When I was 18, I drove to Juárez, Mexico.

There wasn’t really a reason. At least, I don’t remember one.

Maybe I was chasing nostalgia. My family had taken one of our most memorable vacations through there a few years earlier. Maybe I needed to get away. Maybe I was bored.

Or maybe I was 18, had a driver’s license, and apparently thought crossing an international border by myself sounded like a perfectly reasonable way to spend the day.

I think I was driving a red Chevy Monza. I say “think” because time has never been my best gauge. At this point, the seasons of my life tend to run together.

What I do remember is that the car had a tendency to overheat.

So naturally, I drove it to Mexico.

It broke down shortly after I crossed the border. Nothing catastrophic. It needed time to cool down, and I needed something to do. So I started walking.

I was scared. Really scared, actually.

Some of that was probably justified. I was a teenager alone in another country. Even then, Mexico was portrayed as somewhere you should be afraid of.

But looking back now, I think there was something else mixed into that fear.

I’ve spent a lot of my life with this weird underlying feeling that I’m doing something wrong. That I’m going to get in trouble. That I’ve missed some rule everyone else understood.

Crossing an international border alone at 18 probably gave that part of my brain plenty of material.

And yet, that’s not what I remember most about Juárez.

I remember a park. There was a group of kids sitting in a circle around a mime or a clown. I don’t remember seeing any adults with them.

I remember their laughter. Their smiles. I can still see them. I can still hear them.

More than thirty years later, after everything that’s happened in my life, that’s what my brain decided to keep from that day.

Kids laughing in a park.

I didn’t know it then, but I had already been driving for years. I just hadn’t been the one behind the wheel.

Some of my happiest childhood memories happened in the back seat of my parents’ car.

There were four of us: my dad driving, my mom, my brother and me. We’d drive into the mountains. Sometimes we’d have a picnic by a river.

John Denver. The Eagles. Country. Rock. Music playing while Colorado moved past the window.

I don’t remember what I thought about while staring outside. Maybe nothing. Probably everything.

I didn’t have words like “processing” or “regulating.” I didn’t know what neurodivergence meant. I certainly wasn’t sitting in the back of my mom’s Volvo thinking, This is excellent for my emotional regulation.

I was a kid looking out a window. There was laughter. There was music. There weren’t many expectations. And I could just be wherever my brain happened to be.

Usually.

Then there was the deer.

I was probably around ten. We passed a truck carrying a dead deer, its head hanging out the back.

And I completely lost my shit.

Not “that makes me sad.”

Ugly crying. Yelling at the top of my lungs. Pounding on the window of my mom’s Volvo.

My brother was sitting beside me. I remember looking at my family and seeing their faces. Shock. Maybe even a little fear.

I don’t think they’d seen me react like that before.

At ten years old, I couldn’t have explained what was happening. Now I think it may have been one of my first public displays of overwhelming empathy.

I wasn’t angry that the deer was dead. Well, I probably was.

But what sent me over the edge was the way it was being treated. Its head was just hanging there.

Show some damn respect for the deer.

Decades later, I can laugh a little at the image of tiny Danney absolutely losing his fucking mind in the back seat of a Volvo over the dignity of a dead deer.

But I understand him better now, too.

Something felt wrong. He felt it completely. And, to this day, I still feel things completely. Tears and all.

Back then, I just had absolutely no idea what to do with that feeling.

Maybe that’s part of this story too.

Once I had my own license, I kept driving. Into the mountains. Sometimes Wyoming. Sometimes with friends. Usually alone.

And then, somewhere along the way, I mostly stopped.

I got married. Had kids. Built a career. Worked in casinos. Life became life.

I still drove to work, and I usually enjoyed the commute, but the pointless drives disappeared.

I hadn’t really thought about that until now. And I’m not sure what to do with it yet.

Part of me wonders what would have happened if I had kept driving.

What if I had brought my kids? What if I had shared that part of myself with the people closest to me?

Would I have had more time with my kids? Would they have known a different version of me?

Would I have coped with things differently? Would I have understood myself sooner?

Maybe. Maybe not.

That’s the dangerous thing about looking backward. It’s really easy to give meaning to things after you already know how the story turned out. I don’t want to do that.

But I do wonder.

Maybe there was a part of me that existed on those roads that I stopped making room for.

My life started imploding again about two years ago.

I seem to be on a 10-to-12-year cycle.

“Imploding” sounds dramatic. It was dramatic.

And somewhere in the middle of all of it, I started driving again.

At first, there was usually an excuse. A work trip to southeastern Wyoming. Or the Western Slope of Colorado. Or Portland.

There was somewhere I technically needed to be, so the miles had a purpose.

Then the purpose started becoming optional.

Now I can leave the house Saturday morning to get coffee and come home eight hours later.

Apparently, sometimes coffee is in Wyoming at a random downtown parade.

My current car, Otto, is about two years old and has just under 50,000 miles on it. I’d estimate 85 percent of those are Danney miles.

Some had destinations. Some had business reasons. Some probably could have been avoided.

But there’s a difference between miles the odometer counts and Danney miles.

Danney miles are the ones where the destination isn’t really the point.

People talk about “clearing your head.”

Driving doesn’t clear mine. Not even remotely.

My brain is still doing what my brain does.

A conversation from yesterday. A text from three weeks ago. A relationship. Something I said. Something somebody else said. Something they didn’t say.

A memory from twenty years ago that apparently needed immediate attention. A completely unrelated idea.

Work. Love. Regret. A song lyric. Another memory.

Wait, why did they phrase that text that way?

Oh, look, mountains.

Back to the text.

All 37 tabs are still open.

Music is almost always playing, although I’m not necessarily listening to it. Sometimes a song finds its way into whatever I’m thinking about. Sometimes it becomes part of the soundtrack of my life.

There are tears occasionally. There is laughter. There are memories. There aren’t phone calls or texts.

It’s me, the road, and whatever my brain decides we’re dealing with that day. That moment.

And here’s the strange part.

The exact same thinking at home can make me miserable. I can feel trapped inside it.

The thoughts get louder. More threatening. More urgent. I start feeling like I need to solve them. Explain them. Stop them.

Fix myself.

But put those same thoughts in a car somewhere between Denver and wherever-the-hell-I-decided-to-go-today, and something changes.

It’s not the thoughts.

It’s me.

I rarely come home with a breakthrough. Sometimes I do.

There have been drives where something finally clicked. There was a drive home from Grand Junction through a snowstorm where I started understanding something about my relationship with my mother that completely changed the way I saw years of my life.

That’s another Thought for another road.

Most of the time, though, there’s no revelation waiting at the end. I don’t pull into the garage having solved myself.

I just feel… better.

Decompressed. Relaxed. Sometimes accomplished. Renewed. Reinvigorated.

A little more fuel in the tank.

Which is slightly ironic, since Otto is an electric car.

The 37 tabs haven’t closed. Maybe that’s the part I’ve been misunderstanding.

Maybe they don’t need to.

I’ve been trying to figure out why driving does this for me.

Is it an escape? Absolutely.

Avoidance? Probably sometimes.

Processing? Abso-fucking-lutely.

Regulation? Seems like it.

Exploration? Always.

There probably isn’t one answer.

I’m starting to wonder if the difference isn’t that driving helps me think.

Maybe driving changes how I feel about the fact that I’m thinking.

At home, I can feel trapped with my thoughts. On the road, I’m alone with them.

Those sound like the same thing. They’re not.

When I’m trapped with them, I want them to stop. When I’m alone with them, I seem to give them permission to exist.

I don’t have to solve every conversation. I don’t have to understand every relationship. I don’t have to figure out why something hurt. I don’t have to know whether my reaction was reasonable.

The thoughts can just ride along.

And somewhere along the way, I become a little less threatened by them. Maybe even a little more understanding of the person having them.

A little more empathetic toward myself.

That’s a fairly new concept.

I’m apparently much better at demanding respect for a dead deer than extending grace to myself.

We’re working on it.

I don’t know why I still drive.

Maybe I’m searching. Maybe I’m escaping.

Maybe I’m revisiting the little kid staring out the window while John Denver played, the one who didn’t know he was supposed to be doing anything with his thoughts.

Maybe I’m trying to find the pieces of myself that I stopped making room for.

Or maybe I just really like driving.

I don’t need to turn it into something profound if it isn’t.

But I know this:

Sometimes I leave home to get coffee and drive for eight hours.

I come back to the same house. The same life. The same problems. The same brain.

All 37 tabs are still open.

I just don’t mind them quite as much.

For today, that’s enough. I don’t have to figure it all out right now.