Why I Don't Trust the Road
Autistic perception, misalignment, and the tension that shaped my life behind the wheel
I hate driving.
It drains me. Physically. Cognitively. Emotionally. It’s like standardized test-taking, but all visual, and unrelenting. Every glance, every decision, feels like a question I can’t afford to answer wrong. And the worst-case scenario isn’t just failure. It’s something far more consequential.
It took years of overriding tension I couldn’t name. Years of chasing moments that always seemed a half-second ahead of me, like the world was responding to cues I hadn’t been given. It took speeding and “failure to yield” tickets. It took multiple collisions that, thankfully, never took a life.
Driving has never felt intuitive. Not the way people describe it. I don’t just “see” the road and respond—even with decades of experience. I don’t settle into flow. My brain doesn’t work like that. Every moment behind the wheel carries a not-so-subtle edge—a persistent hum of mistrust, like my perception is being asked to respond to data it hasn’t fully confirmed.
And only recently—more fully, more precisely, and with the benefit of a lifetime spent studying how I process—have I started to understand why.
I don’t visually process the world the way most people seem to.
I’ve always had to feel something to fully see it.
Not metaphorically—literally. If someone hands me a phone to show me something (usually a meme, let’s be honest), I instinctively stabilize it. Not for control, but because until I anchor it, I can’t easily make sense of the image. My brain doesn’t immediately absorb visual data. It has to negotiate it—carefully, meticulously, spatially.
Restaurant menus. Street signs. Documents on a table. If they’re angled or moving or unfamiliar, it takes me just an extra beat to orient. The world doesn’t snap into place. It settles.
When I was two, I had corrective surgery for severe hydrocephalus—a condition where excess cerebrospinal fluid builds up in the brain, exerting pressure and causing lasting damage if untreated. A literal quadrant of my brain had already been irreversibly damaged—including my optic nerves. What was left: legal blindness in one eye, nearsightedness in the other, minimal depth perception, and visual snow—a kind of visual static that maintains across everything I see, even the back of my eyelids.
But no one talked to me about how that might shape how I see. How it might connect to being autistic. How it might explain why I couldn’t just look at something and trust it was real. Not that I’m blaming anyone for that—but it was my reality.
So I built a different kind of trust.
I learned to rely on weight. Texture. Spatial rhythm. The weight and balance of a cup in my hand. The resistance and tactile feedback of a doorknob turning. Not just seeing an object, but feeling its presence shape the visual space around it. I built unconscious workarounds, layer by layer, over years of quiet adaptation. If I could touch it, I could trust it. If I could anchor my body, I could begin to orient my mind. Even in motion, I would find ways to ground myself—a light brush of my fingertips along a wall or table as I passed, the subtle way I’d shift my weight into a step when I couldn’t quite tell how far it dropped. My body would reach for confirmation before my eyes could fully commit. Over time, that effort disappeared into instinct. What began as compensation became integration. It didn’t just support how I see—it became how I see.
Basically, I’m a half-baked Daredevil. And my body is Hell’s Kitchen.
But driving negated those incredibly useful accommodations I’d built for myself.
Vehicles on the road move faster than my body is primed to calibrate. The environment shifts too quickly for my body to feel stabilized. Movement happens at a distance I can’t physically interact with. There’s no tactile confirmation—no sensory verification. Just a world demanding fluid response before I’ve finished parsing what it even is.
And that’s the core tension:
I’m not afraid. I’m continuously misaligned.
My system is continuously being asked to trust without anchoring.
To perform fluency without coherence.
And it won’t just perform. It can’t.
So it builds tension. Not panic—friction. Perceptual, perpetual drag. The kind that turns every drive into a simulation rendered in real time, with no room for blur or omission. I can’t skim. I can’t coast. I can’t let go and assume I’ll fill in the gaps.
Because for me, letting go doesn’t mean relaxing.
It means losing grip on the thread.
And my system doesn’t just resist that risk. It refuses it.
This isn’t about trust in the emotional sense.
Just in case that wasn’t clear. I’m talking about trust as a structural prerequisite—a confirmation loop between perception and action that has to complete before movement feels safe.
And that mismatch doesn’t just show up behind the wheel.
It’s there in conversations. In classrooms. In fast-moving group dynamics where context shifts before I’ve had a chance to orient. My mind doesn’t process fragments and sort them later. It commits only when the full pattern aligns.
That’s what people miss about autistic perception.
It’s not about speed. It’s about fidelity.
A system that refuses to act without internal coherence doesn’t need fixing. It needs space. But the world isn’t built to give that space. So we adapt. We memorize patterns we weren’t meant to memorize. We simulate trust. We perform certainty. And we carry the weight of that dissonance in silence—because slowing down to explain it would slow everything else down too.
I’m a pretty good driver now. Consistent. Careful. Methodical. But only because I’ve trained myself to navigate without trust. Because I’ve learned to predict misalignment before it destabilizes me. That doesn’t make the dissonance go away. It makes it just barely manageable.
And I know I’m not the only one.
If you’ve ever felt pressure to perform certainty before your system was ready—if you’ve ever lived with the quiet tension of needing to verify what others seem to trust by default—then you already understand what this is.
You’re not slow.
You’re not resistant.
You’re just waiting for coherence.
And that’s not a flaw. It’s integrity. ∞