Dreadless: The True Story

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

My hands gripped the wheel of the ’87 AMC Spirit and my heart was in my throat as I pulled out of the parking lot onto a busy street in the middle of a strip mall. My boyfriend (whom I’ll refer to here as Ace) was in the passenger seat, carefully directing me and ready to grab the wheel if necessary. In the back seat, our friend gave me encouraging words.

I was in my early twenties, making yet another whole-hearted attempt at learning how to drive. After weeks of practicing in the parking lot behind the mall, and a few residential streets, we had decided that I would try to drive us home today through busier streets. I was terrified, but all the practice had raised my confidence, and I was starting to think I might actually be able to master driving.

We approached a stop light, and Ace directed me into the right lane to turn. When I got to the intersection, the light was red, but Ace told me to proceed because there wasn’t any cross traffic. What Ace couldn’t see from his passenger seat was the man pushing a stroller walking in the crosswalk that I was about to drive through.

“Go,” he said, and when I hesitated, “Go!”

Our friend in the back seat chimed in encouragingly, “Go!”

If I was a robot, you might say my brain overloaded from conflicting commands and fried my circuit board. Part of my brain was telling me to wait, because there was a pedestrian in the crosswalk, but another part of my brain was telling me to go, because my instructor was telling me to go.

My brain decided to split the difference. I hit the gas but steered too sharply to avoid the pedestrian and ended up driving up onto curb and coming to a screeching halt half on the sidewalk, half in the street. Fortunately I didn’t hurt anyone, but everyone in the car was terrified, including me. As I carefully pulled back onto the road and into traffic at Ace’s direction, I looked back and was cut by what looked to me like utter contempt on the face of the pedestrian. I pulled into the next parking lot and didn’t attempt driving again for many years.

The experience reinforced the story I had been telling myself about my physical inability to drive (this was before the Great Tennis Ball Revelation). Worse, the experience reinforced the negative association loop I’d fallen into. This was the most extreme example, and the closest I came to actually hurting someone with a car, but every little mistake I made in the process of learning to drive helped to reinforce the loop, until it had become so strong that it seemed impossible to break.

I started learning how to drive, like most teens, when I was fifteen. As soon as I was old enough, I passed the written test with flying colors and got my permit, and then I practiced–with my mother in a parking lot, with my brother on logging roads. Every time I practiced, I performed terribly–because I didn’t yet know how to drive. But instead of being able to see those mistakes as part of the process, I was deeply ashamed of them. Eventually, I began to associate driving with not just one but two negative things: fear and shame.

What do human beings typically do when we encounter negative things? We avoid them. And I started to go out of my way to avoid driving. But it wasn’t actually driving I was avoiding, it was the negative emotions of fear and shame.

When I was eighteen, I ended up with my brother in Atlanta, Georgia with a few hundred bucks and a need to get back to Bellingham, WA. Instead of buying a plane ticket, I bought a gold Cadillac Seville. Our plan: we would both get home, I would learn how to drive on the way, and I would have a car when I got there.

I made some progress on that trip, but when we got to Washington and it came time for me to learn city driving, I lost my nerve. I started getting more and more anxious every time I tried to drive. By the time we got to Bellingham, the fear had built up so strongly that I couldn’t face it. I sold the car to someone who wanted it for parts and rode the bus for the next several years.

That pattern of trying, getting scared and quitting, then feeling ashamed about quitting and trying again, only to lose my nerve and quit again, continued for years. In fact, it continued right up to the last few years when I was working on getting my license. I made a decision three years before I actually got the license: this time, I was actually going to do it. I practiced very consistently for about six months, then gave up again. A year later, when my permit expired, I renewed it and started trying again. The next year, about a month before the permit expired to where I would have to get special permission from the DOL to renew it a second time, I said to Ace, “if I do nothing else this year, I would like to get my license.”

He said, “Selah, you’re going to get your license this month.”

And I did. We practiced every single day for two weeks until I felt confident enough to take the test. When I passed, I wondered why I couldn’t have done it years ago. The actual skill of driving wasn’t really that hard, once I had learned and practiced it.

It was the emotions that had built up around driving that stood in my way. I had been stuck in a cycle of fear, shame and avoidance. It wasn’t until I discovered how to break this cycle that I was able to move past it.

This is what makes emotional obstacles so insurmountable. If I had been faced with fear alone, or shame alone, I might have been able to overcome either one. For example, I am terrified of spiders. But I don’t usually go out of my way to avoid spidery situations. I go camping, I go on tropical vacations. My fear of spiders is strong, but it’s not enough by itself to limit my life. Likewise, there are things I do that bring me feelings of shame, but I do them anyway. Shame alone doesn’t control my actions. But when fear and shame worked in concert around my ability to drive, they created a cycle that seemed impossible to break.

I suspect that fear and shame are not the only emotions that can work together to create cycles like this. Guilt, anger, self-hatred, grief, rejection, anything that causes a psychological response of “this is not good, let’s avoid this,” that the rational brain can’t break through using mere reason, can create a cycle of avoidance.

What makes this cycle so difficult to escape? Find out in the next post: Dreadless: Enemy Reinforcements

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: As with emotional obstacles in real life, the pressure on your protagonist can be increased exponentially when you combine obstacles for maximum effect. In order to tell a compelling story, consider making things harder for your main character by throwing multiple obstacles at him or her at once. Take a scene you have written where your hero faces one obstacle and think about what additional obstacles you could add to the scene. They could be interior or exterior obstacles. For example, maybe the protagonist is fighting an enemy soldier (obstacle #1). You could add an interior obstacle by having the protagonist think about how the soldier looks like her father, making it that much more difficult to kill the enemy.

Personal Growth: Thinking in terms of the thing you want to learn/overcome, fill in the blanks:

“When I ____________, I feel ___________. This makes me feel ___________, because _________. I avoid confronting these feelings by _____________.”

As an example, here’s my version of the above: “When I drive, I feel terrified. This makes me feel ashamed, because there’s really no reason to be afraid of driving, everyone else can do it, why can’t I? I avoid confronting these feelings by giving up on learning how to drive and using other means of transportation.”