I Returned to My Past, and It’s Still Here

Recently, I drove a car for the first time since… before I started this blog. In 2012. This was also the first time I left city limits since June 2021.

The last time I’d driven a car had been after a period of not driving for months and it hadn’t gone well. Thus, I was nervous about driving again after over a decade of zero experience.

Turns out I drove really well. Not just my opinion, my driving instructor also thought I did really well, much better than his average student (note: his average student is someone without a driver’s license, so not a high bar).

Without thinking about it, all kinds of old habits came back. I assumed the wheels had been turned into the curb until the instructor told me otherwise and found it weird that the parking brake wasn’t engaged. I did all of the mirror checks and turned my head to look around at the right moments. Most astonishingly, I stayed calm through this.

It helped a lot that nothing unusual happened during the lesson. The worst were some pedestrians who walked into the street inappropriately, but I was driving slow anyway because I knew it was that kind of street. The instructor, speaking of these pedestrians casually walking into the street when they shouldn’t, said, “People are very trusting of humanity around here.”

Still can’t believe I got back into the rhythm of driving so easily. Maybe it was because I had an instructor at my side so I trusted that, if I did anything reckless, he’d hit the brakes.

One reason I wanted a driving lesson is that I use a medication which might impair my ability to drive (though there isn’t a ton of scientific research on this). I wanted a professional opinion on whether it was safe for me to do so (though I didn’t tell my instructor about my medication). Apparently the answer is yes, I can drive safely even when I’m drugged. I wonder if the drug even improves my ability to drive.

And the roads we went on… they are roads which I used to drive frequently, but the last time I had been on them was… I think I haven’t been on these roads since I stopped driving. Yet they’re still there, and they look like what I remember. Time felt like nothing: I felt like I’d been on these roads within the past month, not that I had been away for over ten years.

I pulled a chunk of my past, that time in my life when I’d driven a car on a regular basis, back into my present, and it didn’t feel like the past. It felt like it had been my present all along.