One Word Inspiration: Choice, the beginning
This is a choose-your-own-adventure story. What happens next is your choice.
Alison is a twenty-six-year-old married woman, and she has a decision to make. Alison can depend on her family for transportation to work and school, or she can take a risk and learn how to drive.
Alison has a recurring dream of driving in unsafe situations. In the dreaming, Alison does not know how to use a blinker; she reaches for the wheel and pedals while her bum sits in the passenger seat. Alison wakes up feeling like she has no choice but to never drive.
You have a choice:
Alison reads the driving manual. Link to blog post (A).
Alison rationalizes that because she is disabled, she must never drive. Link to blog post (N)
(A) Alison looks up the Tennessee State driver manual online and studies for the next week. Alison now deems herself ready for the written test in order to earn her learner’s permit. Link to blog post (C)
Alison’s lack of faith in her ability to drive safely upsets her. She believes that because she has Asperger’s, she truly is disabled from driving a car. But Alison has places to go; she is a full-time student and a part-time retail employee.
It is Friday morning, and Alison has to go to work. Lee is working, and Alison has to get to the mall by herself. You have a decision to make:
Alison takes the city bus to work. Link to post (D).
Alison takes Uber to work. Scroll to paragraph (E).
(C) Alison takes and passes the written portion of the driving test. Now she has a learner’s permit. It is time for her to learn to drive.
Alison has to make the decision to keep riding the bus (bounce back to g in an infinite loop until you decide to go to paragraph (C)) or learn to drive at paragraph (C).
On a day off, Alison takes the wheel with her husband, and now teacher, in the passenger seat. They are parked in an empty parking lot to what once was a thriving mall.
“You should be able to handle this much better than Susie,” said Lee.
Susie the Subaru had been their SUV. Now they had a smaller sedan-type car.
“You just press the button to turn it on. You don’t even have to put the keys in the ignition.”
Alison pressed the button and watched many lights turn on the dash and radio area. Lee showed Alison how to operate the windshield wipers, defroster, and blinker. Lee may have shown Alison other important details, but this story is written by a woman who does not know how to drive.* So, please suspend disbelief and operate on the notion that Lee is a fine driving instructor and Alison learned many things.
*This story was written over the course of eleven years. That line was written around 2019. I got my license in 2025.
“Put the gear in drive. See, it is the one with the D,” Lee instructed Alison.
Alison clicked the gear shift until it lined up with the D.
“Now, put your foot on the gas pedal and drive forward. With unused parking spaces lined up on either side of them, a runway of a parking lot stretched out safely in front of Alison. No traffic threatened her or Lee’s lives. Alison slowly pressed on the gas pedal with her foot. The car hummed. Alison increased the force of her foot ever so slightly. They inched forward. She pressed a little more. One mile per hour read the odometer. Two miles per hour, three, four, five miles per hour. Alison and Lee rolled forward along the parking lot.
“You can go faster,” said Lee.
You are God. You get to decide how this goes. If Alison drives forward, scroll to paragraph (F) Link to paragraph F. If Alison wigs out, scroll to paragraph (H).
(D) Alison works at her local mall on the other side of town. Usually her husband drives her to work, but when he is working, Alison is on her own. Alison has a direct bus route to the mall near her home, and she can walk to the bus stop easily enough. It's a twenty-minute walk.
But taking the bus is challenging. Public transportation involves a lot of walking and waiting outside. This becomes exhausting, especially when Alison misses a bus or feels compelled to leave too early in order to not miss her bus.
Being bound to public transportation limits Alison’s freedom. The bus routes are limited, and some don’t run on the weekend, causing Alison to spend more money than she would like taking Uber to work on Saturdays. Traveling across town can take several hours. What does Alison do?
Continue taking the bus to work. Scroll to paragraph (G)
Expand her freedom and learn to drive.
Fifteen minutes later, with forty-five minutes to her shift, a red SUV rolls up matching the description and license number. Sherri is her driver. Sherri looks like the woman in Uber’s profile. Sherri and Alison have a pleasant conversation about how nice the weather is in San Diego compared to Memphis (they don’t even salt their roads!).
Fifteen minutes later, Alison arrives at the mall. She is not at her store yet. Alison has thirty minutes to get a coffee, get to her store, and sip on her coffee while it is still hot. Alison is peculiar and likes to arrive at her place of work an hour early to sip coffee and get her head in the right space. Now she only has thirty minutes. She would have had forty-five if she could hop in her own car and drive herself. Alison is cantankerous and $20 poorer. She really shouldn’t be buying coffee at this point either. Now Alison is stressed. What does she do?
Choose wisely.
Alison learns how to drive. Scroll up to paragraph (C).
Alison continues to take Uber to work. This is very expensive. Link to paragraph (N)
(F) Alison learns to drive the standard way: it can go two ways:
Alison is nervous, but functioning. Lee teaches her how to make a left-hand turn. Eventually she is driving on roads and merging into different lanes and even driving on the freeway. Alison has independence. She can do things for Lee, like pick up groceries without making him go too. Alison can go to work and now worry about buying gas instead of taxi fares. But Alison needs to take the Tennessee state license test to move forward
Take the license test without driving school: go to paragraph (K)
Like this? Go to paragraph (i).
(G) The bus can be challenging. For instance, there are weird people on the bus, like the Gothic dude in a long black trench coat whose therapist told him he needed to make more friends, so he tried to introduce himself, shake Alison’s hand, and find out what they had in common. Alison gets that people have problems and some are unique, but making friends on the city bus with no context was too much for her, and she played it off like she was a germaphobe (totally not) and would not shake the weird man’s hand. There was also the time a man asked to buy her while she waited alone at a bus stop. Graphic much? Thematic? All true, but it really happened.
Alison has to make the decision to keep riding the bus (bounce back to G in an infinite loop until you decide to go to paragraph (C)) and learn to drive.
(H) Alison is driving five miles per hour and feels like she is speeding. She can barely move left or right, unless she compensates and makes a sharp turn. So she speeds forward at all of five miles an hour toward a brick wall at the side of the parking lot. Alison is totally wigging out now stop-going between the brakes and the pedal. It is not going well for Alison, and she feels like she will never get past this level of driving.
Go to paragraph (J) if Alison persists and enrolls in driving lessons for adults with anxiety.
Alison gives up; scroll up to paragraph (N) But understand, if you go to paragraph (N) again, you will spend the next ten years worrying about how Alison can't drive. In those ten years, Alison has two babies and her mom continues to age. Eventually, Mom will need rides to her appointments, and Alison's kids will need rides to school and such.
While Alison is pregnant with her second child, she still doesn't have a license, and her mom is doing a lot of the driving for her. Thinking about how much she relies on other people makes Alison feel helpless, and this makes her nervous. These nerves ebb and flow in the form of anxiety attacks.
Then one day Alison is out with her mom in the passenger seat, and she feels tired. This fatigue is a common occurrence for Alison. She is tired so often that she is used to being tired all the time. She doesn't know what to do about it. Alison feels a strange sensation behind her eyeballs and finds herself looking up at the sky. Her eyeballs feel stretched up. Alison tries to look at a road sign ahead, but her eyes keep rolling up.
She can't focus her eyes on anything ahead of her and feels completely out of control.
"What if I were the one driving right now? It wouldn't be safe," Alison thinks about the situation.
"I need to be able to look ahead of me at all times if I'm ever going to drive."
Alison struggles to look ahead of herself, with her eyes rolling up to the sky the whole way home. Alison has no idea what is going on or how to avoid this problem. She has frequent anxiety attacks just thinking about the situation.
What does Alison do?:
(N) Nothing. Alison is dependent for the rest of her life. It sucks. Alison can't afford to take a taxi every time she wants to go somewhere, so she relies on her friends and family a lot. Alison is left out of bible study. No one wants to drive out of their way to take her with them. She doesn't understand and feels rejected.
(O) Proceed to practice driving. No medical intervention.
(Q) Big accident on the freeway. Everybody dies.
(P) Go to the doctor.
Take meds at night, reduce Latuda. Take Maxwell driving school. Go to (J.)
(K) Alison had taken and passed the permit test. She'd driven with Lee. How hard could it be? Alison scheduled a road test with the DMV. Of course, it took her weeks to get this appointment because she likes to procrastinate; she's procrastinated for 10+ years of her adult life on getting a license by this point.
Alison meets the test instructor. He asks her to flip her blinker left and right and trigger her wipers. Then it's time to press the brake. Alison has done this before, but she has to ask... which one is the brake, left or right? (Hint: B is for Big and B is for brake. It's also to the left) But, of course, Alison hadn't put enough time into practicing and fails the road test.
Of course she failed! Did you think it was ever going to be this simple?
(i) Alison is driving alongside Shelby Farms one day. There is a lot of traffic, and people are pulling all the way up just to merge at the last minute. This is creating a traffic jam and slowing everyone down in the long run. A car tries to pull in front of Alison. Alison is not having it and doesn’t let the lady in front of her. The lady ends up right behind Alison and is giving her angry gestures with her fingers. Alison feels intimidated.
Alison drives through the intersection and turns left toward Shelby Farms. There is a long stretch of road ahead of Alison. The woman is on her tail, no matter how fast she goes to get away from the crazy lady. They are both speeding down the road. Finally, Alison realizes she has to slow down to turn safely at the end of the road. This is dangerous. Alison has an angry stranger following her, and she is alone. The minute she slows down, she feels a hard smack. Alison’s head hits the back of her chair. She wants to get out of the car and inspect the damage, but then she would have to deal with the intimidating, angry lady. Alison calls the police from inside her car. She explains what happened and where they are. After waiting for what feels like an hour, the police arrive.
After the whole experience and being lectured by the police for speeding, Alison is completely rattled. Lee and his mom come to the scene, and Lee drives Alison home. Alison wonders, what if the lady who chased her was any crazier than she already was? What if that bitch pulled a gun on Alison? Would this be the end of the story?
If Alison gives up because of this, go to paragraph (N). If Alison keeps trying, go to paragraph (M)
(J) First, Alison reads the Tennessee state driving manual. Then, Alison takes the written portion of the driving test and earns a learner’s permit.
Alison has moved to Arkansas by this point. She's taking a new permit test. It should be roughly the same rules as Tennessee, right? And it's Arkansas; how hard can it be? Does Alison study for the permit test?
How hard can an Arkansas written test be? Alison has already passed the California and Tennessee permit tests before.
Alison fails the permit test! How embarrassing. Go back to paragraph (L) over and over until Alison gets a road manual and studies for the permit test. The proctor knows her well now. Let's move past this.
Alison made the right decision. Whether the rules were different or Alison just needed to review the study guide, she's ready to actually drive a car on legal roads.
It is time for Alison to enroll in driving school. She opts to not have a family member or friend teach her to drive because this is a sensitive operation, and she needs the best instructors: one who can help adults with anxiety.
Maxwell Driving School in Memphis, TN changed Alison's life. Four days of road rules and driving technique lectures helped Alison feel ready to hit the road.
The simulator was a weird experience. She hit so many virtual deer, and the instructor told he she scored fast reactions anyway. The XBOX system simulated the craziest driving scenarios. The professional road instructors made Alison feel safe and took her through guided routes with common driving situations, such as changing lanes and crossing streets.
It feels like a miracle when Alison comes out of the ordeal with a license to drive. Alison took her license test on her 36th birthday. We don't need to choose the adventure any further because this part actually happened. Fortunately, Alison passed the test the first time and didn't have to repeat it.
The driving test in West Memphis was surprisingly easy. Alison wasn't sure if she was really good enough to drive on the interstate, but she continued to practice with Lee and now drives all around town as well as to Memphis. Alison depends on GPS to get places, but it's good enough for now. Alison no longer has anxiety attacks over the impending doom of being unable to take full care of herself.
A couple of months after I got my license, I was using the interstate and getting to Memphis. After I year, I felt comfortable driving anywhere**.
**I don't feel too privy to driving in New Orleans or Dallas yet. (2026)
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