The best part of being a valet is getting to drive some of the coolest cars to ever touch pavement. Guests came in driving Ferraris, Lamborghinis, Rolls-Royces—the whole aristocratic fleet.
It was my dream to have one of these cars of my own, because (I thought) they sent such a strong signal to others that you made it. You’re smart. You’re rich. You have taste. You’re important. Look at me.
The irony is that I rarely if ever looked at them, the drivers.
When you see someone driving a nice car, you rarely think, “Wow, the guy driving that car is cool.” Instead, you think, “Wow, if I had that car people would think I’m cool.” Subconscious or not, this is how people think.
Most drivers prefer to eat healthy food, so team cooks make special food for them. In the days before a race, they eat different foods to give them lots of energy. Just before the race, the drivers drink a lot of water. In the hot cockpit, they lose a lot of water from their bodies. A driver can lose 3 kilograms in one race!
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“Why were you with him for the better part of two years if he’s such an arse, Sooz?”
“Because he also has a world-class arse.”
From the driver’s seat, Sebastian Holt-Carey nodded at this.
“Undeniably true on all counts,” he said. “Our Julian is in all ways arse.”
“But here’s the thing, even if I quit my job and started taking the blog seriously again, went back to meeting all the Bucks and Litas and Mathildes of the world—it’s not going to make me happy. I needed those people, because I felt alone. I thought I had to run hundreds of miles away from here to find some place to belong. I spent my whole life thinking anyone outside my family who got too close, saw too much, wouldn’t want me anymore. The safest thing was those quick, serendipitous moments with strangers. That’s all I thought I could have. And then there was you. I love you so much that I’ve spent twelve years putting as much distance between us as I could. I moved. I traveled. I dated other people. I talked about Sarah all the fucking time because I knew you had a crush on her, and it felt safer that way. Because the last person I could take being rejected by was you. And now I know that. I know it’s not traveling that’s gonna get me out of this slump and it’s not a new job and it’s sure as hell not chance encounters with water taxi drivers. All of that, every minute of it, has been running away from you, and I don’t want to do that anymore. I love you, Alex Nilsen. Even if you don’t give me a real chance, I’m always going to love you. And I’m scared to move back to Linfield because I don’t know if I’d like it here, or if I’d be bored, or if I’d make any friends, and because I’m terrified to run into the people who made me feel like I didn’t matter and for them to decide they were right about me.”
We have feelings because they tell us what supports our survival and what detracts from our survival," the late neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp once said. Emotions, he stressed, emerge not from the thinking brain but from ancient brain structures associated with survival. They are drivers and guarantors of life and development. Intense rage activates the fight response; intense fear mobilizes flight. Therefore, if the circumstances dictate that these natural, healthy impulses (to defend or run away) must be quelled, their gut-level cues -the feelings themselves- will have to be suppressed as well. No alarm, no mobilization. If this seems self-defeating, it is so only in a limited sense: on an existential level, it is the "least worst" option, being the only available one that reduces risk of further harm.
The result is a tamping down of one's feeling-world and often, for extra protection, the hardening of one's psychic shell.
Sometimes we think or like to think that we know or understand people, but can we ever truly know one’s interior landscape? Can we ever comprehend all the drivers from a past life that have shaped someone?
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