Confidence Flashback

I am a driver. It is vital in this job in a rural area. I don’t drive for fun – apart from anything else who can afford that? But I am confident in my driving, and can do it without thinking much about the process (though I do try to think about the road ahead!)

At least that was the case until yesterday. I changed my car, my first car, after many years together. The replacement is a little bigger, a grown up car with back doors – much better for giving lifts to folk , and power steering which is new to me. 

It was delivered yesterday, 6 years old but looking pristine. I took it out cautiously, off the drive, round the corner of the close and onto the next corner –where I braked but the brake wasn’t there and the car rolled across to the garden wall opposite and scratched the car below the bumper.

The car is bigger, the pedals didn’t align with where my feet instinctively went, I’ve made my mark on the car – and have lost my confidence.  When I sit at the wheel the fears and doubts of learning to drive are back, without the reassuring presence of the instructor and dual controls. Now I know that I am not back there, I know that I have years of driving experience – but it doesn’t feel like that.

I feel like a little girl in a grown up world and not able to cope with the responsibility.  All because it is new to me, because I am not in my comfort zone, because it is not the safety blanket of the familiar.  Ok so the scary moment happened, no harm – apart from a scratch or two which can be dealt with, and I will get used to the lights and the wipers being the other way around and the feel of a bigger, different car.   In fact I went out after midnight when the roads were almost deserted for a 30 mile drive and feel a bit better, though still with the learner’s insecurity.

How vulnerable we are to confidence flashbacks. Or at least I am.

Even when things are going well the stress of a change can link back to the emotions of the last time, in this case the last time I had to get to know a new car as a driver.

Or staying with parents, how easily we slip back into the routines and identities of a past stage in the relationship.

Looking back at past places I can see and celebrate the huge emotional journey I have been on to find the self confidence and self esteem I have now. Are times like this, and the weeks to come as i work through this driving wobble, a step backwards? A sliding down a deep dangerous slope? It felt like that, but I am asserting to myself that it is just the twinges of an old war wound, a reminder of those times but not a return. And I guess many of us will have these twinges from time to time, and though painful may just be normal.

Meanwhile if you see me coming and the wipers go, that means I’m turning!