The super-embarrassing real reason why I never got a drivers' license
and how I've hidden behind your empathy so I'd never have to explain
There is nothing embarrassing about needing accommodations for anything, a fact I wish I’d known when I was in middle school. At that time, the mid-90’s, laptops in classrooms were unheard of, but cerebral palsy affects my handwriting just enough that, while it’s perfectly legible, I can’t do it fast. Timed essay tests became the bane of my existence despite also being products of my strongest skillset, because I can’t write at the speed I type, not even close. I was fortunate enough to be attending a well-funded public school in sixth grade — actually, why not a shout out, my experience as a General at Eisenhower Middle School in Albuquerque was an excellent one, though I was only there for a year, and shortly after graduating and feeling wonderful we’d move to Santa Fe and life for both my father and me would fall apart dramatically and horribly so that we basically fled back to our hometown of New Orleans in more-or-less the dead of night leaving furniture behind and lived with my grandmother and anyway these are unrelated stories — and, after being tested to prove that yes, my typing fingers and my writing-hands are essentially on different bodies entirely, and, as noted with some awe by the proctor, I was the only kid tested who wrote faster and faster when making shit up (as opposed to writing from transcription or off of a written page), I was given a laptop for my classes.
This thing was heavy-af, and a computer where computers weren’t supposed to be, so my classmates gathered around to look at it like it was something sacred or rare. “What’s that little screen down there?” I remember a boy asking, referring to the mouse. Eventually they got used to it and I did much better on tests. I didn’t make the grades my overachieving friends made so those essay scores were my only bragging rights, if bragging rights are rights.
When I was sixteen I was back at a well-funded public school, this time in the stifling Illinois suburbs, and like the rest of my sophomore class, I took drivers’ ed. The accommodation I need in order to drive is obvious if you think about it for a second. My feet don’t always immediately act on my brain’s orders and that’s fine in daily life but not such a great thing if you’re driving a car, so I need to control the car with my hands.
If you know me at all there’s a chance you’ve asked me why I never got a drivers’ license and you’d have gotten this answer: “I need hand controls in order to drive and those things are expensive.”
I’m not lying about this. I do, and they are. But here’s the part I haven’t told you because it’s soul-crushingly embarrassing:
I could have been a driver by the conventional American driving age if I’d been less obsessed with my first boyfriend. He lived in a suburb about an hour away by car and it just so happened that we were on different train lines, so we never saw each other, ever, and I lived for phone conversations that were long and vivid and pornographic enough to make up for the distance.
He appreciated these conversations just fine but whatever his feelings for me at that time they did not disrupt his executive decision-making skills. He always got his shit done. I did not. My grades started slipping the minute we got serious and I didn’t even take college applications as seriously as I arguably should have but most consequentially, I never got off the phone before 3 in the morning, whether I had a driving lesson that day or not.
So I was always riskily, not dangerously but riskily, tired behind the wheel. And there was no way I could do well. And at that time, I didn’t care.
I’m a huge advocate for public transit anyway, and I’m always furious when (inevitably non-disabled) people actually use concern for “disabled people” as reasons to defund public transit because they insist bigger parking lots and wider highways somehow serve US better, they do not. Ian and I went years living without a car and those were vibrant years in cities: he purchased one out of necessity when we first moved to rural America, where people would yell out the windows of their cars and congratulate me when they saw me walking. Ugh, it was stupid.
But I was also stupid, at sixteen. I was stubborn. Everyone told me this guy wasn’t worth it and no amount of crying in the high school counselor’s office could convince me that any of those people were right. I go back and fourth about how big of a priority it is for me to be a licensed driver now, but one fact is indebatable: I was given an expensive accommodation for free, and I disregarded my opportunity to learn.
Just in general, that’s a bad way to live, but I’ve learned something valuable, I hope. I’m not hiding the real reason anymore, and maybe that’s something: we’ll see.
