mini-goals of each scene relate and tie back to the over-arching goal? Are there any points in the story where the over-arching goal changes?

Personal Growth: Take the behavior you want to change, or the thing you want to learn or do, and write down in detail the steps it would take in order for you to do it. Make sure the steps are concrete actions. Be extremely detailed, and start at the very beginning of the process. For example, mine would have been something like this: Decide to have a driving lesson. Get in the car. Start the car. Put the car into gear. Adjust mirrors and fasten seatbelt. Put on blinker. Check for traffic. Pull into traffic. etc. 

It could also be the steps you need to take to learn the skill. For example, mine might also have been written like this: Sit in the car. Drive around an empty parking lot. Drive on quiet back streets. Drive in an occupied parking lot. Drive in light traffic. Drive in moderate traffic. Drive in heavy three-lane traffic at 35mph. Drive on a country road at 55mph. Drive on the freeway in light traffic. Drive on the freeway in city traffic.

Make as many of these kinds of lists as you want. Chances are just thinking of doing these activities will trigger a lot of unpleasant emotions. Give yourself some time and space to calm down.

Next, review your list and imagine actually doing the things on the list. For each item, rate your anxiety or emotional response from 1 to 10. Use this to determine which items on the list you can do safely without triggering your emotions so much that they distract you. From that, determine your starting place. It may be far more elementary than you think it should be.