On heartbreak and driving burnout
Article by Asta Sjogren-Uyehara Art by Eden Miller
I have always written about long journeys and running far, far away from here (by which I mean wherever my feet are, it doesn’t matter) and I do not know why. The places I’ve attached myself to are sometimes lively, always beautiful, fully unknowable to me. Before I came to this state or knew of this school, I always said I wanted to live in the Colorado woods: build myself a cabin, sturdy warm walls full of books and cascading greenery and plush velvet everywhere. A midcentury modern dream.
From the ages of fourteen to sixteen, I would calm myself down by sitting in the driver’s seat of my mother’s car. But when I started learning how to drive, ostensibly my escape, a symbol of my ability to choose where I went and when I went there, my eyelids drooped, hands shook, chest tightened. I got my license the year I turned eighteen, two years after twelve-year-old me demanded I must.
Once I had settled into being a person-who-could-drive I began to enjoy it. I would take my step-dad's car on quiet contemplative drives around my hometown. I settled into a comfortable position behind the wheel, a sort of anxious understanding of safety and preciousness. I bumped into a car pulling out of a parallel spot a few months after I got my license, but it didn’t shake me too much. I felt independent, adult, new. I still refused to get on the freeway — being afraid of changing lanes doesn’t serve you well on California interstates.
I let my flighty instincts send me on a whirlwind gap year, to a boat in the Caribbean that sailed from island to island to island. I went into the backcountry of the Southwestern U.S.; we carried backpacks with two outfits, food and ropes to cling to rocks with and the wide open desert was there to surround me. No cars to worry about, no real responsibilities, I was refreshed. Away from home for the first time ever, I fell in love. Also for the first time ever, I forgot what it was to be empty of purpose and I forgot what it was to need to run. I was homesick and I never wanted to go home and I finished everything I thought I couldn’t. And I conquered a life-long phobia of heights. I came home feeling altogether new and different and less scared of living and moving. Suddenly driving seemed so minuscule and easy.
My long-distance-gap-year-casual-not-boyfriend-boyfriend at the time came to visit me and I drove him to San Francisco, across the Bay Bridge, and nothing had ever felt so grown up. When he had to leave, I drove him to the airport and kissed him goodbye, thinking about every romantic movie I had ever seen. When I got back behind the wheel I tried to cry, to prove to myself that I was the same overly emotional girl I had always been. The tears were there, and one or two welled up, but I blinked them away. I couldn’t really cry. Not the way I wanted to.
Two weeks before I was supposed to take a trip to Arizona to see said not-boyfriend — my start date at CC looming ever nearer — I got into a car crash. It was my fault. Luckily, no one was hurt; I was a nervous wreck but there was no one in the other car and no pedestrians and I had no real bodily damage. A little whiplash, but mostly just shaken up. I had totaled two cars. I sobbed the way I had wanted to when he left, sitting on the curb with AAA on the phone.
About a week and a half later, he broke up with me. My parents were still furious about the accident and I started a new ADHD medication, all in the span of a few days. I had stumbled back into real life — even my trip back to the Southwest had been canceled. I was being denied my escape from reality, my chance to run back into the desert. Soon, the desert of Colorado would become real life anyways. Somewhat against my will, I became untethered from reality, from my body, partially because of all the change (I was packing for school and visiting my family in Oregon and, of course, the breakup) and partially because of the new medication. And I flat-out refused to get behind the wheel of a car.
Over winter break that year, I drove a few times but my anxiety coiled around me like a snake and cuffed my wrists together. I shook like a leaf in the driver’s seat. I had somehow associated driving with being in love and any failure or shakiness in that driving with the end of love. I was fatigued — burnt out with being heartbroken. I’d forgotten that I once longed for that freedom, my own ability to escape and take myself into wild open spaces alone.
I still do not drive. I have two bikes: one electric at home to navigate the steep hills of Berkeley, one analog here to take me to therapy and around campus, and they don’t terrify me — though I’m probably less safe on them than in a car. Every day this summer, I took the train to work. I allowed my commute to be my new independence, using it to write and read as much as I could and do my makeup and it made me feel thoroughly twenty-one. A new romance was budding. He drove me everywhere we went, at my request, and I did not fear the small dependence on someone else.
I will allow myself not to flee, to stay stagnant in the passenger seat. The pedals of my bike can take me where I really need to go.