In 2017, I was in a serious car crash that was 100% my fault. It was never announced as I felt the need to quietly reflect on the lessons to be taken away from the experience. Almost two years later, I’m still thinking on my takeaways from the event and striving to apply them in my everyday life.

Leading up to it: The 2 hours prior to the crash

In order for the lessons to make sense, it’s important to understand the following about my personality and what happened in the 1.5–2 hours leading up to the incident.

It was a Saturday evening in late October, and I was getting ready to meet a friend and my family across town for a fundraising event. At this time in my life, I hardly wore makeup and rarely did anything to my hair. When it came to actual events, though, sometimes I felt like I wanted to do a little something to my face and hair. I’m not entirely sure if this stemmed from peer pressure (“if everyone else is looking their best, then I should look my best too”), insecurities (“if I don’t do this, I’ll look plain compared to others”), or even a feeling of obligation (“if I don’t do it, it looks like I don’t care, so I should show some respect and do the same”). Or perhaps it was a combination of these sentiments. Whatever it was, I wasn’t a big fan of the feeling of obligation to “get ready.”

Backing up: Going a little deeper into personal beliefs

This might be one of my controversial opinions, but it’s crucial to the storyline: “Getting ready to go out” has become such a standard in modern cultures that I believe most people don’t even think twice about it. Women in particular have started to make an event out of getting ready together before the main event. There isn’t anything wrong with the act itself, but the nature of putting on makeup and doing your hair insinuates that it is important enough that you will invest your time into it. It’s a process, and therefore it requires your precious time and attention.

In the last few years, I have started to appreciate the value of time more and more. This has led me to question anything that I do that takes time. I ask myself questions like, “If I don’t do this, what’s the worst thing that would happen?” and “Is this absolutely essential for me to do?” when evaluating the worth of doing something. Trying to answer these questions as they relate to getting ready, I realized that the worst thing that could happen is that I feel unattractive to other people (“Ok, so who really cares if you feel unattractive to the bank teller or grocery store clerk?”), and that, no, it is not absolutely essential for me to put stuff on my face and press my hair between a hot iron before leaving the house.

When I analyzed the desire behind doing my hair and makeup, I concluded that the inclination to do it stemmed from some degree of superficiality. It was sourced from either peer pressure or insecurity, both of which I considered to be negative emotions that I was trying to overcome.

Before we go any further, let me state now: I understand that this approach is highly analytical. I’m not saying I think people who wear makeup and do their hair also do it for these reasons. I can’t say what drives other people — I am simply describing my own beliefs and analyses. There are some people who genuinely enjoy the act of doing makeup, and I think that’s different. Everybody should do what they want to do, and I do not label them as insecure, peer-pressured, or wrong in any way. I’m referring to looking at the reasons behind doing we do what we do, and what we don’t do, and the reasons that I got so upset on this day in particular.

Back to that evening…

So, as I decided that I could spare some time to apply makeup and do something to my hair before this event, I subconsciously set a timer on myself. “To do x amount of makeup and do y to my hair, it should take z minutes.” I decided on 15 minutes total for some mascara, minor eyeliner, and french braids. This number was not arbitrary, but it was overly optimistic. I had successfully performed those exact tasks in that amount of time in the past, but that was in the best-case-scenario. It did not allow for anything to go wrong in the process (which, any person who has worn makeup or done their hair knows is very likely).

[Expectation has been set. If expectation is not met, frustration will arise. Setting myself up for failure at this moment.]

The makeup wasn’t too hard, but the braids were giving me a hard time. 15 minutes stretched to 20, then 25, then 35 and then I was over double my allotted time. As the clock ticked on, my shoulders grew tired from holding my arms behind my head, and my frustration began to bubble. There were several factors at play in my mind, the main ones being:

• I felt that the additional time used for this process was time that I had lost. 35–15 = 20. That is 20 minutes I had completely wasted and would never get back. (Why didn’t I feel the same way about the 15 minutes that I also used to get ready? Those were minutes that I expected to use for getting ready, so I preemptively gave myself those minutes and was ok with that allowance. I felt that those were mine to give, rather than the ones I lost, which I had not been mentally prepared to give.)
• Now that I wedged myself into this hole, I was suffering from sunk cost bias (something I learned about months after this day). A sunk cost is something that you already spent (money, time, energy) that you won’t be able to get a refund on. The bias involved with this is leading yourself to think that you have to stick with it, since you already spent (fill in the blank) on it. “I already invested x amount of time into this, so I need to complete it, even if it’s a lost cause.”
• As I was so aware of how I passed the time in my life, I started to feel guilty about the amount of time I was spending on something that I viewed as somewhat superficial. This guilt made me even more frustrated that I couldn’t get myself to stop trying to fix the braids.

Opportunity cost came into play as a result of the expectation I had put on this process. I began to think about the other things I could have been doing in these 20 minutes I “wasted” on “superficiality.”

All the while, I was aware of how frustrated I was, and I compounded that frustration by being frustrated that I couldn’t just give it up. What a feedback loop! It was like a roller coaster that kept getting more intense — but not the fun kind.

I eventually got the braids to look half-decent, but I was fuming. Great. Now I’m “ready” to go to this event with my friends and family and have fun, right?

It was almost time to go, but I was so mad that I admittedly chucked a chapstick across my bedroom at the wall. I realized how ridiculous that was, so I sat on my bed and tried to calm down before I left. I wasn’t even considering the dangers of driving with this attitude, rather, simply knowing I didn’t want to be in such a bad mood when picking up my friend.

I managed to calm down a little, but not completely. I decided to just leave anyway and listen to music on my drive since the clock was ticking. I knew I would move on and eventually forget about it.

The drive

It was the first major rainfall in Portland of the season. We had just had an unusually dry summer that extended through early October, so the roads had not seen so much water in several months. However this didn’t phase me, a native Oregonian, who learned to drive on slick ground. I got in my 2008 Camry, which I had purchased the year before, and blasted some angsty rap through the speakers to fit my mood.

Since I felt I had wasted so much precious time earlier, the thought of driving quickly to save time was appealing. After all, “I am a great driver, and Oregon’s speed laws are outrageously low, so speeding is a completely viable solution,” my inner voice justified. “This is a drive I’ve done hundreds of times, too.”

I was heading west on I-84 to pick up my friend, Cooper, before we drove together to North Portland for the fundraiser. To my dismay as I hit the road, there was much more traffic than I anticipated, which would surely throw a wrench in my plans to make up for time lost while getting ready. Not only that, but “everyone is acting like they forgot how to drive just because of a little rain,” I lamented, so I would have to weave between the slow drivers who were inconveniencing my plan.

I’m not a reckless person, but these small justifications and frustrations compiled together to make me act more recklessly. My foot firmly pressed down on the gas pedal, propelling my car at 60 mph, 10 mph over the speed limit. I know what it feels like to hydroplane, and I thought I was being clever by telling myself that if I feel the car hydroplaning at all, then I would slow down to the speed limit. That’s the only thing that could go wrong with rain on the ground, right?

As I sped up the interstate with BROCKHAMPTON blaring through my speakers, cutting through slow drivers, I still felt the effects of my annoyance with the getting ready situation. More so, I was starting to fall into the post-frustration emotions of embarrassment, shame, and disappointment in myself for acting so childishly.

I’m an emotional person by nature; I have spent the bulk of my life uncovering this and learning how to reel it in. I’ve come a long way from outbursts and panic attacks, but I am still a work in progress. Just as I love seeing myself progress, I hate seeing myself regress, or fall back into temporary setbacks in which I demonstrate behavior from which I’m trying to disassociate.

So as I drove along, my inner monologue began to say familiar things, such as, “Why did you do this again, Shelby? You know better than this — you know that getting upset only hurts you and makes the problem worse. You could have gotten more time back if you didn’t let yourself become agitated.”

These feelings of remorse and shame were, themselves, negative, and something I had experienced innumerable times before. I was tired of this feeling — tired of feeling shame and remorse for every setback, no matter how small.

That’s when a strange and unfamiliar idea injected itself into my thoughtstream. What if I didn’t feel remorse for acting in such a way?What if I thought it was kind of… you know… cute? Endearing, even? “Yes, that’s what it is… This is my ‘thing.’ A lot of successful people have been known to have a short temper, anyway,” I justified to myself. Mind you, I had never had such a thought in my life; I always disdained my short fuse.

My inner monologue continued to build on this idea: “This is why it’s good that I’m single, why I am so selective about the people I get close to, because I shouldn’t even be around people. I’m clearly toxic and destructive, and I shouldn’t subject others to me. It’s a good thing that I’m moving away soon and will be completely alone (I was getting ready to move to Ecuador by myself just a month after this). In reality, I don’t even need people. I’m better by myself. And I like myself just the way I am.”

The crash

I had never been in a major car accident before. I had only been in extremely minor fender benders with minimal damage or consequence. So what happened next was as unfamiliar to me as the thoughts in which I had just been indulging.

As I began turning on the big S-curve exit that merged from I-84 to I-205, I felt my car pull itself in a direction on its own, and I immediately jolted into alertness. Both hands gripped the wheel firmly as it started pulling itself much further to the left than I intended, and then to the right, again beyond my control. It didn’t feel like hydroplaning. I could feel the tires on the (albeit, wet) ground, and whatever was happening to my car, I didn’t know how to compensate for.

Granted, my cocky mood and adrenaline rush said: “I got this. I’m a great driver. I will correct the path.” I concentrated intently on controlling the wheel and therefore the direction of my path. I became intensely aware of the moving vehicles ahead of me and in the lane to my right. “Do not hit a car, do not hit a car, please do not hit a car,” I repeated to myself as I focused on straightening out.

After a few unintended swerves on the first half of the S-curve, the car seemed to be back in my control. “That was weird,” I thought, “I wonder if the other drivers near me noticed that.”

At this time, I was probably going around 50 mph (which was still over the speed limit for that curve, but I was keeping up with the pace of the traffic). Approaching the second half of the S-curve, I was paying closer attention, but my car had a lot of momentum from speeding just seconds before slowing down for the merge. Again, the car began swerving completely out of my control — to the left, to the right, back to the left, and it didn’t seem to matter what I did with the wheel. I gripped it and straightened out, but the car seemed to have a mind of its own.

I was in a swerving metal box on wheels going 50 miles per hour, rain pouring down and wind blustering around me, surrounded by other metal boxes full of fragile people, and a 3-foot-tall cement wall serving as a median to my left. I was acutely aware of my surroundings and felt utterly helpless in being able to do anything about what was happening. I continuously focused on not hitting a car, but braced myself for what happened next.

I’m not entirely sure what happened first — I might have started pressing the brake in attempts to simply stop the vehicle and start over — but my Camry finally made contact with something it wasn’t supposed to. Amidst a swerve to the left, the front headlight was caught at an angle with the cement wall median. The swerving momentum rotated the rear of the car around, making the entire front of the vehicle collide head-on with the median, then bounced off in the opposite direction, doing a full 180 and leaving me facing the wrong way on the freeway. That finally stopped my car.

The airbags did not deploy and I was wearing my seatbelt, as I always do. It locked quickly as the car jolted me forward upon impact with the wall. I went from traveling at 50 mph down the interstate, fishtailing in all directions, to 0 mph in a split second. I was in utter shock, but I was uninjured as far as I could tell. There was no broken glass.

With incredible luck, I had not hit any other cars. I had certainly crashed my own car, but I was very thankful to see I had not involved others in the same misfortune. Also fortunately, the other drivers all reacted quickly and there was not a ricochet effect of more vehicles piling up behind me. Retrospectively, I imagine the swerving of my car served as a warning, and the traffic must have slowed down to give me some space while they observed me. There was an unusual amount of traffic for that time on a Saturday, so this is the only reason I can assume that nobody else hit me. Not only that, but we were at the end of an S-curve, in which the cars at the start of the curve cannot see what’s going on at the end of the curve. That means that all of the cars further back had to have stopped with appropriate time in order to not rear-end the car ahead.

Getting my car off the road

So how do you get your car out of a scene like that when you’re alive and capable? I could barely make out the face of the person who had been in the lane directly behind me (now, she was technically in front of me). I couldn’t read her expression, but I imagined she was as shocked as I was. I felt so embarrassed, and I felt like I wanted to say sorry to everyone who I was literally facing at that moment. I’m sorry for scaring you, I’m sorry for almost hurting you, I’m sorry for acting recklessly. I’m sorry you had to see that, please forgive me.

The cars eventually all passed and I managed to flip my car around; it had been running the whole time. I wondered if it was ok enough to drive all the way to Cooper’s? I was only 5 minutes away. I popped into the right lane, facing the correct direction again, and started to accelerate. I quickly realized that the car was not okay. I felt it dragging heavily from the front, so I slowed down and merged into the right shoulder, putting my flashers on.

It was dusk and the storm was picking up. My entire car swayed when another car sped past me in one of the two lanes. Not being able to subdue the curiosity, I got out of the car once parked to look at the damage.

The entire fender was crooked and hanging off. The worst of the damage was centered on the left headlight, where initial contact with the wall had been made. The thing that really got me was seeing the front license plate absolutely shredded to pieces. You could not read it and it was no longer a license plate — it was shredded, destroyed metal.

I did that.

I did that with my own brain and body. My emotions let that happen. My body made it happen.

Standing on the side of the interstate with wind blowing the rain in all directions, cars speeding past me and my little blue car, I finally snapped out of my state of shock and realized what had just occurred. I immediately burst into tears, hyperventilating at the sight of the damage I created.

I sought refuge from the weather in the front passenger seat, looking all around the undamaged interior of the car, where I had been protected and unharmed by the severe damage on the outside. “What have I done? What could I have done?” I thought.

Immediate Aftermath and Thoughts

My immediate reaction was feeling sorry for my poor judgment and behavior. I felt like apologizing to my existence — I wanted to say “sorry that I had risked my own life over something so petty.” I couldn’t believe I had done something so stupid. Overwhelming sensations of gratitude poured in as I was completely uninjured, and most importantly, I had inflicted no physical harm on anyone else. This made me feel incredibly lucky.

I started thinking back to the moments leading up to the crash. What was unusual about this drive compared to the countless others I’d done without a problem? I’d certainly driven in worse weather before, and I really had done that same drive hundreds of times.

I quickly realized something strange: There had been no pause between my self-justifying internal monologue and then losing control of my car. The rain had been normal, all other conditions had been usual. My thoughts themselves were the unusual factor.

As I was slipping into the usual self-deprecating thoughts that followed my frustrated hair-and-makeup sesh on this day, I stopped myself and tried on a different set of thoughts for size. I tried to reframe my personal guilt and shame as something quirky, something that makes me more of a “character,” and something that I could probably do just fine living with. I justified the feelings of rage as a cute little outburst that equates me to someone great but temperamental. Even worse, I justified how I push people away and keep boundaries up, and convicted to myself that I am better off in this world alone.

What next?

So how was I going to get myself and my car off of the road? How was I going to continue with the evening? I had to call for help. Fortunately, I had my AAA card in my wallet and a cell phone, great! I called AAA and requested a tow. Then I called Cooper. Due to my location between two different freeways, going in the direction towards his house, he had to drive pretty far out of his way to come get me. He showed up about 15 minutes later and embraced me in the rain, immediately giving me affection and calming me down. He is my oldest friend — we’d known each other for 11 years at that point.

The tow truck showed up not long after. We arranged for the car to be towed to my place. We met the truck there, driving in Cooper’s car, and then he had to drive us to the event.

Long-lasting Lessons

I’ve come to believe that everything we do has a potential ripple effect on the world. If nothing else, our actions certainly have a ripple effect on our own lives. I had clearly put myself into a trying situation the second I set an expectation on how long it would take me to get ready that day. Once the expectation was set, if it was not met, I had failed and then suffered from what symptoms that failure would bring: feeling that I was losing time, which I saw as my most precious resource; feeling guilty about giving attention to superficiality; not being able to give up on a sunk cost due to my bias; general frustration and rage due to the “failure” and its symptoms in themselves.

I’ve been learning that I’m in control of my own emotions. For someone who is naturally full of emotions, it’s hard to accept this fact. Nobody and nothing outside of me can make me feel any sort of way. It wasn’t the braids being difficult that made me feel mad. It was me who made me feel mad, by putting enough importance on those braids and falling into the aforementioned frustrations about it. It wasn’t the traffic that made me late. It was me who made me late, by spending too much time and energy on something that had passed. It wasn’t the rain that made me crash my car. It was me who made me crash my car, by allowing my emotions to bubble up and burst out of me while behind the wheel.

If I hadn’t allowed it to get to that point, then I probably wouldn’t have crashed my car. If I had been calm, I probably wouldn’t have sped. If I didn’t speed, I probably wouldn’t have crashed. And even if I still crashed my car but didn’t learn anything from it, then something worse probably would happen to me, because I would continue to pump that same kind of intense, negative energy through my veins.

There are signs around us all the time. I’m not talking about some supernatural stuff. I’m talking about natural cause and effect that takes place in the physical realm. If you are irritated, and you snap at someone, and then that person gets upset, that’s a sign. If you constantly talk to your family in an irritated tone, and then your family tells you that you seem like you’re constantly irritated, that’s a bigger sign. It’s a sign that you should work on that attribute if you don’t want to appear irritated and potentially offend or upset someone else.

For me, there had been many signs leading up to this day. Signs from loved ones and business associates that I sometimes overreacted and let my emotions get the better of me. This affected them poorly in our relationships, and it didn’t help anyone in business. Even if nobody told me anything, sometimes I could read the non-verbal signals that I had offended or upset someone. And of course, I didn’t intend to do that. I just still had work to do on my emotions, and I needed to prioritize that work if I expected to avoid hurting or upsetting people that I care about.

If I had listened to those earlier signs, then I might not have crashed my car, because I would have done the work necessary to calm myself down (or avoid getting to the point of needing to calm down) before I got behind the wheel that day. I would have applied the feedback I got from others and made a stronger habit out of being composed and tranquil, despite my natural tendencies. But since I hadn’t worked on it enough before that point, I did crash my car, and it did come to that extreme in order to wake me up.

And if I didn’t take that as any sort of sign, then I would probably crash my car even worse the next time, and potentially hurt myself and/or other people. If I hadn’t learned anything, I would have validated the toxic thought I had right before crashing — “my temper is endearing and I don’t need anyone” — and continued to allow myself to let my anger build up and overreact. So the causes that I put out become greater and stronger, and their natural effects follow. Isaac Newton’s third law of motion taught us that every action has an equal and opposite reaction.

I didn’t just learn how important it is to temper my emotions. I was reminded that, even though I am an independent person, I am not totally independent and I still rely on others to get through my life. Ironically, the crash that happened right after I said that I don’t need anyone, left me in a situation in which I needed help from various other people. Not only did I need the help of my friend to get me off the road, and the comforting hug and reassurance from him that I’m safe and not alone, but also:

• AAA as a company
• The tow truck driver
• My parents for giving me the AAA card
• Steve Jobs and Apple for creating the iphone from which I made the calls
• T Mobile for providing me a phone service to be able to make the call
• Everyone working at T Mobile
• The people who assembled my iphone
• The people who built the tow truck
• Etc etc…

Et cetera. I could go on forever, but essentially, there are thousands of people who go into making a new product/service that billions of people across the world use. I use things like my car and phone every day and generally take for granted that I get to use such convenient tools. I have no idea how they work and yet I benefit from their functions daily, claiming that I am independent and do not need anyone. If that were really true, then I should be able to make my own car and my own phone, or not need either of those things to begin with, right?

That’s a bit of an exaggeration, but my point is I went from saying “I don’t need anyone and I’ll just continue going through the world like this,” to minutes later, saying “thank you” out loud because I remembered that I had a AAA card in my wallet. But every day that card is in my wallet, and every day my iPhone is with me. Most days, a life-changing event doesn’t happen to us, but it could. I don’t want to wait until I’m faced with tragedy to be grateful for what I have, and who I have.

We all need friends. If I didn’t have any friends to call on that day, I could have gotten a ride in the tow truck to get my car back home, sure… but it would have been kind of weird to hug the tow truck driver and get consoled by him. It simply wouldn’t be the same as having a true friend, someone who cares about you despite your flaws, who you can be your authentic self around. Friendships are true gifts and shouldn’t be taken for granted.I’ve been blessed with many good friendships and I always expected to have them, but I know that I won’t if I walk around claiming that my outbursts are endearing and I don’t need anyone else in my life.

Appreciate what you have. Improve where you need to. Take ownership of the events and relationships in your life.

So this is what I tell myself now that I’ve crashed my car…

It’s easy to walk away from a situation and talk about what pissed you off about it, what the other person could have done better, or what could have simply gone more in your favor. But that doesn’t make the world a better place, and it really doesn’t do any service to you. The more challenging — but more rewarding — option is to ask yourself the Question: “What could I have done better?” and really dig for that truth objectively. Don’t beat yourself down for not performing your best, but do take into consideration how you should navigate a similar situation differently next time to yield better results. At the next opportunity, make those efforts. Ask yourself the Question again, rinse, and repeat.