How Much of Our Characters Are Really Ourselves?
[image error]
When I was ten years old, I was in a car accident. My mother, stepfather, siblings and I were on a freeway driving out of the city after visiting my grandparents when a drunk driver side swiped us.
Considering it happened over three decades ago, I still have a pretty clear memory of it. The car was a green and creamy white van, possibly ex-army, with lots of khaki double bench seats and an aisle down the right side. Big families need big cars. Because there was so much room, we kids tended to move around a lot, even while we were in transit. Because of that, we weren’t always wearing our seatbelts when we should have been.
We lived in a little country town about two hours outside of the city and we were barely on the outskirts. It was just starting to get dark. There was a police car somewhere nearby and my mum turned around in the front passenger seat to look at it. That’s the last thing I remember before the accident. When I woke up, I was on the inside lane of the freeway, face down, trapped underneath a car with my foot caught in its engine.
It must have been horribly traumatising for the driver of that car. Not for me. I was unconscious while it was happening. I was told later that the drunk driver side swiped our van, causing it to roll several times. Because I wasn’t wearing a seatbelt, I crashed out of a window and was flung onto the road where the car that hit me couldn’t stop in time. The wheels didn’t run over me – they did a really good job of steering perfectly so they avoided that – but my foot managed to tangle itself in the engine and they pushed me along the freeway for about a hundred metres.
That’s when I woke up. I knew something bad had happened. There was pain. And I was stuck. I couldn’t free my foot, meaning I couldn’t pull myself out from under the car. I passed out again. When I woke up again, I was in the back of an ambulance and they were inflating a temporary cast around my right ankle just in case it was broken.
They needed several ambulances to ferry us all to hospital but, surprisingly, our injuries were relatively minor. My mother had stepped on a piece of glass after the accident and was hopping around the emergency room from child to child, refusing to let the doctors near her (she is very afraid of needles and knew they would try to give her several). My stepbrother Brian had a cut over his eye. A centimetre lower and he would have been blinded. My stepsister Michelle had lacerations around her mouth and couldn’t eat, drink or speak without pain. My sister Natalie had bruised ribs. Everyone else was fine. Shocked but fine.
I was the worst hurt. I had a severe abrasion high on my left cheek from being dragged face first down the highway. And I hadn’t broken my ankle but I had chipped off a piece of bone that to this day floats freely in there. I couldn’t put any weight through my leg. I certainly couldn’t walk without crutches. I stayed in hospital for four days while the swelling went down and the pain abated.
Despite the fact that there was a police officer who had witnessed the entire accident, the drunk driver was never charged with causing it. He had been allowed to speed off, with the police officer electing instead to stop, to help us and to manage the scene. The drunk driver was pulled over several hours later, still way over the legal blood alcohol limit, but nobody could prove definitively that he was the same driver and it was the same car.
I spent several weeks, possibly months (my memory gets a bit fuzzy on the timeline here), on the crutches before graduating to a walking stick. Yes, I was ten years old and I had a walking stick. I went to sessions with the physiotherapist where they made me balance on a board with a ball stuck through it (and probably other things but that’s the piece of equipment I specifically remember). Eventually, I was able to discard the walking stick. My ankle still swells every day, even now, but the pain is long gone.
The psychological side effects were more long lasting. For years afterwards, whenever I sat in the front passenger seat, I was sure the car next to us, the car coming to a stop at the t-intersection as we were driving past, the car approaching us from the opposite direction, was going to side swipe us. After a few years, I settled down.
At least, I thought I did. What actually happened is that I spent a lot of that time being driven in the back seat or driving myself. What actually happened is that I spent barely any time in the front passenger seat.
A couple of weeks ago, my dad invited me to go see his new house in the country. My stepmother wasn’t able to come because she was working. So instead of sitting in the back seat like I normally would when I spend time driving with them, I sat in the front passenger seat.
I completely freaked my dad out. I gasped and shrunk back as we drove up and then down the side of a mountain on the way there and on the way back. I closed my eyes and shrieked as he passed slow cars with plenty of clearance, sure we were going to collide. I yelled several times, “Stop, stop, stop!” as I misjudged the speed and how quickly we were coming up behind the cars in front of us.
My dad is a perfectly competent driver, a much better driver than me, but sitting in the front passenger seat and not being in control of the vehicle brought out all those fears I thought I’d gotten over but had just shoved deep down and avoided by hardly ever riding in the front passenger seat.
I hadn’t thought about these fears for years. Except subconsciously. How do you think about something subconsciously? Well, when you’re a writer, it comes out in your characters. In one of my books, the main character was in a car accident several years ago and reacts very badly whenever she travels in the front passenger seat of a car. Not when she drives. Not when she sits in the back. Just when she’s in the front passenger seat. Yet again, I’ve been writing a main character who is essentially myself.
I actually thought I was past thinly veiled fictional versions of myself. I hope for the most part that I am and that these things just slip through now and then rather than all the time. I’ll leave it to people who know me and read my writing to be the judge. Fingers crossed.
