Sometimes I think vehicles are out to get me. Specifically when I am the one in control of them. It wasn't until I moved to the United states that I realized that I hated having to drive everywhere I wanted to go. I was used to the city life, being able to walk or subway wherever I needed to go fairly easily. But once I moved to a small college in the middle of nowhere, that all changed pretty quickly. But this all started even before that, from my time in high-school.

I had already started the process of getting my license when I was 16 years old. But that was during the summer, and so by the time I needed to practice driving, I was back in Seoul, South Korea for two years, where it was absolutely impossible for me to practice, so by the time I returned to the states to go to college, I felt woefully unprepared. It didn't help that whenever I got on the road, all I could think of was the fact that everyone else driving had been doing this since they were 15 years old. Besides that, my parents have very different teaching methods, with my mom being very safety-oriented and my dad being much less so. So driving with both of them in the car giving advice got a little bit hectic sometimes.

When it came time for the driving test, I had spent a lot of time just practicing for the parallel parking segment, and I had gotten pretty good at it. And then I took the actual test and it took me 5 seconds before I completely botched it, with the car in the space completely crooked. Regardless, I still managed to pass the test. My parents went back to Korea, leaving me to figure out the rest of my driving issues for myself. This lead into my first year in college.

My parents wanted me to have a vehicle to be able to the places I needed to go without their help, because you know, they would be in a different country. So they lent me their truck, which was a old grey Chevy that kinda looked like the pizza delivery truck from Toy Story, without the big pizza planet rocket on the top. My sister was using it at the time, so she bought a new car from the parents while I got the hand me downs. I didn't mind, I like the truck. Except for all of the spiders. Like legitimately when I went to get it I saw that the windows were just covered in spiderwebs. I wasn't the happiest but after some cleaning I had a working truck. Little did I know what would follow...

I'm just going to list all of the car issues I've had because it's been a lot.

1. To start I got pulled over pretty early in the year for registration issues. It was just a mistake, but it still took months to get figured out, with me going to court and stuff. Not fun.

2. Front right wheel blew when I was heading over to families for thanksgiving.

3. Spiders came back. O_O

4. Tried driving through the snow. Terrible idea, I had no idea what I was doing and skid completely out of control a couple of times.

The Next year I got my families van, which is a golden van my family had sense I was a kid. More issues to follow, including the trunk breaking. Eventually the engine went up in smoke, and it wasn't worth fixing so we just scrapped it for parts. As I said, not fun.

But I think through all of this, I have managed to become a more comfortable confident driver. I still would most likely rather have someone else drive, but that's just the type of person I am. I think the reason I wanted to talk about this is that I want people to know that not all of us understand, have the best luck with, or have had much experience comfortably driving cars. So maybe the next time you see someone you expect to be, in the words of Jon Mulaney, " a hundred year old blind dog whose texting while driving and drinking a smoothie", have some compassion sometimes. But hey, learning to be comfortable driving is just a part of growing up for me. And now that I'm passed the worst of my troubles (or so I hope), I can help my little sister who will probably have the same issues and fears adjusting that I have had. Who knows? Maybe I can make it better for her.

This article is partially inspired by a better article written by a friend of mine, Maddie Thies, in which she talks about learning to become independent and how driving is a major part of that. Seriously, go read her article HERE.