My first car had a manual transmission. You don’t need to have driven a stick shift to understand what that means for a beginning driver. Think of Princess Diaries, when Mia Thermopolis is awkwardly bouncing forward—and rolling backward—through San Francisco. That was me at 16, minus the part where my grandmother knights a trolley driver and a police officer.
The majority of my trips to and from school involved intermittent jerking and stalling. On a good day, learning to drive a manual is humbling, but it is often made worse by stress, impatience, and the performance anxiety that flares up when you realize there’s a line of cars, likely all automatics, behind you—and someone is honking. Someone is always honking.
That’s when you inevitably release the clutch too fast, your car shuts off, and you start to panic. Memorably, once at a traffic light on a particularly steep incline, I became so frazzled that I gave up on my vehicle entirely—parking and waving other drivers past. Like I said, humbling.
Yet even in moments like these, there is an upside to such a trial by fire: You learn that there are some things you simply cannot rush to perfect. Pushing too hard, too fast, or too much for someone else’s benefit will cause you to kill the engine. So you take a deep breath and go slow. You give yourself the time you need, however long that is, to get the car going because you have to, and even then, sometimes you still stall. You’re learning.
It’s with this mindset that I’m entering 2025. In years past, I’ve made big resolutions beginning January 1, and those ventures have either succeeded or they haven’t, but none have felt particularly enjoyable. Maybe that’s because rushing to rebrand one minute after midnight feels fraught. Or maybe it’s because a part of me feels like I’m still parked on a hill, apologizing to the onlookers who are waiting for me to get it right.
This year, I want a soft start. No sweeping resolutions. No rush to drastically improve within the first few months. No concern that I’ll break a streak and fail. The plans I have are long term and will require me to be at peace with starting and stopping and starting again.
Lucky for me, I drove a manual for 13 years, long enough to master a smooth ride—with the occasional glitch, because I was never perfect. I was pretty good, though, and I got myself where I needed to go, which is the whole reason I started driving in the first place.
