Member-only story
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.
