lights, blinkers, gears, hand break, and even pedals

back on the road!!

The time came again, because I didn’t want to wait too much. Time to go get the damn piece of plastic that allows me to drive. The earlier, the better. And the earlier I start, the earlier I finish. So I thought around March would be a good time.

I was, thankfully, pushed by my boyfriend to unblock me from indecision and fear, and bought the flight the 5th of February, for the 5th of March. A flight I took around two weeks ago. A one-way flight, yet again.

This time, I contacted with another driving school in another region, it’s too full in my home city, so it was a better option to continue where my mom now lives. More south, more Spanish, and a smaller town. Other than improving my driving, surely it’ll help my Spanish as well. In these two weeks, I've already had two people tell me they noticed my Catalan accent.

“More Spanish and smaller town” also weirdly describes the driving school owner and teacher. A man in his late 40s or early 50s with a lot of character, a lot of energy and a whole lotta things to say. Someone no one will ever have awkward silences with. That’s the small town part, I guess. He wears a Spanish flag bracelet and speaks Valencian only to say goodbye, which is the Spanish part, I guess.

Today was my first lesson and it was with him. I already had many lessons and a practical exam, but I didn’t drive since October. The lesson started with around 15–20 minutes of how to adjust the seat and mirrors. Then we went through lights, blinkers, gears, hand break, and even pedals. Luckily, I hadn’t yet forgotten the pedal order, but it was a good refresh. I appreciated the detail and the good explanations, and I wish my very first lesson in July would have been this in-depth.

Once the wheels were finally spinning, the lesson started with a lot of instructions, and as I got the hang of it and my muscle memory kicked in, the focus was on the details. And those were similar to the issues I had back in Autumn. Not enough space at the right, pressing the clutch when unnecessary, not looking enough and where needed, and being uncertain and overly cautious in some situations.

But overall it went pretty great, even though I was so ridiculously nervous last night and this morning. But, well, it’s always like this. There’s no escaping being nervous, I just need to sit with it. But when the thing I’m nervous about happens, it’s never that bad. And even if it is that bad, if I think about it, it isn’t actually that bad, because I can survive it. I can drive badly in my first lesson after 5 months, and I’ll still be alive. My close ones will still love me, I’ll still have everything I really care about.

Yesterday I went running, and looking at the trees already bearing flowers, I thought to myself how small these little troubles are. I thought, “My problems aren’t bigger than these flowers are beautiful”. And these flowers will still bloom every spring whether I pass the second exam or not.

It's always this pattern. It’s never as bad as it feels before. What’s most painful and uncontrollable is the anticipation. So when I felt nervous, all I wanted was to finally be there, driving, doing it.

When I opened Substack to write this, this is one of the first posts that got me distracted on Notes.

I wrote this around a week ago. I might keep writing about the next driving lessons, maybe do something like a “driving chronicles” section. That’s if I find the time, peace, and motivation to do so, because I also started working on my bachelor thesis! Which is exciting, interesting, slightly scary, and very time/space/energy/focus-consuming, but that’s a topic for a whole other post.

• This very interesting video by RobWords showing different alternative alphabets that were created for English. If you’re interested in language, I think you’ll enjoy it.

• Similarly, this video of a linguist answering questions (mostly related to word origin of English words) was as enjoyable to me.

• I haven’t been reading on Substack lately, but once I get to all the posts I saved, I’ll probably put some of them in this section.

Anyway,