Veering Off Course

I've always thought of myself as a good driver. I take care in my driving, I obey all but the trivial guidelines, and I work hard to keep moving forward on the right avenue. I've never had a ticket or an accident, although I've come close to both on rare occasions (at the intersection of Circumstance and Oversight).

But I am slipping.

This fact was made vividly clear to me last night when I awoke, traveling at about 40 miles per hour, on the median of Route 15 Southbound. I had drifted into damp brushwood, and my lights were glaring back at me from the tangled vegetation as I plowed through it. I squeezed the brake pedal and tried to steer, but I realized that I didn't know which direction to steer in. I could not see the road, and had no idea where I was in relation to it. I had no idea what lay around me, or ahead. The best I could manage was to keep the car from going further to the left -- downhill -- as it bounced and slid to a stop.

When it did, I realized that the highway lay to my right -- uphill -- and that I had slid in such a way that I was angled towards it. Tentatively, I pressed the gas pedal, hoping that I would be able to ease back onto the road... but it was no use. I didn't have the momentum anymore to plow through the brushwood, and I didn't have the traction to rebuild it. Trying to back up was similarly fruitless, although I did manage to wiggle backward and rightward enough to create some distance, on the left and front, between the car and the brush that I hadn't crushed during "landing." This allowed me to get out and walk back to the highway.

In the end, it took a tow truck and a spare tire to get my car back on the road. It's in the shop now, for a new tire and a clean bill of health.

I was lucky. I know this, and I should feel it... but I'm troubled, and ashamed that I made an error in judgment that could have had such drastic consequences, for me or someone else.

I didn't feel sleepy when I left my friend's house, but I knew that I was tired. It was almost 2:00 AM on a Friday night, and I'd been up since 6:00 on five hours of sleep. That's not unusual for me, though. It's how I live -- once by choice, and now by necessity. In other circumstances, I would have spent the night at my friend's house and gone home in the morning... but I have so much to do this weekend. I shouldn't even have gone out, but I needed a personal night so badly. To justify it to myself, I had resolved that I would be home and ready to start working when I awoke on Saturday. I would have felt... irresponsible... if I had broken that promise by staying at his house.

By the time I reached Route 15, I knew that I was having trouble staying awake. I stopped (for the second time) to get out of my car and jog in place for a few moments, thinking that this was all I needed to keep myself alert. I had considered stopping by the side of the road and calling my mom to come and pick me up, but I thought about how I would keep us both awake even later if I did that, and require us to make a special trip the next day to retrieve my car. Things would be so much "neater" if I just drove home... and I was so close. I thought I would be fine.

I realize now that, like someone who's been drinking, I was too compromised to recognize how compromised I was.

After waiting for the tow truck, taking the car to the shop in Gettysburg, and riding home with my mom... it was 6:30 in the morning before I was home, bathed, and asleep. I got up at 3:00 this afternoon, and as I said, my mind is troubled. My desire to avoid inconveniencing anyone, including myself, is almost laughable now. I delayed myself from my work even more, inconvenienced the emergency responders who showed up to help me (someone who was driving past called 911), frightened my mother, did minor damage to my car, and endangered -- at minimum -- my own life.

What is wrong with me?

I've always thought of myself as a responsible person. I take care in the living of my life, I obey all but the trivial rules of society, and I work hard to keep moving forward on the right avenue. I've never gotten drunk, or tried drugs, or been in a fight. I've done well in school, and I'm close to finishing my education and starting a career in a respectable field. I've always been a reasonably stable, kind, and collected individual.

But I am slipping.

The last two-and-a-half years of my life have been a gauntlet of love, loss, death, and uncertainty. I've survived, so far, but everything that I've been through has taken its toll. I grew up in the course of running that gauntlet (or maybe because of it), and I know that I'll be a different person on the other side. I have to reach the other side, though, before I can figure out who that person will be. In the meantime, I don't know myself. I just know that I'm worn out, stressed out, and depressed.

I am 46 days from the end of my student teaching semester. I consider that to be, at last, the end of my gauntlet. I'm told that student teaching is difficult in the best of circumstances, and from what I've experienced, I believe it. For me, though -- at this point in my life, when I'm struggling to focus, desperate for solitude, and emotionally unstable -- it's a torment. From 7:00 AM to 4:00 PM, I'm forced to maintain a pleasant, interested, and mature persona that's miles away from what I'm feeling. Then, when I finally go home in the evening, I'm overwhelmed by my responsibility to plan for the next day's lessons. So far, I've kept up... but my obligations are going to increase over the next few weeks, until I'm eventually responsible for all five of my mentor teacher's classes. I honestly don't know if I can do it.

And I'm troubled by what last night's events suggest about my life as a whole.

I knew that I was tired when I began my student teaching, just as I knew that I was tired when I began my drive home last night. The various struggles in my life had all come to a crisis between March and May, and I never had the chance to recover from that crisis. The last thing I felt like doing was beginning my student teaching in the fall, but the plans were already in place. It would have caused so much trouble to delay it, just as it would have caused trouble to delay my drive home last night. I wanted so badly to finish my student teaching and be able to truly rest, safe in the knowledge that it was behind me... just as, last night, I wanted so badly to finish my drive home and be able to sleep, safe in my own bed.

Clearly, I made the wrong choice last night. The question now is, did I make the wrong choice when I chose to student teach this fall?

In the past, no matter how little sleep I'd gotten or how long I'd been awake, I never fell asleep at the wheel. Furthermore, there were days that I drove on even smaller amounts of sleep -- two hours sometimes, or none -- and I was fine.

And, no matter how close I came to failing in school, I was always able to pull through. There were days that I scraped through major exams on a combination of luck and cramming. Even in the spring of this year, when I was forced to take an Incomplete, I averted completely failing.

But I was different in the past. I had an energy, of both body and mind, that is gone from me now.

And "school" was different then. I was the student, not the teacher. It was possible for me to get by on whatever I was able to get done in the time I had. It was possible for me to get through an exam that I wasn't ready for, as long as I was at least 90%, or 80%, or even 70% prepared.

Well, "70% prepared" doesn't cut it anymore.

In the past, no matter what happened, I was always able to stay on course. Falling asleep at the wheel last night has made me feel the truth I already knew: that, even if I never have before, it is possible for me to truly lose control. If I lapse in my ability to fulfill my obligations -- even for a moment -- it is completely possible for me to veer off course and go plunging into ruin.