trip dispatch: getting pulled over

fuck idaho

Rachel and I are having a nice old time driving from the Tetons (in French: “titties” because the original mountaineers who discovered it were so frustrated by the time they happened upon them that they had to name them after breasts) to our next destination of Craters of the Moon when a sheriff flashes his sirens at us as we are passing through the town of Arco, ID. I’m freaking out because I haven’t driven in like a year, so of course I’d regress into my old LA days that used to get me ticketed, rolling a stop sign!

The mustached officer approaches our car, and I’m slightly relieved he’s young looking and friendly, but fuck am I still nervous as I hand him my driver’s license I only recently renewed (that’s uh still a California one, not a New York one. The federal government doesn’t know I still yearn for these open roads in the West sometimes, and there’s some part of me that can’t let go) and the insurance for the rental car, which I already had to look at today.

Here I must let ya’ll know that by the time the sheriff was asking us where we were headed and if I would yield next time even in a small town, I was already mad at myself because literally I kid you not, the same day, I’d floored the gas a little too eagerly at a site off the Oregon Trail and rolled our car right over a damn rock, denting the front bumper slightly. I seethed and almost cried while Rachel calmly told me this could’ve been worse and that it was okay, mistakes happen, but I don’t like making mistakes Rachel, it’s hard for my OCD (or, as a park ranger who took us on a float trip calls it, “OCC”, because how could our shared condition be a disorder when it’s about keeping things organized and neat!). Rachel inspected the situation, handed me Clorox wipes to clean up the car so we could prove that the paint wasn’t affected. It’s hard when I sometimes don’t know how to pay attention when there’s so much sensory overload going on.

Mom always yelled at me for being so clumsy, so dysfunctional, but it’s just my dyspraxia okay… anyways, it’s humiliating to have made two major blips on my record of trying to be perfect so Rachel doesn’t feel humiliated by my existence and burdened. We’ve had a couple tiffs here or there about me being a little not situationally aware of whether we’ve been listening more to my music or hers, or opening every single bag of food we have because I crave variety and the comforts of the usual pantry that allow for this habit to continue, or glancing at my phone when I’m stressed out and should be paying attention to the road… Earlier in her own personal development journey, Rachel realized that always stepping in to Fix a situation made other people feel more ashamed and emasculated (the women too) that they couldn’t be trusted, and had to learn to relax. This was a parallel struggle to my ISFJ mother nitpicking every little thing I did, while parentified Rachel was raised by an ENFP teen mom that also had a heart of gold but was also considered sort of ‘slow’ on certain sensory things. It made Rachel and me both fiercely committed to not being like our respective moms, which is its own version of shadow work. I explicitly have used this funny phenomenon to become more patient with myself, in hopefully comparable ways to how I am with those I love.

“It’s not the end of the world to be in trouble,” Rachel tells me, and of course she can’t forget that I’m always fearful I’m in trouble. I’m always thinking I’ve done something wrong, and by wrong it’s honestly just being incorrect more than ‘immoral’, that the right way to screw this lightbulb in wasn’t done correctly by me, the way to communicate with someone I love wasn’t done correctly by me, the way to interpret a gesture wasn’t done correctly by me, my enthusiasm was too much, my desire was too subtly expressed yet also inappropriate for a situation —

So it goes that as the sheriff pulled me over, I’m already shaking slightly from the shame. I immediately think of a list of things this is not worse than, to calm myself down. At least I wasn’t caught speeding. Or doing drugs. Or killing someone. Or cheating on someone. Or —

I wish I could tune in to Rachel’s experience of me accurately without disintegrating. She isn’t even that nitpicky per se, but like I said she just reminds me a bit of my mom who was perennially stressed by my very existence… but Rachel reminds me that criticism doesn’t have to be the end of the world, yet I am flooded from fearing that being slow or being naive or being dumb is a recipe for abandonment and abuse. We talk about how when we were kids in school, we were both obsessed with natural selection in the evolution unit. Rachel thought, “I can figure out how to participte in the rat race of survival of the fittest and make natural selection my bitch.” If a bear attacked us in the woods, as I often panicked about as we walked around the forests of Yellowstone and Glacier, Rachel would 100% fight back. In fact, earlier in our trip we kept running into a small herd of bison that were blocking the trail we were on. Rachel grit her teeth and told me to do a sharp 90 degree angle away and walk into the brush. I tried not to notice how itchy my legs got or how loudly the bison were calling. “That can’t possibly be for us, right?” I panick-asked Rachel as I shuffled along and wondered anxiously why we were being followed. We made it out just fine, but I felt my face stay hot for a few minutes longer thinking about how scary that was.

This is all to say my fight or flight gets activated pretty easily, and it’s usually kept tucked away from the view of others in big bad New York. Probably no one stops to think, what’s a scenario where Crystal Duan wouldn’t be confident? Ah yes, going on a road trip with her best friend! Everyone always forgets my neurodivergency because I know how to make friends easily, and don’t get distracted/overwhelmed by the lulls of the city, because it’s catered exactly to my comfort zone. Where’s the part where they remember I’m a loser again once you switch the setting. But it’s because the formulas of life in the big city are easy for me to master, because they involve an immense amount of self trust in situations I know I can practice managing. In new scenarios, I still feel like an autistic, traumatized teen, much like I’ve elaborated on in pieces like my femcel essay and this FAQ. I’m freaking out constantly at the littlest things where it’s just me and the trees and the animals who can’t be reasoned with with words, what do I do if everything is such a big deal and I can’t tell!

I’m good in really personal dire situations where someone’s sanity or happiness is on the line with a situation they can’t figure out and they’re spiraling, and at being gentle with the validity of others’ feelings (when I remember to model how I can do it with my own), but then how timid I am gets concealed as my reputation starts encircling this perception, that I’m ‘the one to know’ and the one who will be kind and helpful. Pretty much my main traits that only come out in optimal favorable situations I know how to engineer.

The sheriff checks all the records and waves us on our way. As I drive away, I find myself replaying how certain I was that he was going to get me fucked, that I was going to get a ticket again like I last did in late 2020 in LA, and I’m like damn. I’ve done a great job pretending to myself I can take on the world, be confident in every setting, but that’s ones where I’m talking. The ones where there are no words because some Big Other authority is about to issue a verdict on whether I’m valid, whether I can be trusted, whether I can even be loved are truly still terrifying. When I listen to my body, half the time it’s yelling at me to get away from danger, that having so many feelings like I do will make me get hurt, and it pops up in the places where none of my credentials matter. I hide behind Rachel for the situations in the wild while the rest of me yearns passively for the comfort of my notebook and the Internet and conversations with city friends about things that don’t involve directly their feelings about me. She says I don’t need to!

Later that night at 2am, as we’re booking it to Missoula where our hotel is, Rachel’s driving when we get pulled over yet again on the highway for going 75 on a road that is limited to 65 at night. She rolls her eyes a little and nicely answers the girl sheriff’s questions, also gets off with a warning. I gape at how nonplussed she is, even while tired! Rachel patiently tells me that I just have to remember that nothing is the end of the world — that you can pay money to fix problems, you can figure out how to save your health, learn a skill you didn’t think you could, revive the relationships you thought you lost, fight for the ones you’re afraid of losing/are already fucked. All of the world can be yours, but it takes a small step at a time, or something.

As I’m typing this all up at our Airbnb in Glacier, Rachel pops by and smiles that I’m cute when I’m in my element. I feel flustered briefly at this, for I’d forgotten I even had one while I’d been ego deathing in the woods with her and my Instagram story viewers as my audience. But no matter. I’m not really a woods type of girl, I’d much rather be at the beach… like in California where I’ll end up later this week.