(*Linen cupboard metaphor is a psychology tool used for PTSD patients. Link is available at the end of the post).

Ever hear of railroad ties? Yeah, me neither, until one Saturday night in my senior year of high school, when I rammed my brother’s brand-new Dodge Charger into a pair of them. He had asked me to take care of his car while he was out of the country, and boy, did I take care of it. My dad took me to look at it a few weeks after the accident- it looked like a compressed accordion.

I’ve never before written about my car accident, and the details aren’t important. But it’s important to know that while my brother didn’t blame me for it, I blamed myself. I cried for days afterward. Days and days and days. I remember my mother coming into my room on the second or third day, telling me if I didn’t stop crying they would have to bring me to the hospital to be sedated for hysteria.

You couldn’t blame me for blubbering. I was a spoiled, happy, sunshine-y child. The youngest of four, the only girl, who as a one-year old baby had survived cryptococcal meningitis. My parents had agreed to birdsit for a friend, and my baby nostrils inhaled the soil particles from the bird droppings. The fungus spread to my body, then to my central nervous system.

“Pray,” the doctor told my mother and father, as he left my hospital room. “All you can do now is pray. If she survives, which is highly unlikely, she’ll be brain-damaged.”

And they did pray, and I did survive, with no resulting brain damage (well…). I proceeded to prance around for the next 17 years singing and smiling and preening, oblivious to life’s pains and sorrows and eccentricities. So in 1984, the accident was the worst thing that had ever happened to me. To this day, it is the single worst thing that I have ever been personally responsible for.

But life went on. I forgave myself, the car got fixed, and I stopped hyperventilating every night before bed. Soon everything in my sweet idyllic little life was once again sunshine and rainbows.

Until it wasn’t. Because the brain, you see, never forgets.

The PTSD emerged slowly. It showed up usually when I was driving at night or in bad weather, but a rainstorm during the day could do the trick. I could even be relaxing in the passenger seat of a friend’s car headed to the movies, and my heart would begin to pound. I would begin to sweat. I couldn’t watch the road. I would have trouble breathing, and beg my driver to slow down.

I remember one rainy night I asked my friend Jana why she was driving so fast.

She glanced at her odometer. “I’m doing 35 miles an hour, that’s 10 miles an hour below the speed limit.”

“But how can you see where you’re going at night in the rain?” I said, my head dizzy from panic.

“They’re called headlights,” she said, glancing over at me. “And you stay between the lines of the road. Are you alright?”

I guess she knew the answer to that question when I crawled into the backseat of her convertible and crouched down on the floor behind the driver’s seat.

“Tell me when we’re there.”

So much for no brain damage.

The PTSD was never consistent. I drove just fine to college and back, to visit friends on road trips, even to spring breaks. Once the boys were born, attacks came back often on family trips down dark highways, so the Hub would sometimes have to drug me with a sliver of Valium that I would chase with wine, just to keep me calm. Through the years, my driving anxiety lay dormant and hooded, waiting to resurface under the most inconvenient of conditions.

Like in 2016.

My husband had planned to take my son and two of his friends to visit Virginia Tech. The morning of the trip, he woke up sick.

“You take them,” he said.

“I can’t drive all that way by myself. I’d have to drive at night. I’ll just cancel it.”

“You can’t,” said the Hub. “The other kids are counting on us.”

Fair enough.

The dry light-infused trip there was daunting but uneventful. I got them to the hotel right before dark, and while they took a dip in the hotel pool, I released my driving stress by getting soused on one martini at the bar on an empty stomach, then vomited all night in my room. When they left for their campus tour in the morning, I issued a warning:

“The tour gets done at 2:00. If we leave immediately after that, we will be close to home before dark. Do not lollygag, I do not want to be on I-95 in the dark in the rain.”

They lollygagged, and we ended up on I-95 in the dark in the rain, with the resulting panic attack being the worst one up to that point. While the three boys played obliviously on their phones in the back seat, I incanted.

I’m going to crash this truck and kill all of us. Billy’s little sister died of cancer, and he is now his parent’s only child, so I am going to be the reason that they are childless. And my son will never get to go to college, and my other two sons won’t have a mother, and we still have car payments on this truck, and….

My hands shook, my heart raced, sweat poured down my face, I couldn’t breathe. On I-95, in the pouring inky-blackness, going 80 miles an hour in bumper-to-bumper traffic. I was never so sure in my entire life that I was going to be solely responsible for four deaths. And that trip also spelled the end of my driving PTSD. Something about that harrowing trip scared me straight. The fear simply dissipated, like dandelion fluff.

POOF.

(*I guess the memories of my accident were always spilling out of my brain, like messy items stuffed into a linen cupboard that fall out at the slightest provocation. But now, I had re-organized and folded my memories back neatly in my linen cupboard, where I could find them if I wanted, but where they were less likely to fall out).

Despite my newfound bravery, my terror of driving in heavy snow has always remained, probably because of my lack of opportunity to practice in it. And on the way to my resort last week, I got my wish. I was hit by a massive snow squall for the two hours it took me to drive north, and once again I incanted. But this time they were positive affirmations:

Don’t worry, you can still see the road surface.

That car is going faster than you are.

The sky is lightening up.

Just take it slowly, you have all day.

Only another half hour.  

You can do this. You rode horses in Iceland. You’ve sky-dived. Rappelled. Spelunked. You’re a badass.

You can always pull over.

I arrived at my resort so relieved that my endorphins fell south, and proceeded to put my compromised blood cells in a half-nelson. And while I didn’t feel 100% all week, I managed to ski, ice-skate, visit with friends and meet a charming sociopath despite it. And I’m hoping that was the last vestige. You know, the last part of “Scared-Little-Driving-Me.” What could be scarier than that?

Oh, right. Prancing around in skimpy lingerie to the vocals of Ariana Grande while a photographer snaps pictures of you in your 53-year old skin.

Yeah, that qualifies.