"When you get behind the wheel, you are responsible for your own life and the lives of everyone else around you. You are accepting that responsibility while inside a machine that is capable of killing."
Those were the first words that spilled from the mouth of my driving instructor two summers ago, as I began my first session of Drivers Ed.
I've always been a genuinely cautious person, and I've always known how serious the responsibility of driving is, so the words he said didn't shock me or hit me hard until about a year later- when I got into an extremely heated argument with one of my friends about the danger of texting and driving.
She had started driving lessons much earlier than I had, gotten her license long before me, and gotten her own car well before I got mine- which all seemed to snowball and go directly to her head because by our senior year, she definitely felt like she was unbeatable.
One day while she was driving me home from school, her phone buzzed with text message notifications and she insisted on responding immediately. Because I was in the back seat, I was just far enough back that where she was holding her phone was just beyond my reach.
Had I been able to, I would've grabbed it.
"Please put your phone down," I said. "Focus on the road."
To make matters worse, we were in a seriously crowded school zone loaded with student drivers, pedestrians, and end-of-the-school-day traffic.
"Don't worry," she responded. "I know what I'm doing. I'm very good at multitasking.
I had major problems with literally every single thing she had said.
First, I had every reason to worry. She was making the conscious decision to put my life in danger, all because she felt that responding to a text was a higher priority.
Second, the phrase, "I know what I'm doing," is a very ignorant thing to say when you're driving. Sure, you absolutely can know exactly what you're doing, but you don't know what everybody else is doing. Just because you know how to drive doesn't mean everyone else does, and you have to be defensive. If you think defensive driving can be done while you're texting, you are wrong and you need to accept that.
Third, MULTITASKING IS PSYCHOLOGICALLY IMPOSSIBLE.
As a Psychology major, I've studied the concept of multitasking quite a bit and know that scientifically, it isn't even a real thing. A human brain simply can not multitask. Physically, doing more than one task at once is possible. That's not hard to understand. But psychologically, the brain is constantly switching between tasks and is never able to focus on more than one thing at one time.
If you are looking at your phone while you're driving, your brain is focused on your phone. If you refuse to realize that, you should not be driving. You are a danger to everyone and everything in your path when you get behind the wheel thinking that you can drive and do other things simultaneously.
Stay at home if those things are more important to you than your life or the lives of others. It really isn't hard.
It always shocks me, too, when I'm in the car with an adult who texts while driving and they have the nerve to get upset with me when I call them out on it. My own parents have gotten annoyed with me on occasion for telling them not to do it. More often than not I get a disgusted look from these adults and/or a shrug of the shoulders, which both seem to say, "you're the kid, don't tell me what I should and shouldn't do."
If they do give me a verbal response, I can almost always count on it being something along the lines of, "I've been driving for x number of years, I know what I'm doing," and then I'm even more upset with them than they are with me.
Don't get me wrong, I respect that adults have authority over me. I know that in most cases, it definitely is not my place to tell an adult how to behave or what to do. But when it comes to this topic, when it comes to an issue of life or death, I will become the boss and I will do so unapologetically.
"I'm experienced," doesn't apply here. At all.
Let me leave you with this:
You could be the most experienced driver in the world, and that still wouldn't be enough to make it impossible for you to be the victim of someone else's recklessness. You could take every precaution possible, and be the unlucky one in the wrong place at the wrong time who gets hurt because of someone else's driving.
You are not the only one on the road. Being an 'experienced driver' doesn't make you any less vulnerable than anyone else, and it doesn't mean you're invincible.
Keep that in mind the next time your phone rings while you're behind the wheel, and most importantly remember that there are no words in any language that are worth as much as your life or the lives of anyone else.
A text message can either wait until you get to wherever you're going, or it can wait forever. Make the right decision.
