On Being a Wreck.

It’s a June afternoon and I’m in a cemetery, watching as the coffin is lowered into the ground. Inside the coffin is my stepfather.

It’s raining, but my eyes are dry. “It’s okay for you to cry,” one of my mum’s friends tells me gently, but I don’t want to. I feel relieved.

My stepfather was not an evil man. Even as a 10-year-old I knew he wasn’t. When he’d yell at me for making too much noise or smack me for not putting away my shoes, it wasn’t because he hated me. He was violent because he’d spent a quarter of his life fighting a terrible war. A war that had left him deeply scarred. But that doesn’t make his smacks any less painful and doesn’t stop me from making myself small whenever I hear the front door lock turn. In the few years before his heart gives out, I learn to flinch from any sudden movement.

And over a decade later, in college, I’m still flinching whenever someone raises a hand.

I hate it. It makes me feel like a wreck: weird and vulnerable and unable to control my survival mode. I wish I could just be rational about it.

I hate it worse when I start taking driving lessons. Traffic stresses me out and makes me freeze up inside. I forget to check my mirrors. Make rash decisions. And generally make my driving instructor rue the day he picked this profession.

But I stick with it, and about a month into my lessons, I’m in the drivers’ seat on a two-lane winding 50mph road. We’re heading to a village nearby, with little traffic and plenty of space for my many mistakes. It’s rush hour. On my left, a steady stream of cars is heading in the opposite direction, towards the city. On my right – a short slope ending in a river. I’m still inexperienced and jumpy, but here, I relax. There aren’t even any cars in front of me. All I have to pay attention to is the curve of the road ahead.

Then, just as the road starts taking a turn, a shiny black car decides to cross the double line and overtake a bus. But not just any kind of bus. It’s one of those busses specifically designed to transport the hoards of students from the city train station to campus. It’s almost 60 feet long and I don’t know what it’s even doing on this road outside the city. But it’s here and it’s interfering with the black car’s driver’s need for speed. The turn hides me from his view before he decides to switch lanes and by the time he realizes his mistake, it’s too late. He can’t leave the lane.

Neither can I. On my right, still the slope and the river. On my left, the giant caterpillar of a bus and a long line of cars behind it. And right in front of me, that shiny, black Sedan, glistening in the afternoon sun, coming at me with at least 60 miles an hour.

Next to me, my instructor inhales sharply.

We’re about to collide head on and my C in physics is more than enough to know I won’t survive this.

I’ve got seconds, but I don’t do anything. I’m too paralyzed with fear to make a decision – as far as I can tell, each one ends in death.

I’m frozen.

Then, seconds before the cars smash into each other, the black car manages to finally overtake the bus and sharply steers towards the right lane. It’s not enough to avoid me but it doesn’t have to be. My instincts take over and my hands throw the steering wheel to the right, not so much that we go off-road but enough to avoid the collision.

The cars miss each other by inches.

The road is clear again.

My instructor tells me to stop the car as soon as it’s safe. I do and when I turn to face him, his white and shaking. “I was sure we wouldn’t survive this,” he tells me.

I don’t blame him. My mind didn’t see a way out, either.

But in the moment it mattered, my body took over to protect me. And although it needed a lot of luck to even be able to, the decision it made for me when it mattered was still one I simply didn’t have the time for.

My body – my survival mode – kept me safe. Just as it had kept me safe all those years ago in a house filled with anger and pain.

Sure, it made me feel like a wreck. But it also kept me from actually becoming one.

And that’s the truth of it. We need survival mode. Now matter how smart we are, there are times where our instincts are our only hope of making the right choice.

The challenge, of course, is teaching your body how to tell the difference between danger and daily life, especially when daily life surprises us with danger. That’s something that’s taken me many more years to learn.

And that’s what we’ll talk about next.