Month May 2021

The Crash

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“It kind of feels like rushing out to get a new dog right after your dog dies,” I joked to Pete the car salesman as I sat inside the newer version of my car. I had last seen Pete the year before when he helped me close up my 2016 Nissan Rogue’s lease and swap me over to owning the car outright. A solid, quintessentially New Jersey Italian American man, he was kind, helpful, and not super pushy towards me about actually getting a new car instead of keeping my leased one. I assumed that I would never see him again, but the summer of 2020 had other plans for me in the form of my first car crash.

It was a Tuesday morning in late July and I was stopped at a red light near my house on my way to work, waiting to make a left turn. As the light turned green, I saw a car was about to come straight through the intersection so I decided to wait for them to pass before starting my turn. Suddenly, a driver on the cross street full on ignored his red light and barreled right into the other car. I yelled in surprise when I saw their impact, and then, of course, screamed when the hit car rammed into mine. My left knee bashed against the underside of the dashboard as I scrambled with my right foot to relocate the brake pedal it had been jolted off of by the impact. Once I found my footing and came to a stop, I put my car in park, applied the parking brake because we were on a hill, and turned off the engine, not knowing that it was the last time it would run.

To my uneducated eye the damage to my car didn’t look that bad, and in fact my airbags hadn’t even triggered. But I had a bad feeling because the engine wouldn’t turn over when one of the cops who responded to the accident asked if I could move my car from its resting place in the middle of the street. I walked the couple of blocks home unscathed after the accident, apart from having to wrap my bruised, sore left knee for a couple of weeks. My car had properly done its job of keeping me safe, but when I found out the cost I was devastated. A few days after the accident I received a phone call from my insurance company informing me that they were declaring my Rogue a total loss due to damage to the electrical system. To say I cried is a massive understatement.

If you’ve been reading my blog for awhile, you will be aware that I have a tendency to become unusually attached to certain objects that I use often. I had gotten my first Rogue because I had to give up the hand-me-down station wagon that had been in my family for 20 years and had intended to keep it just as long if possible. I’d had nearly four years with the car and it had been a refuge where the world couldn’t reach me. The first year that I owned it was full of very high highs and extremely low lows and it had been my constant companion (and place to cry my eyes out without drawing attention) through it all, and had been just as helpful to me in the years that followed. I was nowhere near ready to give it up and it didn’t seem fair that I was forced to by being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

As soon as I knew I wasn’t getting my car back I decided I would just go back to the dealership who had sold it to me, and within a week of being told my car was unsalvageable I was driving a new one off the lot. I feel very fortunate that I was in a financial position to do such a thing, but I was also resentful and wanted nothing more than to have my own car back. My new Rogue felt familiar, because it was after all another Nissan and they hadn’t changed the layout of the dashboard buttons much in four years, but it also felt slightly off. The fact that many of the radio buttons had become touch screen controls was a big mental adjustment to make. I also immediately noticed it seemed slightly bigger outside and roomier inside (I won’t be bashing my knee under the dash of this one), and thought it was my mind playing tricks on me until my brother confirmed it. It made me jumpy in narrow lanes, paranoid that I was somehow too wide even though tractor trailers fit in the same lanes no problem. (I’m still more nervous on the highway than I used to be, which confuses me because I was at full stop in a suburban area when the crash happened.) On top of this, I was upset about having to put my savings towards the car instead instead of the new computer I had actually been saving the money for.

Additionally, alongside all of those feelings, I was locked in a battle of sorts with my gap insurance company. My main car insurance company valued my totaled car at a few thousand dollars less than I still owed on it. “No big deal,” I thought, “I have gap insurance which will cover the rest for me.” But I had also signed a couple of service contracts when I financed the car, and the gap people wanted proof of their cancellation before they would pay out. The contract people said the dealership had to cancel them and the dealership said the contract people had to cancel them. I made many phone calls and got no helpful answers Confused, frustrated, in despair, and just wanting it to be over, I quietly paid the few thousand dollar balance over the next few months, feeling ashamed the whole time that I couldn’t figure out how to get these various companies to do what I needed and again grateful that I was in a position for this to not be financially debilitating in a major way. So, long story short, when financing a car take gap insurance, but do not accept any special service contracts because sure you may not have to pay out of pocket to replace your tire on the off chance you get a flat, but if you total your car the contracts may become a total fucking pain in the ass.

TL;DR: I was too stressed and upset in various internal and external ways to enjoy my new car.

It’s only now, about 10 months since everything happened, that I feel like I’m bonding with my new Rogue and finally leaving the resentment behind. I first realized it was happening back in March. I’d been feeling low for weeks, so I called out of work and jetted off down the shore. It wasn’t the first time I had driven this car to the sea, but this time I did something different. After visiting my usual haunt, I decided I wanted to go to a town near there that I’d never been to using only signs on the road and my general notion of what direction I should drive in. It was a sunny, unseasonably warm day and I meandered through the area with the windows down, probably technically somebody’s definition of lost, but not bothered by it in the slightest. I felt at peace cruising around in my new rolling refuge. It suddenly dawned on me that all of my awful feelings about what had brought us together were firmly behind me, and ahead was only a bright open road. The safety sensors beeped at me worriedly as I slightly went over a line on the road to avoid a pothole and I patted the steering wheel reassuringly and said, “It’s okay. We’re okay,” as we continued on our way.

Alone in the Storm

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“Does anyone else have something they bought recently that they really like?” asked my friend B while we were on a group video call that was theoretically supposed to be a session of D&D, but which had devolved, as it so often did, into extended chit chat — in this case a game of show and tell. I had recently received a small print that I’d bought from one of my favorite artists. It took several months to reach me, traveling from Finland by the slowest untrackable mail. Even knowing from the outset that it would take a long time to reach my hands, I had to have it. I was drawn in by the oceanic imagery, because nautical stuff is one of my things, but also I looked at the girl alone in a tempest, on a narrow perch in a storm tossed sea, and saw myself. Melodramatic, but true. But when I showed it to my friends and explained that, B joked, “You’re not alone, you have us! You have to send it back.”

But somehow I do often feel quite alone. I’m a bit of the odd duck of my family, the only daughter, bookish and introverted. I also sometimes feel like a tangential person in my friend groups. Yes, I do think I am well liked and appreciated. I consider my close friendships to be solid, and I am grateful for that. But sometimes I do feel like everyone else’s connections with each other are stronger than they are with me. I get the sensation of being on the outside looking in.

I know that I do it to myself, though. When I can’t see friends in person I tend not to reach out as much. This is partly because if I’m not hearing from a friend I always just assume they’re busy living their lives and I don’t want to be a bother, but it is partly out of sheer shitty forgetfulness. I have literally lost close friendships due to these bad habits (although for the record, those people I drifted away from in silence didn’t try speaking to me either — it takes two people to make a friendship work, and I would have responded had I heard from them). However, equally harmful is my habit of withdrawing when my mental health is tanking. I would rather call out sick from work and run away from home for a day than tell my friends I feel shitty and need a pick me up, which is because I am worried about being a burden (despite repeated reassurances that I am not).

I live as the girl on the stony spire, silent as the rock erodes beneath my feet and I am swept into the stormy sea that I have wrought for myself. Sometimes at this point I’ll send out a text message expressing some of my misery, a rope flung out in a panicked prayer that someone will catch it and pull me to shore. I am lucky because someone always does. However, more often than not I allow myself to slip under the waves and be dashed on the sharp fragments of the stone that had been holding me up, preferring to tread water until I drown instead of risking worrying the people around me, because I know I am ultimately the one responsible for maintaining my own well being (although my loved ones are not stupid and can often see me slipping under anyway).

So far I have always managed to outlast my riptide, redevelop my sea legs, paddle back to shore, and start over again. The storm always passes and I find a new outcropping to stand on. As the clouds roll away I convince myself that continuing in this fashion is just fine because, after all, I survived, didn’t I?

(And here, please allow me to read your mind: yes, I know I probably need a therapist, but who can afford it? Blogging is cheaper.)

I fill my nights with my friends so I don’t have to live with the silence that often brings the storm. Two different D&D campaign groups. Watching friends’ streams. Thursday game night and the conversations with the late night crew that often follow. My closest friends just a text message away and more than willing to schedule time to hang out over voice chat. But everyone currently being only faces and voices inside of screens sometimes feels worse than I think it would be to be totally isolated and not have any of that at all.

Their voices fill the space until one by one they log off and disappear, leaving me with only the sound of my own breathing and the wind roaring in the trees behind my house, sounding something like the raging loneliness of a stormy sea. Somehow it feels too silent, too empty, too alone.