What I Tried to Avoid Learning

When living somewhere new demands new skills.

The metaphor:

It surprised me to enjoy living in the woods. Though I’m less than an hour’s drive from my hometown and next door to my grandma’s house, in some ways, it’s a totally different world from where I grew up.

As a soft, oblivious child of the suburbs, it had not occurred to me that there are places where you don’t subscribe to a trash pickup service – or where it’s not even an option. Now, we drive our trash and recycling to the transfer station on Saturdays, a big lot with a garbage truck and receptacles for paper, glass, and plastic.

On one hand, living here is totally different from the big cities where I’d lived since graduating high school in ‘04. On the other, I’ve learned that each new place I move comes with new skills to learn so I can navigate – like scanning for deer on the road at night is the new version of the subway, the highway, or even snowboarding.

The story:

My heart pounded as I opened the car door. I’d spent hours in the passenger seat of Steve’s little silver hatchback, as he drove across the country and on almost every outing now that we lived in LA. But Steve wasn’t coming on this trip.

Los Angeles has a subway system, it just doesn’t cover much of the city. We happened to live in a spot where I could take a bus or subway to my job, or even ride my bike. But none of those methods would get me from Silver Lake to my doctor’s appointment in Culver City. The appointment was routine, but driving myself across town was not.

I technically knew how to drive: I’d passed the road test in one try, 11 years earlier. But I had never owned a car or regularly driven one. Before the cross-country move, I’d barely ridden in one since leaving home. I went to a small college where, like most students, I lived on the walkable campus, then spent five years living off DC’s green metro line, rarely splurging on a cab.

Not only was I out of practice, I didn’t have a particularly strong skill foundation. Most of my classmates had registered for Driver’s Ed through our public school. I’d gone with the alternative that New York State offers: a 5-hour pre-licensing course.

It felt like a genius move at the time, swapping 48 hours of instruction for a single Saturday class. But over the next few years, as I depended on my friends for rides, I got a close-up view of why driving was worth practicing. I was a passenger in a half dozen different accidents, ranging from light dings and fender benders to scrapes, sore muscles, and one hospital trip.

I left high school physically fine, but afraid of traffic: never fully trusting that the cars around me would stay on their side of the painted lines. Driving is, of course, very dangerous: motor vehicle crashes continue to rank as a leading cause of American deaths. I felt a little defiant about the sheer rationality of my fear, compared to friends’ anxieties about plane rides and spiders. But in my new LA life, if I wanted to be independent, I needed to get behind the wheel.

I had reviewed the route: to get to the doctor, I’d take the 101 to the 110 to the 10. It was sunny out, as usual, and the doctor’s office had a huge onsite parking lot. I just had to get there.

I climbed into the driver’s seat and blew out air, trying to override the rising in my stomach. It was 2013: I had bought my first smart phone earlier that year and felt incredibly grateful to be able to hold a real-time map in my hand. I didn’t know that soon, cars would have little phone display platforms, then actual built-in screens. I just felt lucky to be using Google Maps rather than the Thomas Guide, a phone book-sized set of maps that our LA friends described paging through frantically to navigate unexpected detour.

This called for Robyn. I connected my phone to a cord plugged into the car’s cigarette lighter and opened Spotify to Robyn. If I was going into the LA highway system, I needed music loud enough to drown out my fear. I’d learned this trick in high school. Though I’d declined to practice driving more than strictly necessary, I’d joined the school ski club and learned to snowboard. If I found myself in a slick or icy spot on the slope, I sang to override my fear. This quieted the anxious part of my brain by distracting it with an assignment. It was no driver’s ed, but it would have to do.

The synth-and-bass opening notes to Dancing On My Own filled the car. I set my phone on the dashboard behind the wheel, wrapped my fingers tight at 10 and 2, and eased out of the driveway.

Nothing felt natural. Accelerating, tapping the brake, changing lanes: each required conscious thought. I’d execute well for a few minutes, then do something that made my stomach drop: jerk the wheel accidentally when I sneezed, or check my blindspot and get surprised that a car was unexpectedly there. I didn’t always feel on the edge of throwing up, but I didn’t feel relaxed.

I got to the doctor’s fine, like the other few dozen drives I did in LA. Did I feel lightheaded when I had to execute a four-lane highway merge? Yes, but I also learned that Angelenos generally let you in. Did I arrive at my destination a sweaty, scooped-out shell of myself? Totally – but over time, the fear changed from a constant buzzing to a low hum, then to background noise. By the time we moved to Brooklyn two years later, I could drive up Flatbush Avenue with a friend in the car, dodging buses, pedestrians, and debris like Mario Kart.

The whole time I was relearning to drive in LA, though, I felt ashamed, like my discomfort was a moral deficiency. On the East Coast, I’d had friends who drove and friends who didn’t; I drove sometimes, didn’t like it, and felt normal. In LA, I was suddenly an outlier. I went to great lengths to hide my secret from my new friends and coworkers.

Then, when I got to Brooklyn, I was stunned to see a different way. I had two coworkers who were learning skills I’d known since childhood – and describing them without shame. One was learning how to swim, the other how to bike. I loved hearing about how they faced their fears and made time to practice. And I was very grateful for the luck of having learned those skills before I matured into a knowledge of mortality.

I started telling stories about both my relatively new driving skills and my incredibly nascent New York City navigation skills. Yes, most of Manhattan is a grid, and yes, there were apps to tell me where to find the train, but there’s still a real learning curve to checking the sign for uptown or downtown. It can be on the opposing track, on a totally different set of tracks within that station, or at a totally different station – the last of which is particularly disappointing when you’ve already paid your fare and have to run back up to street level and find a different entrance.

In those early days, fall 2015, sometimes I figured out I’d boarded in the wrong direction only once the train had already left the station. Like the time I tried to take the Q from lower Manhattan to midtown, and I realized something had gone wrong only when we emerged from the tunnel to a glorious view of the East River, en route to Brooklyn.

Like driving, I’d avoided learning how to navigate New York City until I had to do it. When I was fresh out of college – living in DC, learning how to pay rent, make friends, and feed myself – I’d take the Megabus to visit friends in Brooklyn. This was 2008, pre-smart phone, and I stayed with a dear friend who’d seen me in my natural habitat and knew how lost I’d likely get. She’d send me step-by-step instructions for getting from the bus stop to her house, including important landmarks and naming when I’d be walking with or against the flow of traffic. Also like with driving, I don’t know how she and others got places before they had smartphones, but even with the apps, finding my way took real effort.

Now I’ve moved to the Finger Lakes, where I regularly meet folks who wouldn’t want to live in any city, much less New York. “I don’t know how you did it!” A woman said the other week, over small talk at a brewery. “I couldn’t stand the crowds.”

I shrugged and smiled at her, and at all I don’t know yet. “You learn.”

The question: What have you had to learn to live in your current location?

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