(no subject)

[darchildre]

I had to put air in my tires this morning, which is not a difficult task but is one that I don't do often and doing anything I'm not familiar with in public makes me anxious. (Because most of my anxiety manifests as "someone is watching you/listening to you and you are somehow irritating them" - that plays in a loop at the back of my brain all the time.) So, while driving up to the gas station, I gave myself my normal peptalk for those kinds of situations - no one cares what you're doing, this is a completely normal activity that no one will pay any attention to, no one is going to watch you do it or be upset that you're doing it slowly, etc.

So I pull in and start reading the instructions on the machine, checking everything several times, and another car pulls up right behind me. And the lady inside stared at me the entire time I was filling my tires. And sure, I get that you also need air - that's fine - but could you not have, I don't know, parked one of the nearby parking spaces for five minutes so that you don't have to stare at me like the physical manifestation of All of My Anxiety?

I ended up only filling two of the tires before getting so flustered that I decided it would be better to do the rest after my other errands. And when I came back to the gas station, there was no one there at all and I could take all the time that I wanted. (After giving myself a second pep talk about how there was no way the gas station attendant was going to notice or remember that I had been there twice.)

Oof.

Comments

[james]

One thing I like about using Jiffy Lube for my oil changes is I can drive up and ask them to check and inflate my tires for free. I just sit there and let the professionals do it!

(My public-performance anxiety is very similar, more of a 'they will see me and wonder what I'm doing and I better have an explanation ready in case they ask' and of course I don't like to do anything that is the slightest bit out of the ordinary bc what if someone sees and judges me.)

[melita66]

That's why I have a small air compressor that runs off the car battery. I keep it in the trunk and can then choose where and when to fill the tires. The gauge is terrible so I have a separate pressure check device. But yeah, I hate those noisy air hoses at the gas stations.

[silveradept]

Oh, that's fun. Glad you were able to get air in the tires, though!