If I want to be a Truck driver so badly, why does it scare me so much?

My worst nightmare is to be on the news "semi-truck causes 8 car smash up -- 3 dead".

Sitting in the cab of a semi truck, you get a sense of how large a vehicle is in my hands. If you were to start walking from the front bumper and proceed the length of  the truck to the red marker light at the rear of the trailer, you would travel just over 70 feet. A vehicle this large does not start, stop, or maneuver very easily.  Some semi trailers can be up to 14 feet high. Fully loaded, a rig can weigh up to 80,000 pounds or 40 tons!

To make things more exciting, if you get lost, it's not all that easy to simply "make a legal U-Turn" as many GPS guides are fond of saying. It's not easy, and often times simply not possible to just do a U-turn, or pull into a driveway and back out.

Standing next to this huge beast, or sitting inside of it, contemplating its sheer size and its potential for mayhem, I feel my body tense, and my then my mind begin to slowly fill up with all the what-ifs, and worst-case scenarios. Not to mention the fact that just one accident...even a simple one could mean my job with this (or any company) is terminated. What are you going to do then, Vally?  By giving up your career track in sales, and becoming a truck driver, It's very possible that you may have forever burned the bridges of getting back into a career in sales or sales management where you came from. You've sort of headed yourself down a one-way road with no exit ramps, no passing zones, and where U-Turns are illegal.

Driving in big cities, tight intersections, and backing into tight spaces all cause fears to boil up inside me. I wrestle with them all the time.  As an over-the-road driver, the entire lower 48 states constitutes the map of where I can  be assigned to go at any time. I'm therefore dispatched into many unfamiliar cities and to shippers with locations sometimes difficult to find and navigate.

And then there's the prospect of winter driving, just around the corner, with icy and snow-covered highways, mountain passes, and chaining tires for traction in the midst of a major snow storm.

Battling fears has become a largely unanticipated war within myself.  As my skills gradually improve, some of the fears diminish, but only to be replaced by new ones.

All these fears notwithstanding, there is something fulfilling after I've successfully unloaded at a consignee.  That's where my love of logistics comes in.  There's a satisfaction of knowing that this food was over there, 1200 miles away, and now, here it is in your warehouse where your delivery trucks will take it out to stores in your area.

The battle over my fears continues.