When Boring Life Chore and Your Past Collide

Yesterday I brought my daughter's car to a NJ state inspection center. This doesn't sound like it would be worthy of a post, but hear me out.  There's a story in this.

I first started taking cars to NJ state inspection stations when I was a teenager. I had no idea what I was doing, of course. My first or second year, very early on, I had a terrible experience. One of the men running the inspection center was mean to me. He made fun of me for being clueless and he was gruff and frustrated, outwardly hostile when I messed up a procedure.

This has stuck with me, to this day, thirty years later. Every time I go to the inspection station, I get tense. I worry that I'll screw up. I worry that the guys there won't be nice. I worry that I'll mess up one of their seemingly specific directions.  So I make sure I have all the paperwork ready before I go. I try to be extra nice to the guys so they won't yell at me. And every time, it's no big deal. The guys are nice, or at the very worst, indifferent. (What a sucky job, really.)  The lines are never too long, and other motorists there for this annual boring chore chat with me about what I'm reading (as I always have a book with me) or about the weather.  It's over in half an hour, and the car always passes. (The kind of car I drove as a teenager didn't always pass, which embarrassed me. I would cringe as they put the fail sticker on, and then worry about how much it was going to cost to get fixed.)  So why do I still get all up in arms about this seemingly banal experience?

We remember the things that are painful to us, even if they're buried deeply, and in this case, when they're not buried deeply -- even if they are seemingly small or unimportant or we should know better to get over them.  We react based on those memories. I may be a 46 year old woman with a husband and two children to take care of, an adult who is an author and in control of her life, but I'm shaped by my experiences, some trivial, some not so much. Whether they come out in my writing -- as they sometimes do -- or they linger as a visceral reaction to something -- like tensing up before I go to the DMV -- they live on in me. Has anything like this ever happened to you? I'd love to hear.