How To Drive A Manual Car At 22 Years Old With No College Degree
‘Sitting in that McDonald’s parking lot, I knew everything was about to change.’ is a weird sentence to see written out, especially if it’s one you consider using as the introduction to a deeply personal essay in which you attempt to get your audience to sympathize with your struggles to accept life shifting beneath your feet.
For one, it’s hardly long enough. It omits many significant details like how you were sitting in your 2003 GMC Envoy which you had named Lars 5 months earlier when your father gave it to you, or how Lars had started shaking suddenly and quite violently on Georgia 400 as you were returning from your father’s 50th birthday celebration on July 12, 2014. It doesn’t indicate that the realization hit you as you were calling your father and step-mother to come rescue you, because you were too nervous to drive the remainder of the way back to your mother’s apartment. It doesn’t delve into the half hour of waiting and panicking and fiddling with your phone as you volleyed between giving your parents your location and negotiating with your partners (Starbucks for ‘co-workers’) to get your shift covered the following morning.
Sure, it’s an eye-catching introductory statement, but where’s the pathos? Where in those 13 words does it say that you felt like vomiting from the anxiety of having to face your father again about having no money set aside to pay for your car to get fixed? Hell, going back and looking at it, you don’t even mention your father. Isn’t that what this essay was essentially going to be about? Wasn’t your aim to show how your interactions with your father and step-mother and mother that night and the two subsequent weeks have led you into a new sort of chapter of your life full of uncertainty? Don’t you think maybe someone in your audience could have the same sort of doubts about their life, or perhaps even likelier, the same sort of fears of disappointing their parents? Why don’t you try and reach for their sympathy?
Well, it might be somewhat difficult to achieve that with a sentence like that at the top of your page. A sentence with a format so rudimentary and overdone, that when you see one like it, you’re likely to know exactly what’s coming.
First come the immediate results, like the lectures filled with such fervent frustration about your poor economical habits and your irresponsibility towards yourself and your family, and how living with one set of parents would have had you on the right path as opposed to the one you were currently following living with the other. All this you received on your way back to your dad’s, at your dad’s, and on your way back home to your mom’s the next morning. It’s hard to escape talks with your parents when they’re the ones having to support you, after all.
Then comes the surprising twist, when you get word back from the mechanic a day later that Lars is irreparable.
And then the all too significant line is drawn from Point A (those three days in July) to Point B (here and now in November) where you trace your path of growth in so many steps to demonstrate that you’ve truly entered a new point in your life:
1. In the days following, your parents call you with a deal: A new car will be bought for you for around $6,000 if you can try your very best to get back into school in the fall.
2. They find you a car. It’s a 2009 Toyota Yaris. It’s under budget and economical and safe. It’s everything they want for you. But there’s one caveat: it’s a manual.
3. You find out it’s mostly too late to apply for most schools for the fall semester, so you all but give up the effort.
4. Your parents discover this fact, and in a passionate lecture over the phone, threaten to return the car. Harsh words are exchanged in harsher tones. It sticks with you.
5. They don’t return the car, and a week or two later, you retrieve the car from your father. The fact that this is your final and ultimate bailout is well established. It’s tense. Which is unfortunate, because this is the first time he’s meeting your new girlfriend.
6. Your mother drives the car back home. You’re still months from learning to drive the thing.
7. You return to daily life. Your girlfriend keeps your spirits high. She’s seemingly the only person in your life whose love doesn’t seem conditional. You hold onto her tight.
8. You stop talking to your father.
9. Two months later, you and your mom move with her boyfriend to a new beautiful house 20 minutes away from what once was home. Ironically, you live closer to your dad, to whom you’re still not talking. You don’t want him to know that you still can’t drive the damn car.
10. You begin writing. You write about music, movies, and anything else you’re passionate about. This seems like something you could do for a living. Your girlfriend encourages you. You continue to hold onto her.
11. Finally, less than a week before Thanksgiving, you scramble for an excuse not to go to your father’s for the holiday. It breaks your heart, but you fear the negative atmosphere. You fear making up for your actions. You fear your own family.
12. You don’t have everything figured out, but you’ve got a bit more certainty than you did in July. You accept responsibility in waves. A little each time.
13. As catharsis, you write an autobiographical essay to be read by everyone. You pretend proof of your new beginning is in the words, but through meta references, run-on sentences, and generally poor formatting, your audience realizes it’s really writing the essay itself that brings a new chapter to your life.
14. You still can’t drive the damn car…but maybe now you’ll talk to your dad about it.
