Keep Your Foot on the Gas

It started young in me. I thought I was a coward.

A huge splinter sticks my thumb with a thud and I nearly pass out. I'm eight years old, walking numb down the hallway. My breath is tightening, I'm sliding sideways, black blots my vision. I'm leaning on a wall, breathing, waiting for it to pass, imagine the scrape of wood wrenching out of my skin...

Most of us have our adrenaline on tap. You face the lion, turn the handle­– out it pours. You win the battle, turn it off– down the drain.

My anxiety turns mine into a leaking sink– drip, drip, dripping. Some days it patters. Some days the spout breaks and floods my kitchen.

I'm eleven years old and being bullied. Standing in the Scholastic book fair in scuffed Mary Janes, I can't even look her in the eye, I can't feel my legs. All I feel is a heart like a fist, the words I can't cough out of my closing throat, my head going fuzzy. "What's wrong with you?" she asks. I force the words out of a mouth that doesn't feel like mine: "You're bullying me and you have to stop." I run to the bathroom and I'm checking my pulse, and checking my pulse, and-

Checking my pulse over and over, sweating through my shirt just being alive. What if someone's looking at me? What if I don't get this assignment done? What if I get hit by a car crossing the street? Check once, check twice, check three times.

I'm growing up on the verge of cracking in half, and I'm thinking: this is what a coward looks like. Drip, drip, drip–

I'm sixteen, merging onto the freeway for the first time, and the cars shoot past sharp and blurry at the same time. I have to go faster, I have to go faster. I imagine the jolt of that red car thrown against mine, metal shriek, burning tires. My body is driving down the highway but I'm not inside it. I can't feel my face or hands, just my chest, crushing in on itself–

No, I realized.

Breathe deeply, keep your foot on the gas–

This is what bravery looks like.

I'm twenty-five, and now when I drive on the freeway I have to slow myself down. I board planes, make friends, write stories, take risks, let myself be seen and heard. That heart-gashing panic is a shadow that I keep behind me with my light.

I wish I could go back, hold that tiny splintered hand, tell that girl how living still kept her up at night she did it anyways; She went to college and drove a car and traveled the world and fell in love. I wish I could watch her eyes sparkle when I said that all this time we were wrong, that it turned out we could do anything.

She would be speechless. She would be so proud.