October 11, 2006, 8:32pm

I told my friends and my physical therapist about my horrible experience last night. I'm still posttraumatic.

At least I have eaten something today.

Got to gather up my energy. It's my midterm tomorrow!

The trauma of driving reminds me how miserable and helpless when I was a kid. My counselor at UF talked about that. That I was all alone trying to handle stuff without guidance. That I put up with everything, trying to stay strong. Yet I was just a kid. I held up all the fear etc and put up a strong face. That was adaptive. But he said, I may need to learn how to put down my strong face and relax.

Yes, I was very helpless. I had a lot of things to do in school and didn't know how. So many other students would do things properly at least in the teachers' eyes. Yet I would come up with something else. I didn't mean to be a bad kid. I thought about it and figured that might be the way to do. It just happened that those were not in my teachers' expectations.

I was ashamed. I didn't know how. Other students would say, "Of course this is the way to do it!" This "of course" has a lot of things taken for granted. They had their parents to fill out all the school forms for them, etc. I only had myself. I had to fill out the forms, then asked my mother a million times to have her sign the form. At times, she would threaten me that she's not going to sign.

The first day in P. 1, one of the assignment was to "recite" the first chapter in the Chinese book. 背書, well, I don't know how helpful it was to learn Chinese but it was an assignment. I didn't know the meaning of 背. The teacher presumed everyone knew what it meant. And I didn't ask.

I didn't have anyone to ask at home. The next day, the whole class was ready to recite the chapter aloud. It's then I know what recite means. It's to read the text aloud without looking at the book. I still wonder why there's such an assignment to do throughout my school years. Why recite every single word in the chapters? Why does it matter if you miss one or two words, if those are not the keywords? Does reciting help learning at all? What are students expected to learn?

Then, the teacher picked some students to stand up and recite. I was very threatened. I couldn't do it. I was not prepared. Luckily, I was not picked.

I have learnt a lot of things the hard way, probably because I have not had any guidance. But this is how I would never forget the lessons I learnt.

Like last night, the cop stopped me. I asked him all the questions I could come up with about driving at night. He was incredibly kind and showed me how to use the heater and fan to defrost the windows. He also showed me how to use the headlights, high and low beam.

If I were him, I would surely wonder how I could have got my license.