Yesterday I drove through heavy traffic, deep in the mess of Chicago’s highways, to deliver Allan and his son to the convention in Rosemont up by O’Hare. The Chicago traffic was shocking. The cars were driving at different speeds. Everyone was angry. Loads of long overfilled trailers. Construction with workers and diggers and post hole drivers and dust and temporary signage. Break downs pulled to the side. Traffic swirling around them. Police cars erupting from exits. Slow drivers. Fast drivers. Distracted wobbly drivers. Trucks passing so close I could see the dust on their windows high above me.
Driving up into the city makes me nervous – very nervous – detrimentally nervous – it is a life changing fear – I will do almost anything to avoid driving. I decided to face my fears of city traffic this week and drive up twice by myself. Once to collect my visitors from OHare – a horrible drive – and once to deliver them back to a hotel very close to OHare. Armed with nothing but my GPS and a cup of strong iced coffee for the last leg I conquered my very real destructive relationship with big city driving.
I dissected my fear and realized a lot of it was fear of getting lost in a big unforgiving city, of missing a turn. But also I am afraid of looking stupid. Getting honked at. Making the wrong move. Not being in the right lane. Looking out of place. Getting a flat tire. Running out of petrol. Missing a turn off and ending up miles from anywhere. I feel brittle and am ridden with anxiety when faced with a long drive into unknown territory. I have to consciously adjust my grip on the steering wheel and relax my posture. The whole way I am telling myself to relax. Settle down. It is only fear. It should not dominate me. Fear is the enemy. So settle the fuck down and pay attention to the road.
I have always battled with driving in big cities. When I lived in London as a much younger woman I would do almost anything to avoid driving the car around the city. I was, still am, incredibly fit due to the determination to avoid driving. I train in and walk.
Written down all this sounds silly.
I do so much scary stuff. Why does driving trip me up? How did this fear get so bossy.
But what is stronger when we make our choices. The fear? Or the knowledge we have accrued over years. Some fears are way too strong. They overpower my knowledge. And they hide behind my great big brave blue eyes and my straight smile.
I have no problem driving in New Zealand.
So this week I did that drive up to the city not just once but twice in three days. It is almost two hours each leg. Or at least should be.
Yesterday was five hours of straight America driving. Half of it alone. Delivering my visitors back up into the concrete jungle. I managed all the highway changes and merges and fast swerving, driving with aplomb. I kept to the correct side of the road. I changed lanes at high speed without collisions. I even had to change course and return to the hotel when Allan left his satchel in the car. Plotting a new course on the fly.
I called that a massive win.
Now, conquering fears is a funny thing. You can win. Achieve your goal. Succeed. Shift the goalposts. But for me – maybe you too – then a person has to practice a few more times so as to assimilate this goal and make it normal. The barbs of fear can still bite and every one of them needs to be vanquished, dominated, put down and kept down. Not just smoothed out of sight.
So. I have to practice! Go places!
Do you have a fear like this? How are you working on it? Does it ever go away? Will there ever be a time I approach my vehicle with confidence?
But first – farming and house. A couple of days of visitors and a lot of rain left me behind! I need to play catch up today!
I am looking forward to writing the TKG Sustainable Sunday newsletter over the next few days. And bring you all up to date and talk…
About interesting things.
Take care and talk soon.
Celi
The Kitchen's Garden 
48 responses to “Giving Fear its Name and Beating It”
Ha ha – I’ve just cycled to Borough and back to buy bread. The worst place I’ve ever ridden and driven on a motorbike, or in a car and van is Paris, for three and a half years. They will deliberately knock you off a bike if you are in their way. Subsequently, I have no fear!
good lord! Have you ever driven in Naples! Aaah!!! No lanes. Just a mass of cars going the same way!
It’s a bit like going round the Arc de Triomphe – complete madness!
Oh yes!! I’ve seen that (never driven it) it IS madness.
You get used to it! The rule on the big roundabouts in Paris, is that you drive on as fast as possibe and all the traffic going round has to give way. It’s barking mad!
Barking Mad indeed!
i so get this. i lack a natural sense of direction and maps are no help to me, so i tend to rely on gps, which does not always respond quickly when i’m immersed in city traffic. i have the fear of big city driving too, and avoid it when possible, but somehow find my way around when absolutely necessary.
I will second this Beth. I do it if I absolutely have no choice but I will actively work to find alternatives if possible! My thoughts on GPS- great for the longer parts of a big trip, the miles on the same highway but in the city…I always seem to be sent down the wrong road that then becomes a circle of streets that the GPS cannot decipher to get me back out.
Mine keeps saying rerouting 🙂
I think mine tries to invent new roads that don’t exist 😉
Yes!
Your last line was so important for us to remember, Beth. We will manage if it is absolutely necessary. I have never been badly directed Deb – I would hate to experience what you have – being sent down the wrong streets! Horrible.
Wow! Well done for meeting your big city driving fear face to face! I just can’t seem to do it and always pass it off to someone else. I can country drive without fear, mountain driving, you name it, but big city driving, sadly, does me in. I, like Beth, rely on GPS. I am thankful for it!
I cannot bear the thought of having to drive without GPS. All of a sudden my phone and my car will not talk to each other so I took my MIL’s car so I could see the map. So important.
My mum has this fear too, even about driving in the small city where we live. So I help her by either going with her or driving her, though I wonder if the latter is ultimately unhelpful in reinforcing her fear. I suggested some advanced driving lessons with an instructor in the city, just to get used to it.
I think you’re very brave to face it directly and in such a big city. I’m not a big fan of driving in large cities either. I drove around the outer London motorway to Heathrow last year, and I was proud of that accomplishment!
I think a lot of it, like you say, is about fear of the unknown and unpredictable. But, of course, it’s a pretty rational fear given that speeding around in chunks of metal has its risks. It’s a common fear, I think. A friend’s grandfather won’t go anywhere unfamiliar unless his son goes with him in his own car, so they travel in convoy.
I tell myself that it’s okay to go wrong and miss a turn accidentally. Remembering that takes some of the stress away from unfamiliar routes. With GPS these days (I use Google Maps) it will re-route and correct the course.
I used to regularly have to drive out of London to Somerset (in my bosses car) and it was white knuckling all the way and in the days BEFORE GPS and smart phones. I literally wrote down the directions on a piece of paper! But I got good at it. Though took the train any chance I had.
Harder in those days without instant correction from GPS. But map reading is a useful skill to have…I grew up before smartphones were a thing and, as a child, used to help Mum navigate with our big AA Road Atlas 🙂
Welcome to my past world. I have driven back and fourth across the US many times, and up and down the East Coast, and to Michigan, where I worked part time in a federal prison, and back down to South Georgia. That was in the late 1990s and early 2000s, but I have limited my driving now to local routes.
That was when driving in the US was almost fun. No more. I live in fear of the situations you describe. In my area, even getting to the grocery store or the bank takes intensive preparation in advance, and I can never be sure a sudden downpour won’t flood my paths, fog up windows, or block lines of cars suddenly stopped behind a traffic accident, with police and ambulances filling the escape routes. That’s when my bladder starts claiming all my attention.
I have to add, at least where I live, that driving often means facing the possibility of death. Our major highways are becoming well known for shooting incidents everyday- some with minor consequences but many ending in deaths that involve not just the victim but other drivers as well. I avoid major highways if I can.
Yes. In the US of A, many people have been displaced from poorer neighborhoods in areas where future Walmarts are poised near the exchanges and real estate is at a premium. Rest stops are rare and usually blocked by huge vehicles traveling slowly in the exit lanes, until I miss them. I still use maps which are often out of date and don’t have GPS in my car. In the period I did my travels across country, I’ve been through several vehicles, a U-haul, and have traveled East to West on Interstates I-10, I-20 1-40, I-70, across the Rocky Mountains, and up and down both East and Western coasts. The cities were always the hardest. Even Atlanta is a mess. It started as a cattle crossing then train stop for passengers and freight, but now it is a major Southeastern transportation hub, so try to avoid it whenever I can.
I am now following your blog from the diagonally opposite US coast. The tide is out now, at almost 7:30 pm, edt. I look forward to seeing your future blogs on my WP reader.
I’ll be here! Every week day. I introduce other stuff every now and then but the blog plods along! As usual.
All that driving! I take my hat off to you! I keep thinking I SHOULD drive across country to visit friends. But I am not quite that brave yet!
For awhile, it was braver than flying, or taking the train, which I have also done, but the large cities, like Atlanta, Memphis, Chicago, and Detroit, and Nashville, have befome increasingly complicated and dangerous to negotiate, especially alone and in a small car. My two cats, and then one, came with me for many car trips, but the cat would sleep in his litter box on the back seat floor. On airplanes, the airlines reached the point where I could only take one in their pet carrier, but the cats have died, and now I only have Speckles, my aging rooster, who is half-way to 13 years old. And here comes Pesky the Racoon to scare my Specials, on the porch. That’s why I stay home as much as possible.
Imagine taking Speckles on the plane!
I couldn’t take Speckles, now AKA Specials. It’s after 10 pm edt, and he’s asleep beside me atop his indoor nesting box and next to the screen door. And my light is disturbing him.
BRAVO….I hate driving which is why I completely stopped when I returned home to the UK/Europe in 1993…. Overcoming our fear is always a good thing….
Do you have good public transport? I would choose that anytime. There are far too many cars on the road.
Yes I do – buses and a train station a few minutes walk away. . For the past thirty or more years I have designed my life to be within walking distance of everything I need….
I have a real fear of flying, which I have had since an exact moment on the tarmac at O’Hare in Chicago summer of 1962 , awaiting take-off for Jamaica with my boss. I had a husband of 3 months in Chicago, a fun life, working as a model, assistant & apprentice for Marshall Field’s top fashion illustrator. I unfolded the Chicago Tribune on my lap & read the headline about a Concord crash on the tarmac in Paris, which killed an entire Atlanta art association groupm which had been touring museums in Europe. A shudder went through me & a panic attack followed. I wanted off that plane & out of that trip. All these yrs. later, I have flown very little & always with horrible trepidation. After the flight, I always think that I may have conquered my fear, but there it is all over again the next time I must get on a plane. And now with all the dreadful Boeing issues in the news, it may no longer be just my irrational to be afraid to fly. I know you luckily don’t have this particular fear, Celi. I hope too that I never have to drive in a city again, but when I was last in NYC 5 yrs. ago, I held my breath just riding in the backseat of zooming, zigzagging, whizzing around in taxis through traffic.
wow. Were you able to get off the plane? did your fear of flying impact your career?
I suppose that I wasn’t and am not afraid of driving in big cities, or anywhere else, because I started fairly young and had to. I never had GPS – give me a good paper map and I’ll find a way to places that GPS would never offer. To get to Rosemont it isn’t even necessary to go through downtown Chicago. I have several other ways to get there easily from the southwest side where I used to live – I used to go there to visit the Gem show. Granted it can sometimes take slightly longer than the express ways but the traffic volume is easier to deal with and there are regular intersections instead of exits so if you miss the turn you can go around a block or two and try again. I was taking a friend to the Jesse Brown VA Hospital and all the way there he had the GPS going on his phone and it was having fits because I never once used the route it wanted (which would’ve taken longer, taken us well out of our way and through downtown when a strait shot up Western Avenue was the best route. I have maps in my head and usually once I’ve been someplace I can go back years later unless they change the road itself. From what I’ve seen GPS does not even offer the kind of alternate routes that are helpful, it puts you on the most traveled and heaviest traffic routes.
having maps in your head is marvelous! With quicker and quieter routes! The traffic yesterday was madness – I would have loved not to have had to make all those lane changes to merge onto specific highways etc. but I have to say the GPS got me there and back:
I have the same fear. Driving in Chicago always scared me to death. Now I live in the South, 80 miles from Atlanta, and I avoid Atlanta like the plague. I will drive on old two-lane highways to avoid Atlanta rather than drive on the Interstate highway.
Avoiding motorways and highways is the way to go. Local knowledge is a wonderful thing!
I don’t like driving around in big cities either; Seattle has so many one way streets that it is complicated. I would never tackle NYC or L.A. or even Chicago. So, bravo! My weird fear is of PARKING. What if I go somewhere and there is no place to park? Or if I have to parallel park? (failed it twice on my driver’s test and am out of practice) If it’s pay parking, what kind of procedure do I need to follow? What if I don’t notice a sign and get my car towed?
oh yes! The parking! Yes – that really is a thing. And parking buildings. Very anxious places.
Judging by many of the comments, you touched a nerve. I can handle the city traffic. But, I don’t like it. We often take a route to avoid it even if it means extra time. We just look for some other interesting things on the route. Plus, we slow down a little. Keeping up with the speeders is deadly. So is going too slow.
it certainly is much more interesting to take a more scenic route. And driving slower. The speedsters yesterday were all in white cars which I found mystifying!
I used to drive quite a lot, at least 90 miles a day and more often an average of 150 to 200 and I was good at freeway driving (practice makes perfect, ha).
I can’t say I enjoyed it but it was all part of my job. Now I’m retired and rural, cruising around on country roads is not a problem but I have no desire to reenter that roadrace, especially as Deb said, there are a lot of folks with terribly short fuses out on the highways. I do like a good map but I also appreciate ‘Jane in the box’ on my phone though one time trying to navigate my friend through a medium sized city Jane kept insisting we go one way, unfortunately that way was under construction and the road was closed. Try telling your phone that!
I will get good at it. I am determined. But the construction! So loud. Like the opening soundtrack to a road rage movie!
Hahahaha. This blog thread is extremely interesting. It’s hard for me to remember individual comments, but I like hearing from people on the East Coast, or the West Coast. I’d like to follow some of the bloggers near where I actually live, in my doddering years. I hate having to go through Atlanta or New York airports. A car is necessary where I live. Buses aren’t reliable and the train and airports are on the west side of Savannah. Farther than the Savannah Beach, 17 miles away.
I totally get this. I’m not afraid of city driving. I just hate it and will avoid it as much as possible.
My fear…heights. I’m better than I used to be but I’ll never fully get over it.
It’s now 1 AM EST and I just woke Speckles/Specials up with my cell phone. He thumped against the wall and his tail feathers tickled my leg. I thought it was a bug. Phone needs to be put on the charger.