The first time I ever drove on the freeway was to tell my girlfriend that I loved her. At this point, I had lived in L.A. for four years. “You can’t not drive in L.A.,” everyone said when I moved here. But I worked from home and lived relatively close to most of my friends. I had Lyft and Uber, a TAP card and a borderline unhinged love of walking. My excuse was that I didn’t have a car and couldn’t afford to buy one, which wasn’t a lie. But the real reason was I was scared of driving and I had decided to succumb to that fear.
I wasn’t always an anxious driver. Growing up in Massachusetts, I got my license at 16 and cruised around in my grandma’s 1979 Peugeot that had one working door and wouldn’t have passed a safety inspection. But I felt invincible. Then I grew into a neurotic adult with an ever-growing list of rational and irrational fears — from weird headaches and mold to running into casual acquaintances at the grocery store.
In my early 30s, I developed a terrible phobia of flying. “It’s so much safer than driving in a car!” people said to comfort me. So I did some research. This did not assuage my fear of flying, but it did succeed in making me also afraid of driving. I lived in New York City at the time, where being a nondriver was easy. In L.A., it was less easy, but I made it work.
When I was single, I appreciated that dating apps let me sort potential matches by location. I set my limit to “within five miles” from my apartment in West Hollywood and tried to manifest an ideal partner who would live within this perfectly reasonable radius. This proved somewhat complicated. My first boyfriend in L.A. moved from Los Feliz to Eagle Rock six months into our relationship, and we broke up. There were other issues, but the distance was the final straw.
I did eventually get a car but was restricted by my intense fear of the massive, sprawling conduits of chaos known as the L.A. freeways. Lanes come and go. Exits appear out of nowhere. And everyone drives like they’re auditioning for “The Fast and the Furious.” So I took surface streets everywhere, even when it doubled my driving time. I became pretty comfortable behind the wheel as long as I remained in my little bubble of safety. Then I fell in love.
Spencer and I met 14 years ago through a close mutual friend when we both lived in Brooklyn. Our friend had talked her up so much that I was nervous to meet her as if she were a celebrity, but she immediately made me feel at ease. She’s confident and comfortable in her skin but also exudes a warmth that makes people feel secure. At the time, I was newly sober, and feeling comfortable — especially around someone I’d just met — was rare.
Not long after we met she moved to Philly, and our lives went in different directions. She was starting med school. I was writing for an addiction website and doing stand-up comedy. She was living with her long-term girlfriend. I was trying to date the most emotionally unavailable people I could find, which my therapist (and every self-help book in Barnes & Noble) attributed to a fear of intimacy.
A decade later, we both ended up in Los Angeles. She had broken up with her girlfriend and was a resident at UCLA. I was taking screenwriting classes and walking everywhere. We texted a few times to hang out, but then the COVID-19 pandemic hit, keeping her busy in the hospital and me busy at home spraying my groceries with Clorox. Multiple vaccines later, we finally met up at the AMC theater at the Century City mall. Just as I remembered, she felt like home.
Over the next few months, we went to about nine movies together, our hands occasionally touching in a shared bucket of popcorn, before I finally got the courage to tell her I had developed feelings for her. We’d become close friends at this point, and the stakes felt alarmingly high. Also, she was emotionally available. Uncharted territory for me.
“I like like you,” I said one night while we were on my couch watching “Curb Your Enthusiasm.” My voice was shaking and also muffled, because I was hiding under a blanket.
This confession was one of the scariest things I’ve ever done, and I’ve done a lot of scary things — gotten sober, did stand-up in front of my entire family (don’t recommend this), come out as queer to a bunch of conservative Midwesterners on a study-abroad trip (one girl took a selfie with me and sent it to her mom with the note, “I met a bisexual and she’s really nice!”). But I learned in recovery that sometimes when something is scary, we are meant to run toward it rather than away from it. That night, Spencer pulled the blanket off my head and told me she felt the same.
This beautiful, confident “Curb”-loving doctor did have one red flag. She lived in Santa Monica, at the end of a six-mile stretch on the 10 Freeway. On side streets, getting from my apartment to hers could take up to an hour or longer in traffic. After a few months, we were seeing each other so often that the commute had become unmanageable.
Also unmanageable were my feelings. One night, about four months into our relationship, I told two close friends that I loved Spencer but was scared to tell her. The absence of these words had become a weight between us, triggering insecurities and petty fights. My friends urged me to tell her and thought I should do it that night (we’d been watching “Yellowjackets” and were feeling a little dramatic). I felt emboldened. But it was 10 p.m. on a work night and it would take 45 minutes to get to her house by my usual route.
I called her. “I’m coming over!” I said. Twenty minutes later, I was merging onto the 10. I drove too slowly, got off at the wrong exit and gripped the steering wheel so hard my fingers went numb. But when I got to Spencer’s apartment, I was bolstered by adrenaline and the rush of having conquered my fear. I had driven on the 10 — at night. I could survive anything. I told her I loved her. She said it back. I didn’t even hide under a blanket.
This was two years ago. Since then, I’ve driven on the 10 hundreds of times between Spencer’s apartment and mine. Now we live together, which significantly cuts down on the commute. I still prefer a side street, but I’ll take the freeway if I have to. Since mastering the 10, I’ve also braved the 5 Freeway, the 101 Freeway and even the 405 Freeway. Spencer always tells me I’m “brave.” I’m starting to believe her.
The author is an L.A.-based writer, editor and comedian and co-host of the podcast “All My Only Children.” She’s on Instagram and Threads: @maywilkerson
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This story originally appeared on LA Times
