MENTAL HEALTH
I’m a Liberal But I Can’t Turn Left
My driving phobia has made my world very small and boring.
Some days are better than others. Some days I can tool around town doing errands with barely a detour to accommodate the weird, annoying fact that I can’t turn left.
This seemingly small-ish problem is way better than the sheer terror I used to feel just driving to work.
“White knuckling the wheel” is very real, as is hair pulling, face slapping, or whatever other form of self-abuse I tried in order to keep myself from pulling to the side of the road in the throes of a full-blown panic attack.
It all started when I almost died from heat stroke after a bike ride in the Cuyahoga Valley National Park. I already had an anxiety disorder as a result of my first marriage, but the biking incident put me over the vehicular edge.
Bike = car? Who knows. The human mind is a strange and stupid thing.
After many years, I’ve managed to beat the general day-to-day terror of navigating several tons of hurtling steel down a narrow asphalt path while presumably drunk/distracted/dickhead drivers come within inches of me from the opposite direction at high speed.
But I still can’t turn left.
It’s not the turning, per se. It’s the waiting. The panic sets in while I’m waiting to turn left at a light that is apparently several lifetimes long.
While I wait, I’m trapped. You can’t turn left on red (at least, not in Ohio. Maybe in Florida.).
Any middle lane, really, is a problem. Anything where I can’t escape the situation by turning right and getting back into motion.
And that includes highways, which are the epitome of being trapped. No exits, nowhere to go, wedged in between (God help me) giant trucks in a traffic jam.
I’m having a panic attack just thinking about it.
Younger me had no such problems. I drove to Maryland alone for a seminar I had zero interest in and watched everybody else bludgeon crabs while I ate a piece of bread.
I love the zoo. I used to drive to the Cleveland Zoo alone all the time. Who doesn’t love being up close and personal with a giraffe?
I want to go to museums. I want to go to exhibits and festivals. I want to go north to the cities (I can go south any time I like — the Amish are not known for their traffic jams.)
They say the sooner you force yourself to face a phobia, the more likely you are to overcome it. The longer you wait and coddle yourself like a fragile Victorian maiden, the harder it is to fight the fear that has a worn a groove in your brain.
Well, that ship has sailed.
I’m thinking about Ubers, but out here in the boondocks I don’t feel like that’s something I can rely on yet.
The only benefit of urban sprawl is that I can get to just about anyplace in my town by cutting through parking lots.
I don’t think stop signs in parking lots are real things, so it’s probably best to stay out of my way.