I hate driving. Any time I have the option of not driving, whether that’s carpooling or ridesharing or walking or sometimes just not going, I will probably take it. I have, at times, been known to bribe people to let me ride with them. Gas money, a cup of coffee, a concert ticket, dinner. Thankfully, I have a few lovely friends who for some incomprehensible reason actually like driving, so it usually works out.
More than a general distaste for driving itself, I really hate driving places I’m unfamiliar with. This probably isn’t unique to me—throw a rock on the internet and you’ll hit someone making a video about googling a parking situation before going anywhere—but the stress of one-way streets and turn-only lanes and parking signs with conflicting messages is enough to make me want to never leave my house.
Now, because I’m an adult who does not live in a walkable city, I do, of course, end up driving places. A lot. I have a love-hate relationship with my GPS, which does tend to get me where I need to go, but often doesn’t account for closed roads or poorly-lit country backroads or the fact that I don’t actually want to make a U-turn in the middle of downtown no matter how many times it tells me to.
I’ve long held the theory, odd as it may seem, that GPSs are making us miserable. When I type my destination into Google Maps and let it tell me where I need to go, I’m effectively giving up my autonomy, giving my critical thinking and know-how over to a machine. Considering my internal compass can barely find west at sunset, this probably isn’t altogether a bad thing. But I do often find myself even more frustrated and anxious in unfamiliar driving situations when my GPS is telling me to turn down a closed road or suddenly tells me to make a left when I’m four lanes to the right, anxiety that I wouldn’t have if I had taken the time to familiarize myself with the route ahead of time.
Part of this is the stress of navigating unfamiliar terrain in real time, but a significant part of this stress comes from the internal pressure to do things right—or rather, to not do them wrong. I was a straight-A student. I’m good at following directions. It’s kind of my thing. So when my GPS tells me to turn left and I physically can’t, some part of my brain registers it as a failure and my internal stress meter ratchets up a notch.
I know, logically, that this thought pattern is ridiculous. It’s literally impossible to make a wrong turn with a GPS—it will simply readjust your route and tell you the next turn. (It won’t even tell you it’s “recalculating” anymore, either. Gone are the days of being robotically called a dumbass by a sentient map.) But still, I can’t shake the irrational stress that with one ill-fated wrong turn I’ll end up somewhere I don’t want to be, unable to leave or to find my way back.
This has, if I’m being honest, been a weird year. In early January, I made a bingo board of 2024 goals and pasted it in the front of my brain dump journal, and while I’ve accomplished a little over half of them (with this newsletter checking off number fourteen), the main thing that sticks out to me when I go over these goals is how different a person I was at the beginning of the year.
Two of my goals were around finishing and editing a novel because I planned to have a trilogy of romance novels published in the next year or two; sometime in March I had an existential crisis that led to me reordering my creative priorities and, over the course of the year, realizing that I didn’t want “author” to be my main signifier in life. Two other goals were about travel, and I remember thinking at the beginning of the year that I wasn’t sure if I would hit both of those because I didn’t travel much; not only did I accomplish both of those easily and early, I ended up taking six big trips, plus an array of weekend and day trips. I’ve made new friends, I’ve pushed myself out of my comfort zone, I’ve added things to my life that make me happy and stopped doing things that were no longer beneficial.
All my life I’ve been white-knuckling it, afraid of being lost, of making a wrong choice, a wrong turn, and ending up somewhere I didn’t want to be, unable to leave or find my way back. But that assumes that there’s a correct path, a specific set of life directions to get from point A to point B that is the most efficient and most correct. That assumes there is, in fact, a specific point B to get to.
I’ve grown a lot this year, in a lot of different ways, but the most impactful has been slowly ridding myself of that little GPS voice in the back of my head telling me not to try new things or take chances or make mistakes, and just embracing the freedom to take this life of mine in any direction I want to. Embracing being lost. Embracing getting lost. I turned off of Publishing Deadline Boulevard, with no specific destination in mind, and the resulting opportunity to creatively play has actually been kind of fantastic. I veered impulsively onto Groupie Drive and saw my favorite musical artists three times in concert and once on Broadway this year alone, and now they recognize me and give me a hug when they see me, and it’s incredible. I accelerated onto Friendship Freeway and have been cruising there for a while, putting effort and intention into friendships new and old, and I’m happy. Plain and simple. I don’t know where any of these roads lead; I don’t know how long I’ll stay on them or if in two months I’ll make a hard left turn onto a road I never knew existed and see where that takes me. But I’m okay with it. I’m exploring new routes. I’m mapping a broader swath of experience.
And I have to say, I’m immensely enjoying the drive.
Stay excellent,
Kristen
For my birthday this year, I took a weekend trip to New York with a friend and got to see Swept Away on Broadway, which was absolutely phenomenal. 10/10 highly recommend if you have the opportunity to see it.
Also for my birthday, I hosted a Twilight marathon with some friends and went all out on punny food and drinks, including creating the “Bella, Where the Hell Have You Been Mocha” cocktail, which is somewhere between a White Russian and a Chocolate Espresso Martini and was a total crowd pleaser.
2 oz chocolate milk
1 oz espresso (chilled)
1 oz Kahlúa
1/2 oz vodka (I used caramel vodka, but any would be good)
Rim the cup with chocolate sauce dipped in crushed Oreos, then line the cup with chocolate drizzle. Shake all ingredients with ice and pour.
I recently redesigned The Lit Nerds’ logo, and I love how it turned out. Check it out, and stick around to read a few of the amazing stories we’ve published recently.
Featured image by Jametlene Reskp on Unsplash
Earthbound, But Aspiring 