anxiety

My female owner drives badly. I know, coz I've been a victim of her bad driving (I almost choked to death on water, when she drove me to the vet the other time).

Recently, my female owner's Brisbane host, lent her the car (coz the host was going for an extended business trip and didn't need the car). The only condition (besides not crashing the car) is that she has to pick up some people from the Gold Coast Airport in a few weeks' time (read: 1.5hrs, 105km away).

Having had the car for a few days already, my female owner, being indecisive, pondered about whether she should drive to her aikido class. The location is just a little behind the city, which is about 15mins drive (10 km) away. After struggling the whole day (between convenience - bus would take 1.5hrs to get home - and anxiety about driving/ not knowing her way around) and checking out the directions on whereis.com, she decided to go for it.

Everything was good, heading from school to the city...until she missed a turn (for being in the wrong lane). Then it was downhill all the way... coz she didn't know her way around the vicinity. What made it difficult for her to navigate around was the fact that many roads were uni-directional or lanes were suddenly reserved for buses only. Hence, she had to make turns and detours in order to get back. She managed to get back into the city, but had to leave it, because she ended up on a lane which brought her AWAY from the city, across the the Brisbane River, into another suburb.

After the oh-shit moment, she tried to turn back, but there was no U-turn in sight. So she had to drive on and on.... You can just imagine the anxiety within her, driving around in an unknown area, with a manual car and trying to find the city map in the street directory. Things in her car started tumbling down as she tried to juggle with a number of things. In the backdrop was the colours of the setting sun and believe it or not, a rainbow!

Somehow, in the confusion, she managed to find the right map and get herself sorted out (heavy traffic helped in this case - she had time to flip through the street directory) and managed to reach her class in the nick of time... after 50mins of driving (might as well take bus).

My female owner concluded that she still has high anxiety about driving and such experiences ain't helping her overcome them. Actually, at this rate she's going, I wonder if she will make it to Gold Coast...