living is easy with eyes closed

Today I had my final driving lesson. As with all other learning activities I’ve had in my life, the approach to the finish line feels somewhat premature and undeserved. I simply cannot accept that, at this point, I am supposed to know everything I should know about wielding the monstrous machine that is the automobile. My instructor says it’s just nerves – he thinks I suffer from a severe lack of confidence that makes me need someone in the passenger seat to watch out for me, to nudge my steering wheel every so often, to pull on the handbrake if necessary. I think he should be a psychologist instead of a driving instructor.

It’s a little weird to hear that I am not confident in myself. I always thought I had the world fooled. Because by all appearances, I’ve managed to look like I know what I’m doing. Somehow I am able to get through life simply by “winging it”, and I’ve led people to believe that this is how it’s really done. I’m the master of facades, the queen of faking it. But I’m the worst possible kind of “all-bark-and-no-bite” because I’m in a profession that does not allow for errors of idiotic presumptions. And while I’ve gotten this far without causing any serious damage, I’ve said it before and I still feel that it holds true now: that sometimes I feel like I’m a catastrophe waiting to happen. And by perpetually, quasi-confidently, smiling my way through life, I manage to raise the expectation bar to a level that makes my potential, almost inevitable, failure a massive, gut-wrenching disappointment.

But I’m in the driver’s seat now, in more ways than one. And my deeply buried inadequacies are about to surface once and for all. I feel like I'm hurtling too fast onto a highway of professional racecar drivers who will secretly snicker and/or curse at me behind their shiny spotless windshields. I feel like my ineptness is about to manifest itself in a colossal way, because truly, I am out of my league.

I want to tell the world I’m new at this. I want to keep putting that “student driver” sign on my license plate, to warn everyone in my path that I’m not who they think I am, that I just might be the biggest mistake they’ll ever meet. I want someone to sit beside me and stress me, second-guess me, and hold my hand so that I won’t have to suffer through this alone. But I kind of know that it’s not going to be like that anymore. It’s going to take a number of embarrassing stops and starts but we’re gonna get moving, my life and I. And this time I’m taking the wheel.

“Whatever tomorrow brings I’ll be there, with open arms and open eyes…”