I Passed Out at the Wheel of a Moving Car So You Don’t Have To
Or, how I learned to live with the guilt of not being superhuman.
In January of 2024, I was driving home in a windstorm, swerving around fallen tree branches strewn across darkened roads lit by cracks of lightning, when suddenly, everything changed. It began as a sensation of extreme heat. Face suddenly flushed and sweat streaming, I rolled down my windows to let the winter air stream in, but it didn’t help. Then I was hit with a wave of grogginess and an alarming feeling I can only describe as the vitality being sapped from my body. I distinctly remember thinking, now panicked, “This is not good.” In hindsight, I wish I’d pulled off to the shoulder right then. But nothing like this had ever happened to me. I’d never collapsed, fainted, swooned, passed out, seized, had an “episode”, or taken a serious blow to the head. Clearly not in an ideal state of mind, and less than a minute from home by this point, my hope was simply to will myself the rest of the way. I stopped in front of my development, left turn signal blinking while I waited for a motorist coming the other way to pass. That’s the last thing I remember.
I came to in a cloud of acrid airbag powder, my forehead leaning on the steering wheel. My right foot was still hitting the accelerator as my Mazda fishtailed on a sidewalk inside my neighborhood, its zombie joyride cut short by a dirt embankment. After an instant’s reorientation, I took my foot off the gas and turned the engine off. I felt like I’d been hit on the nose, and realized I smelled smoke. A sizzling, coin-sized hole in my upper right pant leg, its edges curled back and melted, told me that my pants had somehow briefly caught fire, though my thigh was unburned.
Surveying my surroundings, fully myself again, I was struck by where I was. I’d unconsciously waited for that other driver to pass, executed the left turn, then veered around the landscaped median separating the “in” and “out” lanes to smash into the wooden planks bracing the elevated yard of the property bordering the “out” lane. As best as I can tell, I lost a minute or two of time. No one was around. Thankfully, the windstorm kept the roads mostly clear. There wasn’t so much as a scratch on the wood planks I hit, nor any tire marks on the sidewalk or grass. It was like I’d never been there. My car, however, was toast.1
I spent much of that night in the emergency room being poked, prodded, examined, measured, scanned, observed, and questioned. In the weeks that followed, specialists continued the quest to diagnose me. Apparently, there’s nothing medically wrong with me. It seems I passed out at the wheel of a moving car due to a perfect storm of fatigue, lack of sleep, low blood sugar, dehydration, and stress. In a word, my ailment was overwork.
I wrote early last year about my search for a healthier work-life balance. Having only become a professional writer in the past few years, and doing so as a contractor rather than a salaried employee, I discussed the unique and then-still-unfamiliar pressures inherent in having radical autonomy in one’s work. Having no fixed hours, workdays, workplaces, time zones, and, in many cases, even deadlines, seems like it should be profoundly liberating. And yet, when one’s income is directly proportional to their publishable output — when one is free to work as little or much as they want, but is only paid when a job is completed, the work becomes far less liberating than it might at first seem. It turns out, having to sing for every supper, without the safety of a regular salary rolling in, is a harsher taskmaster than any boss. This dynamic deranged my work-life balance. It drove me to work crazy-long hours, and convinced me that I was never doing quite enough, making enough, achieving enough, or that I was letting down colleagues.
That essay from last year vaguely alluded to the “toll” my disrupted work-life balance took, and yet I felt too self-conscious and embarrassed to go into proper detail about what it led to. Happily, I learned my lesson. In 2024, I restored order to my life, set healthy boundaries, and reclaimed my nights and weekends. In turn, my mental/physical health fully rebounded. From time to time, however, I still get that guilty, sinking knot in my gut, like a schoolboy with a report he hasn’t started that’s due the next day. It still sometimes feels like I’m letting readers, colleagues, and writers down when I clock out without having completed my always-too-ambitious work itinerary for the day. But I’ve decided I’d rather feel occasional guilt than to run myself ragged. And the truth is, even when I was working at all hours, the guilt that there was always more to be done never went away. If I have the kind of personality prone to generating this guilt no matter what I do, I may as well take care of myself instead of trying in vain to slake an unquenchable thirst.
I just wish I didn’t need such a gruesome wake-up call — one that, had the circumstances been even slightly different, could have easily resulted in multiple deaths, including my own — but I guess I’m a little slow on the uptake. Hopefully others can learn from what happened to me. I passed out at the wheel of a moving car so you don’t have to.
See also: “On Finding Balance”
Subscribe now and never miss a new post. You can also support the work on Patreon. Please consider sharing this article on your social networks, and hit the like button so more people can discover it. You can reach me at @AmericnDreaming on Twitter, @jamie-paul.bsky.social on Bluesky, or at AmericanDreaming08@Gmail.com.
Naturally, I’d just put $1,000 of repairs into it days before.