So… I got my diver’s license as soon as I turned 18. It was a very stressful period of my life, and I hated everything about driving. They promised me freedom, but I got shackled.
Passing the exam as a nightmare (took me 3 attempts) and even during the lessons the professor saw how horribly tense I was. I got sick just by thinking about the car.
Once I passed, my family decided that I’d get over my fears by forcing me to drive, every single day, for weeks, with the whole family in the car, yelling, mocking me…
I had several panic attacks that were dismissed as lack of maturity, and I stopped driving. It’s been years.
But now I’m going to have to get better at this due to circumstances, and I’m scared.
I feel that I can’t focus on all the elements of the road, I have a very hard time calculating distances because I’m very short (edit: 1’50m, if that is relevant) and barely see above the wheel, I have to move the seat so close to the wheel that I fear that if one day the airbag jumps, I’ll suffocate. My blind spots seem infinite.
My car is automatic, so no stick to worry about.
If you have read all I wrote, I’ll greatly appreciate any advice or encouragement. Thank you
I think you have a few moving pieces you’re going to grapple with. It’s going to be scary. It’s supposed to be scary.
I think the biggest thing everyone needs to keep front of mind is that speed is relative. Yes, your car is rocketing along at 100. But the other traffic is going 105. 100 is fast compared to something that’s not moving, but the other cars are going relatively quite slow to you. Try to keep that in mind if you feel a knee jerk reaction to react.
Figure out how you sit in the car before you do anything else. You might fiddle with it a bit, but in general, you should be sitting in a way that makes you as comfortable as possible before you even start the engine. I don’t mean comfortable as in your back doesn’t hurt - I mean you have a high level of confidence that you can see in every direction you reasonably should be able to. Is the seat still too low? Get a pillow to boost you up. My wife and mom both do this because they’re too short to properly see out of regular cars.
Blind spots? Figure those out before you move the car, too. Sit in the driver’s seat and adjust your mirrors the way you want them. Now either get a friend to stand outside the car and move around, or if you’re alone just drop a few things on the ground around your car. Sit in the driver’s seat and look where you see those things. Can’t see them? What about if you do a shoulder check? Still no? Is it critical that you have clear line of sight to that exact spot? Probably not, but use your judgment.
If you’re still getting comfortable driving, stay the fuck out of downtown, major highways, and busy parking lots. Don’t do that to yourself. You should practice for months and build the muscle memory of “normal” driving before diving into high stress driving scenarios.
Struggling to determine distances, or whether there’s enough time to make a left turn before that oncoming car hits you? That’s sadly something you just need to develop yourself with practice. It took me months and months and months to get competent. A rule of thumb: if you see a car coming at you and you’re not sure if you can turn in time, don’t. Instead, starting counting seconds from when you would have turned. Making a left turn takes a couple of seconds. If you’re counting past 10 seconds and that oncoming car still hasn’t passed you, that gives you a good sense of how much cushion there is.
I’d also really, really recommend the show Canada’s Worst Driver. It’s a semi-documentary/game show that has shitty drivers go through driving boot camp. It’s full of driving tips, great explanations of how a lot of the physics around driving tasks works, and the entertainment value of dumbasses ignoring what they were told and crashing into styrofoam walls. I really believe that there’s a lot of content in that series that would help any driver, regardless of experience.
Good luck!
Thank you very much for such a thoughtful answer.
Do you have any advice for when I have to overtake a car or merge into a highway? Those are the parts that terrify me the most.
Most of the time you don’t have to overtake a car. You can just follow them at a safe distance and eventually they will turn, or the road you’re on will widen into two lanes, letting you drive next to them. This is the safest option, and other cars can overtake you if they want. You can leave space in front of you.
One time I was “stuck” behind a cement mixer for 20 minutes on a 2-lane road, and it felt like forever, but there were really no lasting repercussions. So if you don’t want to overtake another car, just don’t.
Eventually as you are more comfortable with other aspects of driving, you might want to learn how on your own, staring on multi-lane roads.
Merging onto a highway is something that takes a lot of practice, and I wasn’t good at it for a long time. The saving grace is that most other drivers are pretty good at avoiding accidents and if you are being predictable, it is OK if you aren’t perfect at it.
I recommend finding your favorite on-ramp in the area, and ride as a passenger a few times. Watch how the driver checks for oncoming traffic, then gets up to speed, positions themselves, and joins behind or in front of another driver.
Thank you very very much!