The Roads You Most Fear Traveling

There is a road you’ve probably been avoiding.

Maybe it’s a literal one. A highway. A bridge. An on-ramp that makes your hands go cold before you even reach it.

Or maybe it’s something else entirely — a conversation you’ve been postponing, a leap you keep talking yourself out of making, a version of yourself you’ve been too afraid to become.

Whatever it looks like - you know exactly which road I mean.

And I want to tell you what I learned from spending too many years avoiding mine.

It Started on a Bridge

It was long ago, late afternoon on a perfect Southern spring day. Vibrant colors were bursting from every bush. The intoxicating scent of jasmine and wisteria filled the air.

This perfectly reflected my mood. I was excited, in love with life, heading out on a first date with a woman I couldn’t wait to see again.

Within minutes I had effortlessly merged into the center lane of rush hour traffic on a busy interstate. I was happily cruising along, completely relaxed, crossing a tall bridge.

And right then - my world shattered.

Suddenly I was completely dizzy. My body was shaking. My hands were vibrating so badly I could barely hold the wheel.

Instantly, I was overwhelmed with extreme anxiety.

All I wanted in that otherworldly moment was to get out of that car.

The terror I was experiencing was so overpowering that I momentarily forgot that I was also traveling at 65 mph in the middle lane of heavy traffic on a busy highway.

Fortunately, I made it to the shoulder safely. I just sat there for a long time, completely bewildered and unraveled by what had just happened.

In the days that followed I did what any confident person would do. I fought against it. Day after day I drove back onto that highway at rush hour. Each time the anxiety was somehow worse than before.

Finally, I couldn’t try anymore.

Up until then, I had driven tens of thousands of miles in every condition imaginable. I loved the freedom of the open road.

And now I couldn’t do something that seemed so basic as that?

What did that mean?

What cracked open within me right then was far worse than the anxiety itself.

Having never heard of something like this, I quickly came to believe that something was fundamentally wrong with me and that no one else had ever experienced this. I felt completely alone with it.

Driving on highways was central to my life. It was necessary for my work, for various interests and for fun. And now it was gone.

So, I did the worst thing possible. I hid from it.

For the next several years I became an expert at avoidance - I drove only on backroads or offered excuses, quietly encouraging others to drive.

Inside, I felt increasingly humiliated, diminished and ashamed.

All the while, my fragile male ego wouldn’t allow me to tell anyone what was really happening.

Well. That’s not entirely true. I told my dog Willie. He was very sympathetic.

My world grew smaller. My confidence followed. Every detour around the fear was also a detour around the life I expected to be living.

I began to believe my future was destined to be unimaginably dark.

Meanwhile, I thought about the driving phobia constantly. In my mind, it became this increasingly bigger wall- uniquely my own-between me and the life I wanted to live.

What I didn’t understand then - but understand completely now - is that avoidance is a false promise. It offers short-term relief at the cost of long-term freedom.

And the driving phobia wasn’t even the real problem.

Some of the greatest gifts we will ever receive in life come cleverly disguised as insurmountable obstacles.

Another thing I didn’t at all comprehend at the time was this-Something more urgent was trying to get my attention.

Doubts I had never examined.

Stress I had never named.

A version of myself I had turned away from when I should have embraced it.

The anxiety was pointing at all of it - insistently, persistently, getting louder the longer I refused to listen.

I didn’t know how to.

The Dark Night of the Soul

What a driving phobia produces at its worst-at least for me- is something far more frightening than the panic itself.

It’s the creeping suspicion that who you thought you were might not be true.

If I couldn’t do something this basic - then what else had I been wrong about? What else might suddenly be gone?

This is the dark night of the soul.

That place where the story you’ve built about who you are cracks open like an earthquake shattering everything you thought you knew.

Where the identity you’ve relied on -capable, confident, in control - suddenly feels uncertain.

It is terrifying.

And it is also, I now believe, a doorway.

The bigger the challenge, the greater your opportunity.

Years went by. I continued wanting to drive on highways again. Each time I tried, the results were continually disastrous. My self-identity continued to inwardly crumble.

One day I stood in front of a mirror and asked myself a single question.

“Who are you?”

When I finally stopped fighting the signal and started listening — the real question emerged.

Not “What is wrong with me?”

But “What is this trying to show me?”

That single shift-changing the question from self-judgment to honest curiosity - began to change everything.

Because the crack in your foundation is not a sign that you are broken.

It is light getting in.

What Actually Works

It was right about then that I inadvertently learned something that electrified me.

There was actually a name for what was happening with me- it was a real thing that also happened with millions of other people.

It was called a Driving Phobia.

I got what advice I could on what to do about it. Unfortunately, most of it was no help. But some of it was.

Several years and thousands of white-knuckled road miles later, I finally reached my destination.

Two hundred and seventy miles on the interstate.

I stood on a mountaintop with a 360-degree view of the Blue Ridge and felt something I hadn’t felt in years.

Fully, completely myself.

But here’s what I understood standing there.

The mountain was never the real goal.

I was the destination.

I also realized, the more I was back out on the road, the rest of my life started to come alive to a greater degree than ever before.

What followed was many years of driving on highways to distant destinations. It was great.

But then, early one morning as I was beginning a long trip when, jarringly, “IT” returned with a vengeance.

This time though, I asked myself a different question:

“What’s another way to look at this?”

So, building on what had worked and ignoring what hadn’t , I began to apply it in a different way.

Small steps at first. Mile after mile, I began to create a new process for getting back on the road-again!

After many months, I was able to start driving on highways again-not great distances at first, but I was definitely getting somewhere.

I built a program that was initially just for me.

It worked so well for me, I shared it with a few other people, It worked for them as well.

I knew then that many other people could benefit from it as well. So, I wrote a book to share the process.

The original version was released in 2019. Since then, I have updated the process and have now re-released it as a new book.

The process is not built on willpower. Willpower eventually burns out.

A few of the many things I learned that actually made the difference:

-Avoidance makes it worse. Every single day.

-Anxiety always peaks and subsides. Your nervous system just needs consistent proof of that before it will trust you again.

-The language you use about fear shapes your experience of it. I stopped calling it a phobia and started calling it a challenge.

That one word shifted everything into a higher gear.

And the goal was never just to drive on highways again. The real goal was to become someone with a deeper, more resilient foundation than before.

The road was simply what brought me back to myself.

The Road That’s Waiting for You

You don’t need a driving phobia for this to make a difference. It can be used as model for a variety of situations that create extreme anxiety.

Because the roads we most fear traveling are rarely just roads.

They are the conversations we haven’t had.

The risks we haven’t taken.

The bridges — literal and otherwise — we’ve been navigating around for longer than we care to admit.

Every detour costs you something. Usually something you can’t fully see until you’ve been paying it long enough.

So here is what I want to leave you with -not as advice, but as something I know to be true from the inside of this experience:

The road you’ve been most afraid to travel is the one that will lead you to a higher expression of yourself and your unique gifts.

And you’ve been waiting long enough.