You Don't Have to Drive

I don't drive. I'm twenty-four and I've never had a license. People react to this information like I told them I don't know how to read. Disbelief first. Then concern. Then this barely concealed judgment that says something must be wrong with me. Nothing is wrong with me. My brain just doesn't do driving.

Driving is a sensory nightmare. You have to process motion and speed and distance and sound and light all at once while making split-second decisions that could kill someone. That's not freedom. That's a high-stakes multitasking exam I never signed up for. My brain is very good at some things — cataloging twenty thousand items in a database, finding patterns nobody else sees, running an ecommerce operation single-handedly. Driving isn't one of them. That's not a moral failure. That's just a fact.

The World Treats Driving Like Adulthood's Entrance Exam

Somewhere around sixteen, America hands you a script. License. Car. Freedom. Adulthood, apparently, begins in the driver's seat. If you miss that exit — if you can't drive, or won't, or tried once and your nervous system said absolutely not — the world treats you like a sentence with the verb missing. Incomplete. Suspicious. Still waiting to become a real person.

I've gotten the comments. "You'll learn eventually." "It's not that hard." "How do you get anywhere?" As if getting places is the only measure of a life. I take the bus. I walk. I get rides. I plan ahead. My life works. It just doesn't revolve around a two-ton machine that costs thousands of dollars a year and could kill someone if I zone out for half a second. Which I would. Because I'm autistic and sensory processing is not my strong suit.

Not Driving Is a Valid Choice

Some people can't drive for medical reasons. Seizures. Vision problems. Medications that impair reaction time. Some people can't drive because their brain processes information differently and the risk is too high. Some people don't want to drive and that should be enough of a reason. None of these people are less adult. None of them have failed at something essential. They've just made a different calculation about what their life needs.

I've made peace with not driving. It took a while. I spent some years feeling embarrassed about it. Feeling like I was missing a milestone everyone else hit without thinking. But I'm not missing anything. I'm just not doing the thing that doesn't work for my brain. That's not failure. That's self-knowledge. It took me twenty-four years to learn it. If you're younger than me and feeling the pressure, let me save you some time. You don't have to drive. You never had to drive. The script was always optional.

— Michael

About the Author

Michael was diagnosed autistic at five and non-verbal until they were five. They work at an independent bookstore where they run the entire ecommerce operation. They live in Virginia and are still learning to separate the guilt that doesn't belong to them from the self they're building.