I have a driving test on the 12th of November and I feel pretty nervous about it. First of all, let me just say that I am not a terribly good driver, or a terribly bad driver. I'm mediocre at best behind the wheels but not the extent of an ancient Asian lady behind the wheels of a Mercedes SUV.

I first learned to drive when I was 13 years old. It was a momentous year for me. I didn't bother to ask for my parents' permission if I can learn to drive because I knew they'd probably say no. So I went and ask my driver if it's cool for me to drive a bit in the backroads behind my school. My driver drove me around in a big Honda CRV. Which is technically a SUV, but it's an Asian SUV so it's not that big. It's like a midget SUV, if you can call a normal Western SUV a big Tall, American SUV. I went off on a tangent there but anyway. So that went well. I didn't crash at all, which was pretty impressive considering that the car wasn't the best sort of car for learning to drive.

Fast forward several years later, I have managed to crash that same Honda Midget SUV at least 3 times. The first one was me not paying attention to the car parked in front of me. So I was cruising home, and I was on the home stretch, and I crashed into a parked car. The thing is that car wasn't supposed to even park there. But I'm just making up excuses. I had my phone out because I was getting someone to open the garage door for me. And that was that. I asked my dad, Fuck this shit, I don't want to drive anymore (what a fucking pussy thing to say, right? Ha). And he said, Shit no. If you don't keep on driving you're not going to learn anything from it. So I kept on driving.

I got a bit better, the other two times I crashed my car was when I had to make a ridiculously tight U-Turn in the middle of an intersection clogged with trucks and buses. I scraped off the edge of my car to a truck. The truck was fine, and I had a dent with some scratch on the side. The other time was when I had to reverse my car into a parking lot. This one was stupid and it ingrained a sense of fear in my psyche. I had to watch as my confidence in driving dropped as I became much too afraid to drive because I was afraid of parking my cars. This lack of confidence translated to a sense of a lack of control in my life.

This is where it gets interesting, for me at least. I have always associated driving with a sense of freedom. I believe that if you can drive, and you have a car, you have access to more things in this world than someone who doesn't have access to this brilliant facility. Imagine, if you will, a tireless horse, that you can ride from one end of the earth to the other. Tireless, fast, reliable. There is a certain romance attached to driving, in my opinion at least.

Then why do I feel such apprehension to my driving test? Why all of this anxiety even though I know that I can drive? My instructor said that I handle the car perfectly well on straight roads, but when it comes to following the local rules, I stumble. It is foolish to drive without acknowledging the local rules but the rules they made up for the driving test here are almost textbook like. I was taught to drive using my instincts and gut feeling, and being corteous to other drivers. I guess it takes a lot of practice to chuck that mindset out of my head because driving in Australia is different. It's way different.

I guess it all comes down to practice, because once you practice enough, you can drive naturally and you can finally use more parts of your brain to focus on following the rules, e.g. headcheck and checking the mirrors as instructed.