Lessons from an Extremely Used Car

I drove a real beater in high school, but at least it taught me a thing or two about taking care of cars – and myself.

My first car was a clunky old Nissan that my parents bought off of some scam artist (probably). The year was 2011. The car was barely street legal. The price was $700.

That may sound like a comically cheap price for a car here in 2025, but back in 2011, $700 was…still not nearly enough to spend on a car. It was, however, the maximum amount anyone should have spent on a machine that would be operated by 16-year-old me. We named the car Rusty, short for Rusty Crapload, but I was too thrilled about having a car to care that it realistically belonged in a dump.

Rusty was a car of many charms. Most noticeably, the driver’s seat was stuck straight upright and all the way forward, so you had to drive with your knee up by your chest like you were driving a bumper car. The other seats were fine so long as my passengers didn’t mind that only some of the windows worked and the A/C had about a 50/50 shot. We just laughed and slid in our cassette-tape-shaped adapter, plugged the aux into someone’s iPhone 5, and hit the road…but only certain pre-approved roads.

Per the order of the parents who paid for the car, Rusty Crapload could only be driven to a select number of locations. He could go to school, he could go to musical rehearsals (at the school), he could go to school dances (guess where). He could go to local babysitting gigs or my job at the mall or friends’ houses. He could not go outside of the tri cities, and he absolutely could not go on the highway. I used to roll my eyes about it, thinking my parents were trying to control me. In hindsight, they were mostly trying to keep me from breaking down on the side of the Dan Ryan.

Rusty was a ticking time bomb, but he never failed us. We took good care of that crappy car, fixing the brakes more than once and taking it into the mechanic the second we heard something rattle. A good mechanic goes a long way (or at least to the high school and back). The summer after senior year, Mom and I drove Rusty to get frozen yogurt one last time, then we drove him straight to the scrapyard. Rusty Crapload, may he rest in pieces, lasted exactly as long as we needed him to.

This has always been my family’s policy when it comes to cars — we make them last as long as possible until they just don’t drive anymore. My mom still has the same hand-me-down Ford Edge we got pre-2010, and I can’t say for sure how long Dad’s been driving his car, but it sure isn’t new. Personally, I learned my lesson the hard way. When I was 23, I ignored my mechanic’s suggestion to replace my brakes, then proceeded to total the car when my brakes went out.

Since then, my husband and I have made a 2012 Subaru Outback last us every mile of a multi-year American road trip and then some. It’s seen better days, of course, but God willing, it’ll see worse. When my father-in-law asked when we planned to replace the car, I told him the truth: when it’s more expensive to fix than it is to replace. Routine maintenance is the key to most things – and people, too.

I live in a major city, so I don’t drive every day, but I still wake up inside a rusty machine every morning, and it’s only getting rustier by the minute. I am 29 years young, but with 30’s hot breath on my neck, I can feel my body slowing down to remember old injuries. The knee I hurt when I was 16 is acting up again. My back demands constant foam rolling. I look back at a version of myself I used to be — one who worked a full-time job, ran a ghostwriting agency, created daily TikTok videos, managed a portfolio of coaching clients, traveled the country full-time with no home base, and was a literal bodybuilder — I wonder how the hell I did it. I had a younger body and a stupider brain that was more willing to block out feelings like exhaustion and burn out.

I sped through my 20’s as hard and fast as I could, hardly pausing to notice the wear and tear of trauma. Even when I sold my debut novel to Penguin Books – a bigger achievement than I thought would ever be possible for me – I didn’t stop to admire a job well done. Instead, I kept speeding ahead, high on my own exhaust. I didn’t realize I was driving on busted brakes until they snapped. I snapped. I broke down on the side of the Dan Ryan, metaphorically speaking.

For all of Rusty’s faults, the warning lights on that car’s dashboard worked great. If something was wrong, you knew it was wrong, and you knew what to tell the mechanic. I am equipped with no such dashboard, and after my breakdown in June, it’s taken quite the team of mental mechanics to diagnose the problem: PTSD mostly, but also ADHD, my lifelong anxiety disorder, and a good old fashioned case of burn out. It’s not just that my brakes were busted; my brain was a regular Rusty Crapload.

If you follow my writing, you know it’s been quite some time since I’ve published an essay. My breakdown nearly totaled me, and writing – the thing I’m meant to do the way a car is meant to drive – was not only unsafe; it was impossible. Only now, eight months later, do my fingers hit the keyboard and remember what to do. I’m moving slower, though. Writing slower. Less work, more routine maintenance. I already knew better when it came to my car, but some lessons can’t really be learned until you’re walking away from the wreck.