Today I met my current arch nemesis. Laugh all you want, because it was a little blue Honda. I’m a good enough driver at this point in my life that cars don’t scare me anymore (well, until I think about all the other people on the road) but this car had something a little out of the ordinary.
I’m talking about a manual transmission. The kind with a clutch… and the stick of doom.
This was me this afternoon, trying desperately to just put the gosh-darned hunka metal in reverse so I could move it twenty feet for my siblings to wash it.
This was me, losing track of whiplash-and-stall, whiplash-and-stall, after take eight or nine.
And you know what? It was infuriating. I’m not going to lie. I did a good job of keeping it cool, but there’s something downright emasculating about trying over and over to just make the gears connect and being met with failure every.single.time. I had to let my mom finish the job after moving the vehicle six feet via aforementioned whiplash-and-stall.
It’s even more emasculating to watch your sister jump in and take it back to where you started on the second try. That’s personal experience speaking, by the way.
The truth of the matter is that I’m back at square one. I might hate it, but that’s the way things are right now. I can handle an automatic just fine, but I blanched internally the day I peeked inside the new car and noted one, two…three pedals? I knew then what I know now— I have to start over. I have to learn how to drive all over again.
And that, my friends, is one of the hardest things to do. How many times are we faced with some curveball and have to rework the way we do whatever it might be? My battle with the little blue Honda is just like the battle I fought with a big yellow bicycle the day I had to learn to ride without training wheels. Things will run through my head like they did then— this is ridiculous, I already know how to do this— but that’s not going to make it any better. In the end I’ll just have to get over it and relearn what I already know.
And it will happen. Eventually. My future will still hold many, many stalls and angry red lights on the dash, but someday I will pilot that Honda down the road to pick up milk or ferry a sibling. Until then, I have some work to do.
With the car washed and put away, the rest of the day commenced. A few hours later I hopped in the driver’s seat of a 12-passenger van and drove down to the store, then relinquished the helm to my mother for the return journey. (Because, you know. Habit.)
Tomorrow I’ll get back in that Honda… and treat myself to a little more of that good ol’ whiplash-and-stall.