Ava (from bookbear express) writes one of my favourite Substack newsletters - her writing is always so crisp, elegant and insightful. Ava recently wrote about her experience of taking driving lessons, finally, at the age of 24:
Driving is a metaphor, by the way. It’s a metaphor for being almost 25 and my prefrontal cortex finally developing. It’s about finally making a living from writing, something I’ve wanted to [do] since I was 8. It’s about feeling out of control for most of my life and finally slowing down enough to, uh, keep a steady grasp on the wheel. It’s about learning to get around on my own.
I see why the metaphor appeals to Ava, who just before this paragraph clarifies why she hasn’t learned to drive until now (she relied on parents or boyfriends taking her places). Doesn’t everyone want to see themselves as self-reliant and capable? As driven?
Ava certainly isn’t alone in seeing driving’s potential for metaphor. Metaphors and idioms about driving are abundant in English: ‘drive’ comes from the Old English drīfan, meaning to urge a person (or an animal) to go forward (it’s the same root as ‘drift’). People who are energetic, motivated and enthusiastic are said to ‘have drive’; relatedly, the extremely positive attribute of ‘motivation’ derives from ‘motor’. But you can have too much of a good thing: nobody wants to go into overdrive, nor do they want to be driven around the bend (or even up the wall). Not all driving metaphors are positive ones, but the idea persists culturally that it’s a positive thing that signifies the received virtues of independence and self-reliance.
On the one hand, I can see that being able to drive about by yourself is a nice thing to do: why wait for others for your own journey to begin? But some of my strongest and fondest memories of driving feature other people: not getting around on my own, as Ava puts it, but getting around with others (and enjoying the journey, to boot). Like Ava, when in my teens I also relied on others to drive me places. Most of my friends lived in rural villages and therefore had to learn, whereas I lived nearer the town centre and could rely on them to pick me up en route to our destination. This meant lots of exciting, giggly car journeys to teenage house parties (and sometimes sleeping in the car after the party, too).
The ‘magic roundabout’ was another bonding experience: a huge roundabout with five mini ones surrounding it, it was an intellectual and infrastructural hurdle that everyone in my hometown had to overcome before they could pass their driving test. Then there’s the colours and sounds of other people’s cars - the frivolous bright blue of my old flatmate’s car, or the particular clunk-thud-clunk the drain cover outside our family home made whenever anyone slowly maneuvered over it. (Most times I heard that sound it was my mother coming home from work and so hearing it in my memory now, the sound, though indelicate, is a fond one.)
Cars suggest shared experiences - but specifically intimacy. In his book Finding Flow, the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi claimed that families, when in the home, tend to be pretty atomised. Everyone’s in separate rooms, doing different things, barely communicating. But the car is where the ‘affective bonds’ (as he puts it) of the modern family are made. It’s there, he argues, that you’re participating in something together - be that a conversation or something as simple as listening to music. In my experience, cars are also a good place for emotionally difficult conversations: assuming both people are in the front seats, you can open up to each other while not facing each other (thereby reducing the intensity of the situation), and pauses in the conversation are achieved not through stoney silence or obstinate retreat from the issue, but as an inevitable result of having to pay attention to the road. In the front seats of cars, on unremarkable suburban journeys, I’ve discussed heartbreak, suicide and despair, with welcome interludes provided by the punctuation of red lights, three-point turns, and unexpected pedestrians in the road.
It’s time to confess: I’m a terrible driver. I took three attempts to pass my theory test and five for the practical. On the day I finally achieved it, I was so giddy that my instructor had to drive me home. I then didn’t drive for another ten years, but took a few refresher lessons last summer. Following these I hired a Zipcar for a few hours, an adventure which ended with me getting a puncture and somehow locking myself in the car while the alarm sounded without end, and my boyfriend and a man from the AA simultaneously coming to rescue me.
I find driving hard - so much harder than other people seem to. I find it difficult and frightening. Maybe it’s because I struggle with the reality that the metaphor isn’t so appealing. And there’s plenty about driving that doesn’t fit into the attractive metaphor of ‘getting around on your own’ and is, instead, draining and tedious. Think of taxes, MOTs, parking, insurance, and so on. Along these lines, a friend of mine recently said this to me (quoted with permission):
I feel to some extent like a jelly being wafted through the ocean by the current and that kind of living has always been surrounded by language like "directionless", "lost", "lacking ambition or drive" and I'm like, but to "drive" somewhere you need a paved road and you only get to go where the municipal town planners of life say you can go. What if you want to wade through a blueberry bog instead and not get anywhere but you get some blueberries out of it?
I’d love to be a capable, reliable, strong person. At times I think I am: I’ve lived alone for many years, and generally I can look after myself day to day. But there’s something about driving that - despite my reluctance towards the metaphor - reminds me that I’m not fully independent. In recent months, life changes have left me feeling less certain, less assured, than I used to. I’m a solo traveller now, drifting and savouring the blueberries, wondering if that’s where I was meant to be the whole time.