Declaration

Well, the first driving lesson in 20+years went surprisingly well. Hill starts, 3 point turns, roundabouts, junctions, and a little bit of the A1, where I got up to 55mph and 4th gear. (There are, I’m sure, fingernail marks in the steering wheel from where I was gripping. I need to get my head round the fact that a car does not, in fact, have a mind of its own and will simply do as it is told. I’m not learning to ride highly-strung bareback horses at a circus, after all.)

All the time I was driving, there was a little part of me saying, “But I don’t drive. I’m a non-driver. I don’t do driving. I’m a passenger. I failed my test and moved to London and never really got around to it again.” These, I realised, are the things I’ve been saying to myself for 20 years. I’ve been saying them to other people too: every time I arrange to go to a new client and they offer to sort out a visitor parking space for me, I say, “Oh no, that’s fine, I don’t drive.” (Which doesn’t go down terribly well when working with car manufacturers, I can tell you.)

And other people have been part of the Stephanie-can’t-drive conspiracy too. My failing my driving tests (OK, there were 2) have become something of a joke among friends and family. I’ve never found it especially funny, and after 20 years it’s getting really old. On Tuesday, for example, I told my brother I was having a driving lesson the next day. His reaction? “Oh, no.”. Ha bloody ha.

What all this adds up to is a big mental barrier. I think of myself as someone who failed to learn to drive, cannot drive, would be a liability if she ever did learn to drive. And overcoming that is as much of an issue as remembering that cars now have power-assisted steering and brakes so I don’t need to stamp my foot to the floor when I see an amber light.

So, while I’m working hard on not being thrown by negative messages about driving, I’m also being reminded of how strong these thought patterns can be. It’s so, so true of cancer survivorship too: how we define ourselves in relation to cancer matters. If I need to talk about cancer to someone, I refer to myself as ‘a breast cancer survivor’, or I say, ‘I was diagnosed with a breast cancer in 2008, I’ve had treatment, and I’m well now’. I always say ‘I had a cancer’, singular, rather than ‘I had cancer’.

Now, I’m lucky in that my dance with cancer has more or less ended, and I can bandy words like ’survivor’ around. Not everyone can. Some people are living with cancer; some are being danced to death by it. But I think that all of us need to find ways to think and talk about cancer that help us to feel a little bit positive, a little bit in control. We need to still feel like us.  

So today I declare:

I am a breast cancer survivor, and I’m going to pass my driving test.

Please feel free to add your declaration in the comment section. (Open to those drivers not dancing with cancer too. Cancer and learning to drive are not the only places where negative thought patterns can get a grip.)