Embarking on the road to driving, Jonathan Jensen shares a personal journey in pursuit of confidence behind the wheel.

Learning to drive was not an easy task. It started off with being given a book that really felt like it made no sense, and questions that I was sure I would not remember the answer to if I were actually in a car.

Honestly, the most useful thing for the learner’s licence was free online practice tests. I did test after test and it still wasn’t quite enough. The pressure to pass the tests was weighing down on me.

Eventually I just had to brute force the test. I went in with enough money to take the learner’s test five times in a row, and fortunately it only took me three tries.

There was a bit of a break between getting my learner’s and my restricted licence. The pressure of getting my learner’s licence had been so heavy that I didn’t really want to try going any further. I felt like I would rather not try than try and fail. Lessons from my parents were of little help — my mother told me I was driving too fast, my father said I was driving too slow; both of them made me feel more nervous and expected me to have memorised the way to places that were several kilometres away. Fortunately, my parents were able to get a driving instructor who acted nothing like either of them. He was able to correct me whenever he needed to and, when something went wrong, he would take control while laughing in a way that prevented me from becoming more nervous. Thanks to him, I was able to get my restricted licence on my first go.

Despite this, I still felt exhausted by the pressure and found myself unsure if I even wanted to go through the process of getting a full licence. I even considered simply staying on a restricted licence forever. When I finally decided to get my full licence years later, I tried to avoid mentioning it to anyone, as I still had the memories of the pressure my parents put on me when getting my previous licences. Fortunately, I still had the phone number of my driving instructor, and, despite a couple of mistakes, I was still able to pass my test on the first go.

I tended to avoid driving to new areas. Once I found a public car park I would use it as much as possible, even if it was hundreds of metres from where I actually wanted to go. This was because I feared that I would do something wrong if I was trying to search for a parking space while driving down roads I wasn’t that familiar with, while focusing on every other part of driving process.

I’m still not that confident when driving, but I am managing. I’ve driven to a lot of places with no one guiding me on the way and sometimes I would drive back with no GPS just to see if I could work out where to go from memory. I also got my forklift licence, so even though I’m not the most confident driver, I’ve still got one more licence than most people!

Jonathan Jensen is an Autistic man in his early twenties.