Why do you think you are invincible?

I promise you are not.

I was just like you and now I know better. This is my story.

When I was 15 years old my mother started giving me driving lessons with her as my teacher. I was excited it was the beginning of a whole new world. I drove cautiously, but I didn't think that anything bad would happen. It was my mom who was really concerned that I was going to wreck her car, but she kept urging me to learn.

During 11th grade while I was 16 I would come out from school and every day I was in tears from my depression. My mom would suggest that I drive. Some days I did, most days I didn't, I was petrified.

Death was a very big part of my childhood. I knew people who died from old age to people who ran across the six-lane interstate and got hit by a car. The last funeral I can remember going to was probably the saddest. It was the funeral of a man who four years previous I had gone to his wedding. This was traumatic for me.

During high school, I thought about death, my pending doom and how it would happen. My high school didn't give us Driver's Ed. as an option. We didn't watch many Driver's Ed. videos, but we did have one every year around prom time. We watched one drunk driving video and watching those kinds of videos and hearing the stories scared me more than getting behind the wheel did. I started to develop more and more anxiety and it became an overwhelming part of my life.

What happened? I was just like you! I was just as reckless, just as invincible and then one day it hit me. If I wasn't careful enough driving, if I wasn't as alert as I could be, if I was preoccupied with anything but driving safely I'd be dead.

There were two things that I think finally did it for me; one was the death of a family member. I didn't know him very well, he was around a lot more in my childhood and he was a good friend of my mom in hers. He rode a motorcycle and he always kind of scared me, but I remembered when I heard. My mom told me one morning that he got hit by a tractor-trailer truck while he was riding his motorcycle in the rain. It was terrifying for me not necessarily just because he died but because he was one week away from getting baptized.

One week.

It could happen at any moment! Losing your concentration, not focusing on one little thing, getting distracted by something and it's all over in the blink of an eye or even less time.

The other thing that did it for me was my senior year's drunk driving extravaganza, and I say extravaganza because that year they decided to not show a video, but to do a live reenactment. They got a bunch of students together, gave them fake blood, and told them to hang outside the windows of the school bus. They also had a convertible with a couple from prom in it; the boyfriend had been drinking and his girlfriend was thrown into the backseat. They had real cops give the boy a drunk driving test, which he obviously failed and his girlfriend had serious injuries. All the students on the bus had died except for two. The thing that probably scared me the most was the car that had the teachers in it. The front end was completely gone and one of the teachers was through the windshield the other side was completely smashed in and they had to use the jaws of life to get them out. Both were pronounced dead and one had such serious injuries that they showed him being zipped up in a body bag on the spot.

It was the hardest thing I've ever had to watch and I was looking away for most of it!

By this point my mother had stopped trying to get me to drive, actually, she hated me to even suggest it. I wanted to learn, but safely. I was terrified to get behind the wheel and every time I would I would have a panic attack. It was so bad that when I got out of the car my legs were so weak from panic and fear.

None of my friends could understand how I wasn't driving yet and especially when I went off to college they questioned it. Saying "Dakota you have to learn how to drive!" and I would respond, "I know I'm going to at some point." But that wasn't good enough.

My first semester of my freshman year in college I got in the car with one of my friends. He was a decent driver and I didn't notice anything right off hand about his driving, but a couple of minutes down the road I noticed he was swerving into the other lane with oncoming traffic and I asked him if he was alright he said he was. It wasn't until we got to where we had to be that he told me that he had had three shots before driving.

I got so mad I didn't talk to him for a week and I got a ride home with someone else that night.

Three shots. That takes three hours to get rid of. What really bothered me was that he drove with me in the car and I didn't even know. In situations like that you don't really know what you can do. You know you don't want to jump out of a fast-moving car but at the same time, you don't want to stay in the car with a drunk driver. The best thing to do in that situation is to know the person you're with and ask if they have had anything to drink before you get in. It was hard for me to ride with him after that, but he's not my only friend who didn't drive too well.

I have another friend who is a speed demon and doesn't mind showing it. It's hard to know if you're going to be safe or not and getting over the fear of driving is literally probably one of the hardest things I've had to do, but it's time.

I have to be places, I have to leave, I have to keep moving forward. Driving was my next step and so for this past week, I've been taking Driver's Ed.

Getting in the room I felt very nervous. I'm so scared to drive and I haven't done my driving hours yet. When I got in the room I thought this class isn't for me! This is for people who aren't scared to drive. The program I did was a Scared Straight program. They showed us all the videos of all the drunk driving accidents and the idiots behind them. Watching them I found there was one recurring theme in every single video.

They all thought they were invincible.

And not only that but people in my class thought they were also invincible. I just wanted to shake them and tell them, "You're not invincible. You could die at any second, you could be sitting in this room one day and the next day you don't show up. We hear about your death on the news and even though we didn't know you too well, you're gone you were one of us and you're gone. You are not invincible and you're foolish to think you are."

So it's probably not great to be petrified of dying every single solitary time you get in a car. It's also not good to think you can't die from a car. Car crashes are the leading killers.

One flick of the wrist (yes, I went there) and you're dead. Gone, forever. You're not invincible. We are not invincible and we have to protect ourselves and everyone around us because none of us are invincible.