The Road Doesn’t Care If You’re Crying (but It Will Let You Keep Driving)

A Meditation in Motion for the Chronically Conscious: Where Belonging Is a Highway Exit You Keep Missing on Purpose

Photo by Illia Panasenko on Unsplash

Somewhere around mile 417 on a stretch of road that was never the plan and barely the accident, I realized I’d become one of those people who narrates her own life out loud like there’s an NPR microphone surgically embedded in her clavicle and the driveway is some unseen stage for philosophical asides about suffering and the shadow self. I’ve taken to monologuing in the car. Alone. To no one. Or maybe to the cracked gods of the interstate. Maybe to Kierkegaard. Maybe to the ghost of the version of me who used to believe in things like arrival.

There’s something weirdly narcotic about being nowhere in particular. When you’re between cities, between states, between cell towers, you get this unholy reprieve from being the main character in your own disaster. You are no longer “her.” You know, her. The woman who cries in the gluten-free aisle over basil or rejection or the sudden uninvited memory of someone who said forever but meant the weekend. Now you’re just a blur on a map. A ghost in a rental car. A heat signature with 90s indie ballads and a complex trauma disorder.

The road has zero curiosity about your trauma. It doesn’t pause for your origin story. It doesn’t want your resume or your therapy worksheet. The road doesn’t care what you’ve survived, only whether you’ll merge. And honestly, that kind of indifference? It’s magnificent. It's the purest mercy I’ve found outside of gas station coffee and the rare human who actually listens instead of waiting to talk about themselves.

Resilience is the world’s most marketable trauma kink. I don’t want to be resilient. I want to be irrelevant. I want to be boring. I want to be loved with the same frequency people reserve for their dogs or their second-favorite coffee mug. You know, consistent. Soft. Familiar. Instead, I am the full anthology of intensity. I’m the person you date when you’re trying to feel alive and then leave when you remember you’re tired. I get it. I do. I’m tired too.

Somewhere around exit 242 I started thinking about the thing I always swear I won’t think about again. That maybe I’m not built for love in the way people romanticize it. Maybe I’m the anti-Hallmark. The love interest that gets cut in the final edit because she thinks too loud and feels too weird and doesn’t know how to do normal without bleeding.

I’ve got the emotional aesthetic of drum n bass played on a rooftop in a lightning storm. Everyone wants to listen until it gets too loud. Then they leave. And they always leave gently. That’s the worst part. They leave gently and call it grace.

Knowing all this doesn’t help. I’m a woman with three degrees, two licenses, and enough psychological insight to write case notes in my sleep. And I still fall for people who treat my honesty like it’s a dare and my complexity like it’s a curse. I am simultaneously the scientist and the failed experiment. I diagnose myself nightly and still can’t find a cure.

I remember this one Sunday afternoon, actually it was technically evening because the sun had already started its descent in that creepy pre-dinner way that makes everything look like a flashback, and my mother, who has always treated emotional warfare like a contact sport, decided that the best course of action after I dared to exercise basic adult autonomy (read: leave early) was to stand behind my parked car like she was reenacting Tiananmen Square with menopausal fury and a rosary in her purse. My father, who had just finished screaming something righteous and spit-flecked about “who the hell are you to call someone a hypocrite” (answer: his daughter, who learned hypocrisy by watching him pretend to pray), had already retreated into his holy recliner. I wasn’t crying yet. That came later. First, I had to hear her diagnosis, “You’re sick, you need help”, like she was channeling both a concerned mother and a 1950s asylum intake nurse.

Here’s the kicker: I was forty-four. Like, full-on credentialed grown-up. Master’s degree. Career in mental health. A child I had somehow managed to raise with empathy despite the fact that I still flinched when someone dropped a spoon. And in that moment, with her behind my bumper and righteousness puffed into every pore, I was also approximately twelve. Chronologically no, psychically yes. Because trauma doesn’t give a shit about your résumé. It just queues up the oldest available tape and hits play.

And here’s the real kicker because with family, there’s always a realer kicker: I still hesitate at green lights if the person next to me looks annoyed. I still fold my sweaters like someone’s going to inspect them for proof of moral worth. I still apologize when I don’t mean it just to make the air in the room breathable again. That’s not emotional maturity. That’s trauma running an improv routine in my nervous system like it’s trying out for SNL but never got the memo it’s not funny.

This is the part where someone says, “But look how far you’ve come.” And yes, okay, I’ve come far. But you can run an ultramarathon in the wrong direction and still end up lost. The scar is the map. And it’s in a language no one taught me to read.

So, I drive. Because the road has no clipboard. It doesn’t ask for my progress. It doesn’t make me prove I’ve evolved. It just lets me be a person. A body in motion. A consciousness that’s finally quiet because there are no mirrors out here. Just wind and dust and the occasional moment where the sun hits the rearview and I almost believe I am forgivable.

People like to say the road is lonely. But have you ever been misunderstood in your own kitchen? Have you ever been held hostage by someone’s version of you that doesn’t even resemble your reflection? The road doesn’t care who I voted for. It doesn’t correct my tone. It doesn’t punish me for being too loud, too soft, too tired, too much, too anything. It just says go.

And I do.

I drive because I don’t know how else to not disappear. I drive because it’s the only place I’ve found where my grief and my genius don’t cancel each other out. I drive because stopping feels like surrender and sitting still invites memory and memory is an arrogant little bastard with a knife.

I don’t know if I belong anywhere. I think maybe I belong nowhere. Or everywhere. Or maybe I’m just an emotional Schrödinger’s cat, both seen and not, both too close and never enough.

But the road doesn’t ask for a thesis. It just moves. And I follow. Because at least out here, being a little bit lost still means you’re going somewhere.