Take a deep breath.

Sometimes, I let my frustrations and anxiety get the best of me. Today was one of those days.

If you have kept up with me at all in person or on social media, then you probably know that I have had some pretty severe car issues since February, when my first car– my Buick– was rear ended. The back of the car was totaled and at the end of the day, I decided that repairing my 22 year old car was probably not going to be as financially intelligent as bucking up, taking out a loan, and getting a “new” car. Of course, I say “new” meaning new to me, not a new car. On February 20 of this year, I bought a 2007 Ford Taurus. And so my struggles began. The first couple months, my Taurus ran beautifully. It was a little quicker to run out of gas than my Buick, but I knew that would happen when I upgraded to a V6 engine. Then the issues started.

I rolled down my window, and it wouldn’t roll back up. The next three days, of course, were three of the rainiest days in all of April. I got home in May and after some pretty significant issues, figured out that I needed to replace the coil pack. This happened right before I was supposed to leave for Florida, and I had vowed to myself that if the repairs were going to cost more than $300, that I was just going to buy a plane ticket and call it a day. God must have heard that, because my repairs ended up being just a little under $300. Read as: I ended up driving my car from Illinois to Florida over a two day period, taking about twenty hours to make the trip all by myself. No big deal, right? You did it, Chris! Good job! You had this amazing adventure and you made sure that your car could make it, and that is all on you. I was proud of myself.

About two weeks after being in Florida, my car started acting funny again. I convinced myself it wasn’t anything serious, but it got progressively worse and worse and eventually I realized that it had to be the alternator. The morning that I woke up to take my car in to get it fixed, the battery was completely dead because the alternator had given out. I eventually got the car jumped and running, to a shop that was open, and I paid a lot of money to replace the alternator. Wonderful. Problems solved, right? Wrong.

On Sunday, I drove to and from St. Pete for the gay pride festival that was happening. It was an amazing time, and I will definitely go into more detail about that marvelous adventure at a later time. The funny thing was that other than the persisting issue, my car was completely fine to and from St. Pete. On Monday morning I woke up, got in my car to leave for work, and realized that my engine was significantly louder than it should have been. Now, by no means am I the most intelligent person when it comes to vehicles, but I know enough to know that if the car is loud, that means there is probably something wrong with the exhaust. In a hurry to get to work, I figured I could deal with it later. Two blocks from home I heard metal fall from beneath my car and begin scraping along the pavement of the street. Hell. No. I pulled over and saw my exhaust hanging off the bottom of my car. I called my parents in an absolute panic, but eventually got the car home and got a ride to work with a coworker. I got it into a shop that evening, and got it back the next day. I was informed that the ar had been “straight piped,” which had caused the exhaust to blow off of the vehicle because it could not move around the way it needed to. But I got it fixed. Problems solved, right? YOU GUESSED IT: Wrong.

So I have mentioned that my car has had a persisting issue. That issue is that each time I brake or just slow down, and then press on the accelerator again, the car will coast for a second, lurch forward, and then continue moving. Sometimes it will do it even when I’m at a complete stop. My mom mentioned yesterday (I think?) that I might want to see if the car was running low on transmission fluid. So today after work I went into Autozone to buy some transmission fluid, and the gentleman working there was kind enough to step outside and look at my car. It was then that he rolled a paper towel up so that he could poke it down into my car. When he brought the paper tower back out, there was an inch or so of the paper towel covered in a fluid. “You have a major leak in your transmission.” WHAT.

How on earth is it that I have had my car in two different shops within the past two weeks, and no one noticed that transmission fluid was leaking out of my car? So after around 5:15pm or so today, I was in a pretty rotten mood. And I hate to admit it, but I kind of stayed in that rotten mood. It has affected me all through my evening, from sitting at home, to going to class, to coming back home and heading straight for my room. I’m the type of person that wants to be alone when I’m upset, not because I am upset with anyone in particular, but simply because I don’t want my bad mood to bother anyone around me. I don’t want to be that person, so I separate myself which I feel is often misinterpreted for isolating other people and freezing them out. That is never my intention. But I need to process. I need to think and I need to be able to be upset and not worry more than I already am that I might be upsetting other people by being upset. And that might sound absolutely insane, but that’s how my brain works.

SO. I’m sure you’re wondering, “Chris, isn’t this blog all about what you are learning on this huge new adventure?” Well, yes. It is. You will also find my personal thoughts, feelings, anxieties, and the general hilarity that is my life interspersed. But today (really, the past two weeks) has taught me that when it rains, it pours. My dad has said that to me multiple times over the past few weeks, and it finally hit me today how true it is. I am taking my car back into a shop tomorrow to figure out exactly what the issue with the transmission is, but by this point I have spent just shy of $900 on repairs for a car that I bought toward the end of February. Four and a half months later, and I made my $4000 purchase a $5000 purchase. It upsets me that I have had to put almost a quarter of what I spent on the car back into the car, but being upset isn’t going to do much to better the situation. Tonight, I had my moment. I was sullen and grumpy and I tried to make the best of it but I know that I was being a bit of a jerk. So if you are reading this and I was a jerk to you today, I am so very sorry. When it rains, it pours. And the only way I have found to get through it all is to take a deep breath.

So here I am: I’m laying in bed and really contemplating sleep because I have to be up in about eight hours to get to work, and I am breathing my way through the rest of my evening. For far too long I have let the pressure and anxiety and frustration build up inside of me, and I don’t want to do that anymore. Work today was great, but finding out that I had yet another issue with my car kind of ruined my whole day.

But that was today, and tomorrow is a new day. So I will just breathe.