Our Research Notes series invites authors to describe their process for a recent book, with “research” defined as broadly as they like. This week, Shannon McLeod writes about Whimsy from Long Day Press. We’re also honored to have shared the first published excerpt from Whimsy in 2016.

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Writing Through My Driving Phobia

“Just merge, the other drivers will make room for you,” my therapist said from the passenger seat as I entered the freeway, hands slick with sweat, heart pounding.

This was the thing. I did not trust other people to make room for me. I did not trust other people to protect or look out for me. How would one develop such a precious belief? (Years later, in 2020, this question would loom again with the mistrust of others to protect my health.)

Shaking, sobbing, wishing for windshield wipers for my own eyes, this is how I experienced driving on the freeway.

Even as a passenger, I couldn’t merge onto the freeway without vivid thoughts of car crashes. The sudden lurch of impact, hands searching for limbs and blood. In my mind, every surrounding vehicle was ready to tear into my own.

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I remember learning to drive. I never drove with my mother because she would scream or wail in fear. I’d seen it happen with my older brother and my nerves couldn’t handle it. Sitting to my right, my dad instructed me to turn from 10 Mile onto Woodward. Though I’d seen this turn made as a passenger hundreds of times in my life, my brain went blank with fear. I started to turn onto the southbound lanes, against traffic, instead of waiting for the northbound lanes. My dad grabbed the wheel and yanked it straight.

With my driver’s ed instructor, I cried nearly every session. During our last lesson, we pulled back into the parking lot of Sears driving school after I’d made an ill-determined left turn. I remember staring at the discarded McDonald’s bags at his feet as he said, “You — almost — killed — us,” the words pushed out between labored gasps.

Why is it so easy for others? Maneuvering a lethal machine.

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Like most families in the Detroit area, mine had ties to the auto industry. Both of my grandfathers worked for Chrysler. My childhood home is a block south of I-696, an eight-lane freeway known as “The Autobahn of Detroit.” From the yard I could hear the distant rush of a hundred vehicles going 80, sounding almost like the sea. When I was sixteen, my grandfather gave my brother and me his old Dodge Stratus. We were elated with the freedom it symbolized. For Christmases to follow, my grandfather gave us booklets of car wash coupons. I was to protect this gem. I was to keep it clean. Certainly, intact.

My friends could not believe that I had access to a car, yet I still put off taking my driver’s test. I remember a boyfriend commenting on it. He was tired of always picking me up. That relationship didn’t last until I took my test, a few days before my seventeenth birthday. Miraculously, I passed. It terrified me, this new and potentially fatal power I held. My friend and I ate off-brand Oreos and watched Garden State instead of going on a joyride after I came home with the temporary paper license.

In the first accident — where I spun out on the way to my parents’ for one of my first weekends home from college with a couple friends — I was driving the car. A nearly twenty-year-old maroon Caprese, which belonged to the yoga retreat where my friends were living. Anne drove down from the retreat with Maria, they picked me up, and then it was my turn to drive. It was raining. Being my cautious self, I checked my blind spot an extra second too long. When I looked ahead again, we were heading for the internal wall of the bridge we drove under. I jerked the wheel in the opposite direction, overcorrecting and then losing control, narrowly missing who-knows-how-many cars and ending up on the side of the road facing traffic. (How many degrees did we spin? Was it 540? 900? It felt like several revolutions, but maybe, realistically, it was only the half.) I remember turning to check on Maria in the back. She was curled up in the fetal position, her head resting on the seat. I don’t know how we would have made it the rest of the way if Anne hadn’t been calm enough to take over behind the wheel.

I recently reconnected with Maria after many years. I found out that at thirty years old, and thirteen years after the accident, she had still never gotten her driver’s license, still feared driving. I felt both relief at not being the only one and responsibility that my terrible driving singlehandedly instilled this fear.

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I started seeing the first therapist at 22. She thought I’d get over my fear of freeway driving by simply doing it. I had assumed we’d just talk about my phobia from the comfort of her office. Instead, she led me to the parking lot. Once we got into the car together, she pointed me to the freeway entrance a half a mile down the road from her office. It was the first time I’d driven on the freeway in a couple years. We exited quickly, though the time felt like it existed on another plane of reality. My legs shook and my palms held hot pools of sweat. My whole body clenched, bracing for a crash. We ended up in the Target parking lot. It looked like a faraway part of Ann Arbor I’d never before visited. My fear colored my vision such that the familiar became distant. It took a while to recognize the red bulls eye. We didn’t discuss the way my body was punishing me, practically attacking itself for taking such horrible advice. The therapist just directed me to the entrance ramp to head back north. “See? That wasn’t so bad.”

Jumping into the deep end didn’t work. After the driving session with my first therapist, I continued to take the long way on my daily commute, stretching my drive almost an hour each way to avoid the freeway. On the weekends, I spent my time glued to the couch, near-comatose from the mixture of the strains of teaching and the nearly ten hours I’d spent in the car that week, clenching my body and rehearsing my violent demise in my head.

My fears make me feel weak. I know I have more fears than most. Sometimes it feels I’m afraid of everything. Paralyzed. Why can’t I trust myself with my own life?

It wasn’t until a couple years later, when I went to a therapist who specialized in anxiety and OCD, that I started to make true progress on my driving fears. Unlike the forcefully optimistic head-on approach of my first therapist, Dr. A used a regimented and meticulously co-created plan for exposure therapy. She had the calming voice of a PBS host and the reassuring presence of someone you couldn’t imagine ever screaming. I was comforted by the sense that she would never accuse me of attempted vehicular manslaughter.

The whole process of exposure therapy felt so logical, so level-headed: the exact opposite of how it felt to drive. She listened as I recounted the different factors that added to my stress on the road. She took notes. She drew a pie chart and asked me to select the likelihood of the possibilities I spent so much time fearing against the likelihood that I’d arrive at my destination intact. We identified the habits I used to distract myself from my fears, like listening to music or audiobooks. I’d thought these were coping mechanisms, but she’d challenge me to stop relying on these comforts, cutting them out in a regimented and gradual way as part of the exposure.

Around the same time that I was confronting my freeway phobia again, I’d started writing a new novel: attempted manuscript number three. I had an idea that I wanted to write a story about a teacher who neither sold drugs nor slept with their student, a revolutionary concept amid the height of the show Breaking Bad’s popularity. I was tired of this bad teacher trope. When you’re writing, it’s hard to keep the subconscious from creeping up. So what started as a story about a teacher moonlighting as a fencing coach turned into a teacher who left a horrific car accident with her face disfigured and her passenger deceased. Perhaps it was the narrative that would help me confront my personal worst-case scenario. Or maybe it was just dwelling in fear the way my brain liked to do.

I had homework between sessions. I was to complete certain driving tasks for periods of thirty minutes or more. By this time, Dr. A and I had created a list of driving circumstances in order of ascending anxiety: driving in the day with the radio off, driving in the day with the radio off and the windows down, driving at night, driving in the rain, driving in the rain at night, driving on the freeway. Driving on the freeway. The idea was to endure the stressful situation for an extended period of time, until your body experienced the symptoms of panic long enough for them to build and build and then, eventually, subside. One of my “homework” assignments was to merge onto the freeway as a passenger and force myself to not look away from the other cars, to not tell myself “they won’t hit me.” She said reassurance would only make the anxiety worse. Dr. A told me I should watch the cars on the freeway while repeating in my head: “The car will hit me, the car will hit me, the car will hit me.” I had to teach my brain through the experience of enduring the fear. And part of that would be letting the thoughts get more extreme, raising my anxiety until it dropped off on its own. For any one of these anxiety-inducing circumstances I was to drive in, my homework was to drive for 30 minutes minimum, long enough to ride the wave and then let it pass.

I remember our session at night. We had scheduled it late so we could drive together in the dark. It was raining. I don’t remember if that was part of the plan. I liked Dr. A because she pushed me, but she didn’t push me too far. Unlike my previous therapist whose casual attitude towards my phobia felt minimizing, Dr. A legitimized my anxiety and the pain it caused. We got into my car and her honey voice guided me out of the parking lot.

Writing fiction is an experimentation in realities. Writing my book Whimsy brought some sense of self-soothing through living in the narrator’s tragedy, my greatest fear. It would be okay, I told myself. If I got into a car accident and I died, I died. If I survived, I could survive what came next. The premise of exposure therapy is to help you convince yourself that you can withstand the fear, that you can survive it. But unlike people who fear clowns, spiders, and heights, I know that people die in freeway accidents all the time. The fear isn’t all that unfounded.

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To say I’m now “cured” would be disingenuous. Staying at home due to the pandemic has meant I’ve barely driven in the past year. So much so that rodents chewed through my engine wires and my car battery died. I try to force myself to drive around town at least once a week, but I’ve avoided the freeway completely. I figure I can allow myself to dwell on just one path to fatality at a time. Depending on the day, and my baseline of anxiety, driving my neighborhood is fine, relaxed even, or it’s tense and familiar feelings of panic creep in.

I’ve done it once already, at least. I worked up to driving on the freeway and riding the waves of anxiety. Those years ago, after exposure therapy, I started taking the interstate home from work. When I visited my parents, the drive took 40 minutes instead of an hour and a half. I finished the book, creating a fictionalized resolution, but one that afforded me some very real relief. The narrator didn’t experience a storybook happy ending, but it was one that left me feeling hopeful. Like she was ready to face the hard things.

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