Sometimes driving makes me cry

It has happened more than once.  Not too many times, but enough.  It usually happens when it’s raining.

Where I live, when it rains, the roads get slick.  No joke; it’s kind of like ice.  Think of it as an “ice-light”.  It’s not exactly my idea of fun.  In fact, it’s kind of hellish.

This spring, I was driving my partner to school.  He’s legally blind, mass transit in the US sucks, and we need to go places often, so all of the driving responsibility falls on me (yay…not).

Unlike most of my high school classmates, I did not obtain my drivers license on my sixteenth birthday.  Nope, I waited until I was 18 1/2.  That didn’t happen by accident.  There’s a reason for that: anxiety.  I get severe anxiety while driving, because I can’t control the unintelligent, impulsive dickheads around me.

So on that rainy morning, with those slick roads, I was driving down a side street.  I had been driving for an hour and a half already, and I was more than a little frazzled and worn-out.  We rounded a corner that turned out to be a little sharper than I had anticipated, and for a split-second, even though I don’t take liberties when driving, especially in bad weather, I thought I was going to lose control.

I freaked out.  Oh I maintained control of the truck all right, keeping it on the road and merely having to change lanes suddenly, but I thought we were doomed.  Thank goodness I was in the middle lane and there was no one beside me, because if there had been, we would have collided.

I did indeed keep my head on straight.  But I also started to hyperventilate.  I was utterly overwhelmed.

A few minutes later, we arrived in the parking lot.  Still severely shaken (and shaking), I put the truck in “Park”.

And I immediately started to cry.

Today provided another example.  It was cold outside and it had been raining all night and all day, so we figured that the traffic would be light, since no one would want to go out in this crap.

We figured wrong.  Dead wrong.

People were out all right, and although the traffic was lighter than it probably would have been if it were a sunny day, they were downright rude.

But this is the Christmas season!!  What the fluorescent blue fuck?  When I was growing up, this was the one time of year in which I could count on previously-ordinary courtesy.  People used to let you in on the road.  People weren’t rude.  These days? It’s frickin’ open season.  Christmas, like Thanksgiving (another past-polite holiday), is dead.  The courtesy is gone.  It drained out of society, right about the same time as the mass advent of cell phones and LED billboards, over stimulating everyone’s nervous systems, locking them in perpetual states of fight-or-flight, keeping them amped up and off-the-scales rude.

This is incredibly disheartening to me.  In fact, it’s semi-devastating.  How people can cut off and retaliate against perfect strangers, when I’ve done nothing wrong (unless you count abiding by the rules of the road and making adjustments for inclement weather as “wrong”, that is).  I’m just trying to get from Point A to Point B, and safely at that.  That’s it.  Nothing more, nothing less.

Frazzled once again (only this time, not fearing for my life), I lost a little innocence.  I lost a lot of faith in humanity.  Even though I set my standards are and expectations low to avoid disappointment, I was…disappointed anyway.

It makes me want to cry.  It makes me want to daydream about putting Arsenic in the wheat–or the water–or whatever.  It makes me start dreaming of how nice it might be to have a good plague sweep the nation, greatly thinning out the population, much like the bubonic plague in 14th-century Europe.

People these days are hostile.  They feel an overblown and misplaced sense of entitlement.  They can do no wrong; their shit don’t stink.  They’re above the laws of physics and humankind.  Those laws don’t apply to them.  Until there’s an accident, of course.  And lanes get blocked.  And the traffic backs up.  And the other people are delayed.  And in their anxiety about getting to work on time, they haul off and do stupid shit, too.  And of course, I get to deal with all of this.  I get delayed, because of the actions of the Idiocracy.  I also then have to deal with the irrational, impulsive compensatory actions of other members of the Idiocracy.  And the more often these accidents happen, the more ALL of our vehicle insurance premiums rise.  I get it from three ways, a one-two-three punch.  And again, I’ve done absolutely nothing wrong.  My only “sin” was needing to get from Point A to Point B, while abiding by the rules of the road in a responsible and intelligent manner, and expecting other people with rights/freedoms equal to mine to do the same.

This whole situation is a complete assault on my Aspergian/autistic sensible sensibilities.  The logical and passive side of me demands something better, demands more universal consideration from humanity, demands more sensibility and calm.  But alas, it’s not to be.

And yet, it is we, the people on the Asperger’s/autism spectrum, who are labeled as “inferior”, it is we who somehow “have” a “pathology” that is “epidemic” and “horrid” and “needs” to be “treated”, “cured”, and/or “prevented”??  Somehow it’s we who have a “problem” when we have a meltdown?  Where do you think the majority of those meltdowns come from?  Who do you think causes them?

Fuck you, typical neurotypical world.  Asperger’s/autism is not a problem; it’s not we who have the problem.  The root of the problem does not lie with us.  I will not allow our community to take responsibility–or the heat–for that.  I will not allow you (speaking to the “typical” NTs here, NOT to all neurotypical people) to rain hostility down on us; your desire to eradicate us is, in itself, pathological.  For if there were more of us and fewer of you, I wouldn’t have to break down and cry just from driving.  I wouldn’t have to spend an incredible amount of time recovering from contact with you.  I’m actually proud of my neurotype.  I like it just fine.  It’s living in a semi-sociopathic world designed around you that sucks.

As I usually say after a “downer” post like this…. Tomorrow Will Be Better.

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(Image Credit: Alex/Wave3)