From an early age, my strengths and weaknesses were abundantly clear. I was a compelling storyteller, an affecting dancer, and an imaginative hairstylist. But I couldn’t add two numbers together, fold a shirt to my mother’s standards, or operate a moving vehicle.

For my fifth birthday, my uncle gave me a bright pink Barbie Jeep. While I had no interest in Barbies, a 150-pound vehicle with a twelve-volt battery, capable of whizzing my brother and I around our neighborhood at five miles an hour, was the best present ever.

Strapped in, we made it just two blocks from our house before, in an effort to avoid a cat sitting motionless in the sun on the other side of the street, I hit the gas, turned the wheel, and drove the pink car directly into our neighbor’s mailbox, which on impact, snapped and toppled onto the hood.

When four years later, back for another visit, my uncle bought us our first video game console, we were ecstatic. We set it up that night. Really, my brother set it up — instruction manuals turned out to be another one of my weaknesses. The first game we played involved choosing a character and a vehicle to drive along a winding track through a magical land. I couldn’t make it past the first big bend without launching Princess Peach and her pink jeep into the rainbow abyss, my brother reminding me all along: you only have three lives, you know.

Eventually, after weeks of testing my mother’s patience, I learned to drive her old Volkswagen Golf, which she said I could take with me to California. I was going to college to write compelling stories. It wasn’t until the summer after my senior year, when my brother came to visit, that I dared drive into the major city north of my small college town.

We were going to dinner and a movie at an outdoor shopping mall in the center of the city. In the eight-story parking garage across the street, I opened the car door and stepped out to grab the ticket from the machine I’d pulled too far away from to reach. On the 600th 90-degree ramp, the flow of traffic moving toward the top came to a complete stop. And I knew then, there was no way of getting my car going again, unless my brother walked down the 600 ramps, asking every person behind me to move back. The car rolled halfway down the incline before I caught the clutch and slammed the gas.

The smell of burning rubber filled the structure. Someone asked if there was a fire. You know you only have one life, right?

That next day I called my mother, told her I was moving to New York City, the land of subways and taxis.