stick shift angst
I get infrequent practice with stick shift, and a part of me really thinks that I’ll just never grow comfortable with it. However, at the risk of drawing some cheesy comparisons to learning programming, today I realized a few things that helped me overcome some heavy trepidation - not unlike the heavy, near-constant, soul-crushing trepidation I feel about my beginning steps as a coder.
You just gotta do it. Just do it.
My relative unfamiliarity with manual makes me jittery and paranoid about how often I might stall or whatever else I might be doing with this thingamajig whose workings are arcane to me. But these are the words that come to mind again and again in regards to any challenge that intimidates me - "Just do it." A car with an automatic transmission isn't going to drive itself, and a manual is even less inclined to do so. It'll probably be a while before I can smoothly accelerate forward from 0 mph while stopped on an incline - but I gotta at least try to just do it.
Shifting from neutral to 1st is the hardest up-shift.
When you're worried about just willing a car in motion and not feeling in control of the damn thing, the idea of traveling at higher speeds and in higher gears seems incredibly daunting. But of course, up-shifting from 1st to 2nd, 2nd to 3rd, and so on, is not so bad at all. Can I make sure to use my foot to depress the clutch all the way down whenever I shift? Yeah, I think so.
A huge, largely empty driving environment gives you room to attain things you might have thought impossible.
We were pleased to see several other student drivers roaming Lot K at the Rose Bowl today - silver Celica coupe, black Mercedes sedan, and burgundy wagon, among others. The lot was only sparsely populated with parked cars, allowing us all ample room to maneuver without getting into anyone's way. I drove at speeds I'd never reached in stick shift, I made a few slow donuts (slonuts?), and I practiced turning to my heart's content.
It was a good practice session that boosted my confidence. My day-to-day interaction with stick shift is largely restricted to the amount necessary to switch our cars from their tandem parking spots in the garage, so this was great. A learning process that seems so fraught with fret, dread, cringing and whinging - doesn’t always have to be so.