Driving always made me anxious like no other thing on this planet. It’s freaked me out ever since I started driving and was especially awful if I was driving somewhere new. It didn’t matter if I was alone or with someone who could help me. I was constantly anxious when I got behind the wheel.
When I say it made me anxious like nothing else, I mean hyperventilating, hands and sometimes my whole arms going numb, shaking, sometimes crying, that kind of thing. Even just going to Charlottesville or Culpeper was a nightmare for me. What made the situation even worse was that I couldn’t figure out why it freaked me out so much. In my head, driving should be easy. I know how to do it. I know where to go. But the reality of driving was hell for me.
The worst part about the whole thing, though, was that I wanted to love it. I had places I wanted to go and things I wanted to do and I wanted to do it all by myself, but the fact that anxiety controlled me when I drove ruined all of that. I couldn’t go wherever I wanted unless I wanted to give myself a panic attack in the middle of a highway. Knowing that I should be fine while I wasn’t fine just sunk me into a deeper whole.
It got worse when I switched from driving automatic to manual. I was finally getting comfortable with driving my automatic just about anywhere when I totaled it. She was the best little car (I still miss her) and the one thing that had made driving barrable. Now I had to find a new car and get used to that one all over again. It was like I had made it to the end of this hellish maze and then bam! More maze.
I refused to drive my manual for the first month I had it. I made my mom drive it while I drove her car. I SLOWLY worked my way up to driving it around town. (Mind you, I was going to school in Charlottesville at this point, and still refusing to drive my own car because that would mean I had to take it onto 64.) I stalled out at stoplights more often then I actually got my car going, and either cried or stopped breathing if someone honked at me. I sat through the length of many green lights because I simply couldn’t calm down enough to put my car into first gear.
I started driving my car to school. I would pray the whole time. The entire forty-five minutes it took me to get there was spent in prayer for the first few weeks. But I was slowly getting comfortable in my new car, and it was HUGE progress for me. The whole process of learning to drive again took almost an entire year. But it was progress.
I say all this because I drove to Fairfax today. Fairfax is about an hour and a half away from me. “What, you drove to Fairfax? Wow, Annie. Amazing,” everyone said sarcastically. To a normal person, yeah, big whoop. It’s not that big of an accomplishment. For me, it was a ginormous one. Because not only did I drive to Fairfax for the first time alone, but I didn’t feel anxious. Not even a little bit. I got lost, I made wrong turns, I accidently cut one guy off, but the whole trip was successful. For a 3-hour round trip, I sang too loudly to my music, I watched the sunset, and I drove like a professional. I didn’t pray at stoplights because I was confident in my ability to start from a stop. I didn’t profusely apologize to every other car around me because I was screwing up so badly that it was affecting everyone else, too. I didn’t stop breathing when I had to merge about a million times. I didn’t start shaking or crying. My hands never went numb. I drove like I liked it. And I realized, for the first time in my entire life, I did like it. I loved it. I went from being a literal wreck behind the wheel to actually looking forward to the drive. I went from shaking and crying and praying to singing and dancing and praising.
I didn’t just randomly start to like to drive. My anxiety didn’t just magically disappear. God has been working on me in every aspect of my life for the past few months, and He decided that driving was going to be one of those things. He’s been reminding me over and over and over again that he has my back, even with the little things, like driving. He’s been reminding me time and time again that He makes me brave. And man, I really love being brave.
