Seatbelt on. Mirrors adjusted. Key in the ignition. I am ready to roll. I am sitting in the parking lot of a DMV with a small Hispanic lady with overly drawn-on eyebrows in the passenger seat. In her hands, she holds a beige clipboard and a pen that looks as though it has been half-eaten by some underfed pomeranian. Oh wait, it’s not the pomeranian, it’s her. She is now gnawing on her pen. Oh gosh, Emily don’t focus on that; focus on how you’re going to pull out of this parking lot. I am panting heavily. All of the sweat that was once flowing from my body is now on the steering wheel.
Breath, Emily, breath. I drive to the exit and face a four-lane roadway. “Turn left,” my passenger says.
“Okay,” I mutter back. I can do this. I can totally do this. I am Emily [Name] for goodness sake. The Emily [Name] who is president of student council, Failure is not in my vocabulary; it never has been, and it never will be. I proceed in driving. “Stop!” Oh no. I look to my right to see the examiner grip the ceiling handle with all her might; her eyes simulate the expression her penciled-on eyebrows were portraying all along. I am in the middle of the roadway; cars are heading towards me in all directions. At that moment, I know I failed.
March 25, [Date], is a day that will live in infamy. The day I experienced failure. Unaccepting of my loss, I blamed my driving incompetence on my mother’s Chrysler minivan, which had what I liked to call “touchy brakes.” My father was good at agreeing with me, adding on with “it’s too foggy out” and “maybe you’re wearing the wrong shoes.” Assigning responsibility for my ineptitude to a pair of sneakers was far easier than admitting that I just wasn’t good at driving. So, with my ego still at large, I decided to take the driver’s test again the following weekend.
April 1, [Date], is another day that will live in infamy. The day I experienced failure for the second time. I failed my road test again, but not for the same reason as before. This time I actually made it out of the parking lot. However, I did in fact run over a curb and blow a stop sign. I didn’t receive as much sympathy as I did for my earlier attempt. It wasn’t the car nor the shoes this time. It was me. I failed my driver’s test all on my own. Now, any normal, rational human being would probably call this “not a big deal,” but to my high-strung sixteen-year old-self, it was a big deal. How could I have failed something that ninety percent of my class mastered on their first try?
My entire life, I had been accustomed to excelling in whatever I did. Whether it was in school work or extracurriculars, my life ran on a simple input-output system. I would put the hard work in and out would come immediate success.
On July 29, [Date], I finally got my license. After the April debacle, I practiced driving almost every week. I learned to stop at stop signs and look both ways before crossing streets, the things I apparently didn’t know how to do during my first two tests. When pulling into the parking lot with the examiner for the last time, a wave of relief washed over me.
“Third time’s the charm,” the lazy-eyed instructor told me. I was ecstatic! For the first time in my life, I was licensed in driving as well as licensed in resilience. My experiences at the DMV taught me that failure is inevitable and essential to moving forward. As I peer down the long road ahead, I am no longer afraid to conquer any bump in my path.