Every day I drive the Small Child to school. I spent most of last year relying on other people to do this for me as I was so oversedated in the mornings that I knew I wasn’t safe to drive…. that and I was really avoiding going anywhere that involved getting in a car. The whole getting uncontrollably anxious and upset, feeling like I’m suffocating and fighting rising panic when anyone got too close to me or did something stupid just doesn’t sit well with my (normally) no nonsense personality. I was finding myself getting really angry when those feelings would emerge while I was driving.
But anyway, long story short… taking the Small Child is something I just have to do. I no longer have someone reliable to help me get him to school anymore since Yale started a regular day job, so I’ve had to suck it up and do it. Problem is… all those fears are still with me every time I get in the car and if someone does something crazy I seem to either get really angry or I get extremely nervy and frightened. I don’t know if there is actually more people on the road who seem to have taken leave of their sense when making traffic navigation decisions or if it’s due to the ridiculous amount of road works going on in our area over the last year or so… but it feels like I am seeing crazy arse people doing crazy arse things all the time and it is freaking me out!! 🙁
In fact I’ve noticed over the last six week or so that I’m reacting to not just idiots in the traffic speeding, running red lights, changing lanes alarmingly or basically being reckless – I’ve also been having an unacceptable emotional response to this –
This car is parked in a street near my son’s school. It has been there for about five or six weeks now and I’ve been driving past it twice a day for what seems like ages. Everytime I see it I get a little heart-in-my-throat thing or a sense of rising bile kinda feeling and I find myself grimacing everytime I drive past. I am assuming that who ever owns the thing has no insurance or it wouldn’t be sitting there for so long. I know it shouldn’t affect me at all… but I’ve taken to altering my route so as not to be confronted with it every day.
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