One time I almost hit a kid because I was in a hurry to make a left turn. Luckily my wife was with me and yelled for me stop. I still shudder when I think about it. Be thankful no one got hurt. Nothing hammers home the importance of driving safely than an experience like this. You'll be a better driver in the future.
Over time, I gradually learned that IT IS OKAY to miss your exit and take the next one. Sure it sucks ass if the next outlet is 15 minutes but do the mental math of how worth it is to cut people off or STOP TRAFFIC to save what averages a "wasted" minute during hasty decisions. We all make mistakes or forget routine things, but what I feel comes from doubling down on bad judgements or risks is the abuse we put on ourselves (or from the backseat driver) for making the mistake and losing time. Your one-off punishment should be a slight delay and that's it. Because over time, these risks will catch up percentage wise, and should a big accident happen, all of those time saving shortcuts will be negated and a higher price in money and human suffering will be paid back beyond full. Don't be "that douchebag" on the road. I've been "that douchebag" before, but I hate being it enough to let go of winning the road race. Judging will make your blood boil too, so just cut that aspect out and it'll do wonders for your stress...on yourself and on the others "who can't drive worth a ****".
Learn not to do it again and just move on. Stop crying over spilt milk, be constructive in how you learn from the past not let it brood on your mind and follow you like some dark cloud. Its not a big deal anyway.
Maybe one thing you could do to get over it is take a driving safety course. Not only would you review safe rules of the road, you might get a break on your car insurance.
I was about 16 when we drove 3 hours from home to go to a Tool concert. Of course we were up all night partying after the concert. I don't remember the exact details but we had driven 2 cars with 5 in each car. I had ridden with my best friend and 3 others in his Nissan Altima. It was already tight with 5 people in the car. Anyway, the morning of the concert, one car heads back with 4 people. I cannot remember why, but we were left with 6 to cram into the altima. My one friend volunteered to ride in the trunk if we gave him a pipe with some weed to smoke. He didn't see it as a big deail (IIRC he was the one that was left from the other car). My friend fell asleep at the wheel and we woke up with oncoming draft a few hundred yards off. We got off the road just in time. There was this shocked silence as my friend stopped us in a safe area. Then the kid in the trunk freaked out. He lapped up and it was a somber right home.
Just like a quarterback, you have to put it in the past and keep the next play alive. Driving is a fairly simple thing to do, and you only have yourself to blame for putting yourself in situations that endanger your passengers/others lives. Look past it and focus more on driving correctly and getting to a destination safely
Then humble yourself and stop thinking of yourself as a pretty good driver. Start planning out your moves in advance instead of during the moment.
Biggest driving advice that often goes unheeded: never act like you're in a rush. Ever. Being forced to exit because you're in the wrong lane? Either merge out of it safely or exit, go through a light, and get back on. Too many people think that if they miss their turn, it's the end of the world when all they have to do is do a u-turn or something to remedy the problem. Thinking you're never in a rush is a pretty relaxing way to drive, too. Plan your route, but if things don't go right, it's always easy to fix. This prevents you from doing crazy stuff like slowing everyone down on the freeway or stopping on the shoulder just because this isn't your exit. Mistakes happen though, bro. We're not infallible. Best way to get over it is to relax and drive.
appreciate all the advice, guys. I never really have posted personal crap like this on here before, and it was definitely helpful.
Sorry man, no risk like that is worth your life or others. You might hate it, but just take the exit and get on the freeway again. At the most you loose few minutes.
Try to make a habit of appreciating driving with awareness and respecting physics. Never rushing while traveling from point A to point B. Leave early whenever you can, but there will come a time when you are late. Accept you were irresonsbile, and suffer the upbraiding from whoever you were in a hurry for. Also, visit trauma centers, ICUs, morgues, and similar places if you have friends in the medical community. If you spend time with paramedics and ER doctors, you learn the dark side of carelessness. Observe what charred flesh, severed limbs, and other terrible injuries look like. They result from people acting like idiots on the road. You'll then learn to prioritize your health and other people over that stupid meeting the managing director emailed you about at the last minute, or the multimillion-dollar deal your team had been working on for the past several weeks. All those petty contracts at stake mean nothing when you see the consequences of road accidents. Corporations' bodies don't explode into red mist in head-on collisions between metal objects weighing tons and traveling 65+ mph. Sorry for the weirdly morbid post, but after hearing stories from family and friends who work with the above, I became like Peter Gibbons from Office Space on this issue, and I didn't give a flying f^kc about driving in a hurry for others. I hope you learn from this, and don't do something like it again.
Same exact thing happened to me. This is why you have passengers, if you miss something they sure as hell probably won't. I'm definitely a lot more careful now.
Restrict your travel to routine errands and familiar routes so you can blindly refer to process and procedure once the anxiety kicks in. Or, in the middle of summer in a large, fertile, coastal state; take a road trip to San Antonio by way of Austin, or up to North Texas, and learn to trust yourself and love driving again.
It's a b**** that they have security cameras everywhere now. Here's the OP's encounter: <iframe width="420" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/y0qcWAXgQJg" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
You're worrying about the past, OP. You should be worrying about the future. You almost took a dirt nap, but you got another chance. Do something with it and don't hose it up.
