Tales of a Middle-Aged Drop-out

One of the more ridiculous hurdles I'm trying to overcome is the fact that I can't drive. I never succeeded in passing my test in the UK, although I eventually did pass it in the US. Legally speaking, I can drive on my Virginia Licence for a year (if only on automatic cars).

Except...

1. I am terrible at every skill required for driving: concentration, spatial awareness, sense of direction, distinguishing right from left... you name it; I'm bad at it.
2. Virginia roads are flat, straight and wide: a narrow road is one without a passing lane. Cornish roads are hilly, twisty and narrow: a wide road is one with a lane for both directions of traffic.
3. At no point in my Virginia test was I required to perform any sort of manoeuvre. I can't parallel park to save my life and have never dreamed of reversing into a parking space, let alone down a country lane in quest of a passing place.

These factors combined mean that I am really not capable of driving myself in the area I have chosen to live in. I knew this ahead of time, and we're already working on getting my skills and confidence up, with a view to get me driving independently before the end of the month.

Until then... well, let's recap the status quo:

I'm single, unemployed, and not only am I living with my parents, but I'm reliant on them to drive me around. 

23 years of adult life well spent, everybody! Thank you for reading; I'm delighted to be your Drop-out Guru.


Perspective, perspective, perspective...

OK, so obviously this is a transitory stage of my life, born out of convenience as part of a larger plan leading to self-sufficient adulting. (Besides, I'm doing my own laundry, I swear!)

Yet I die a little inside every time I have to select "Living with Parents" from a drop-down menu—which comes up a lot more often than I ever expected, but half of relocation is this endless reverse cascade of online forms, where you start one and then discover that you haven't got the information they require, so you have to fill out another form to set that up, and then another form in order to complete the second form, etc, etc.

I digress. This is the sort of undisciplined behaviour that has got me stuck living with my parents in the first place.

For the first week here, maybe the first ten days, I was in something of a recovery period from The Move anyway. Being totally dependent on somebody else was fantastic, because I was ready for the bare minimum of responsibility. Even as I muddled through my relocation to-do list, it mostly felt like we were on our annual summer holiday.

Two weeks in, and it doesn't feel like a break; it feels like limbo. There are many lovely things about living with my parents, but the kids are bored out of their skulls and I'm getting stressed because I can't see an end to the form-filling nor am I actually achieving my new life. (I assume I am making progress. Except during insomnia, because then my brain will only consider the hypothesis that I'm failing miserably.)

My cat, Meg, is perhaps the only one of us who is happier since The Move than before. She adores my parents' garden and loves having so many people in the house all day long. She'd prefer more freedom to bully my parents' dog, Sam, and make his life a misery, but she's going along with our insistence that the dog is entitled to exist.

The rest of us are in a funk. We need a social life—never my strong suit unfortunately, and one made worse by my inability to drive myself. We need a place of our own. We need to feel like we live here instead of just visiting. We need to feel like we belong.

But mostly, we need to suck it up and remember it's just for a few weeks. For a few weeks, I can take the humility of being forty-one and dependent on my parents. Yes, I'm not going to be activating my Bumble profile until I can drive myself to and from a date, so it's a few weeks of spending every evening drinking hot cocoa made by my Mum—

Every evening.
Hot cocoa.
Made by my Mum.

Maybe I'm winning at life after all.