Lifestyle
I stopped driving on L.A.'s chaotic freeways. How do I get over this painful anxiety?
My New Year’s resolution this year is simple. This weekend — my first back in L.A. after visiting family for the holidays — I will drive to the 101 freeway entrance by my house and I will … get on it.
Simple as that. But far easier said than done.
I haven’t driven on the freeway in more than two years — I’ve been too afraid. I’ve rarely even ridden as a passenger on the freeway, with someone else behind the wheel, and when I do, I sit on my hands so my fingers won’t tremble.
Fear of driving on the freeway is hardly uncommon — and for good reason. Headlines reporting fatal accidents and police pursuits ending in deadly crashes are more commonplace than ever in L.A.
But here’s the thing: It’s an entirely new phenomenon for me. Living in Los Angeles as a journalist, I’ve fearlessly traversed the city’s vast thicket of freeways for decades. My work took me from the mountains to the desert to the sea. Years ago, I dated someone in San Diego and endured the three-hour drive on the 5 south every other Friday for about a year. And all with relative ease.
So what changed? My brain, basically.
The pandemic was rough, in infinitely varied ways, for everyone. For me, on top of the stresses of the public health crisis and its myriad economic and social repercussions, I experienced a series of losses in succession, sometimes with just weeks between them. And it didn’t let up for about two years. My grief manifested on the freeway, where I’d have small, then more pronounced, panic attacks — something totally new to me.
Here’s what happened: In early 2020, a sibling of mine tragically died. Later that year, my partner and I broke up. We’d been together for several years and it was a significant loss. This was in the early days of the pandemic, when many of us were wiping down our groceries and staying inside for days on end. I was doing that too, but now alone in my apartment.
I don’t have children but my cats provided comfort during that period. (For some of us, our pets are our kids.) Then they both died too, one after the other — unexpectedly. The first, only 8 years old, suffered a violent and painful death. My second cat, much older and more fragile, witnessed it and became so anxious afterward that she got sick and passed away only months later.
The silence in my home, after that, was unsettling: no scritch-scratching of claws on hardwood floors or chomping of kibble in the background as I pecked away at my keyboard writing articles. I’d sip coffee in the mornings, taking some comfort in the lush view of the greenery on my deck. Until nearly all the plants died in a heatwave.
Then my parked car was smashed during a hit-and-run. Insurance paid to fix it. But then the car was targeted by catalytic converter thieves. Again, insurance covered the repairs. But when, several months later, the thieves struck again, my insurance company declared the 14-year-old Honda a total loss.
When the tow truck came to haul my car away, I fell into the driver’s burly arms and cried. I’d had that trusty, beat-up Honda longer than any romantic relationship, and at that moment, it felt like all I had left.
Given this sustained succession of emotional gut punches, my central nervous system was on high alert. A car door would slam outside and I’d jump, my body bracing tensely: “What next?”
That feeling manifested — exaggeratedly so — driving on the freeway. I held it together in all areas of my life, but the freeway became a release valve for my pent-up grief. Instead of seeing the big picture while driving, getting into the flow of traffic, I saw too much detail. The freeway was a dangerous, kinetic collage of spinning wheels and whirling, sparking hubcaps and rectangular hunks of metal flying forward, any piece of which, at any instant, could crash into me. It was like at the start of a billiard game, when the cue breaks the racked balls with a fiery crack, sending the multicolored striped and solid orbs flying in all directions. That’s how I saw traffic. Panic.
The freeway was a dangerous, kinetic collage of spinning wheels and whirling, sparking hubcaps.
The lane I was driving in felt constricting and narrow; trucks on either side of me felt hulking and ominous. My jaw clenched, my breath quickened, my teeth chattered. And my heart pounded in my chest.
It wasn’t a choice so much as survival — I could not drive, safely, on the freeway anymore. I made adjustments, slipping like water around rocks. I changed my Waze settings to “avoid freeways” and took surface streets everywhere instead. I took Ubers or carpooled with friends if the drive was too long on surface streets. If headed especially far, I took a train.
I should add that I don’t particularly like to drive. Nor would anyone close to me say I’m good at it. Before L.A., I’d only lived in walkable cities with active public transportation systems: Philadelphia, San Francisco, Tokyo, Boston. But I certainly never feared driving.
And for those who have always feared freeway driving, it’s understandable. Traffic-related deaths in Los Angeles have been on the rise in recent years, at their highest point in two decades. In 2022, 312 people died in traffic accidents, according to the Los Angeles Police Department’s most recent data. That’s a 5% jump from 2021 and a 29% jump from 2020.
Perhaps the most disconcerting part was that my newfound freeway phobia sparked something of an identity crisis: I am not a fragile or fearful person. I take risks, I speak up for myself, I have a sense of agency. I don’t recognize this new, tentative version of myself. I’m confused by her, ashamed. Who is she? How do I get back to the self I identify with? Does she even still exist?
I’ve since healed from those aforementioned losses and am feeling infinitely revived in my personal life. New cats, new boyfriend, new car. But, oddly, the freeway fear has stuck.
“It’s such a normal human impulse when you’ve gone through tragedy and loss,” says L.A. author and psychotherapist Claire Bidwell Smith. “You’re seeing the world through a lens where the unexpected looms around every corner and something catastrophic can happen at any moment. Your life was going along and then: Bam! Bam! Bam! You’re scrambling to hold onto something, so you hold onto ‘How can I predict this, control it in some way?’ But we can’t control the world in the way we would like to, so we get stuck in this catastrophic place.”
Panic attacks in cars are especially common, Bidwell Smith adds. Her theory? “The car is a space where you’re often alone, a quiet private space, and all these thoughts, some of the stuff we’ve been pushing away, start to gurgle up.”
I haven’t talked openly about my freeway phobia much, not even to family. Until recently — and nearly everyone I’ve spoken to about it had experienced something similar or knew someone who had. I was at dinner recently with two journalist friends. One of them said she developed flying anxiety after her father died, something that dissipated over time. The other said her sister in Toronto developed a fear of driving on the freeway after their father died — she still hasn’t gotten over it.
Bidwell Smith says that after her own parents died, she developed a fear of flying and became fixated on her health. A client developed a fear of riding on elevators after his wife died.
How many more people are there like us in L.A.?
“It’s very common,” says Sarah Caliboso-Soto, director of the Telebehavioral Health Clinic at USC’s School of Social Work, which provides counseling for driving anxiety among other mental health issues. “Grief itself can be a very traumatic experience, and when people are driving, in particular, their senses are more heightened. And you can experience anxieties as a result.”
My period of avoiding freeways wasn’t all bad. I traversed neighborhoods I’d never otherwise pass through in L.A., gaining a better understanding of how the city connects. I got lost plenty, on zigzaggy Waze routes, but that had its upsides too. I stumbled on a collection of street murals, on remote side streets, in the downtown L.A. warehouse district. I found an available apartment for rent, for a friend, in Jefferson Park, a gem of a neighborhood filled with old Craftsman homes. I stopped several times for roadside fruit at different points around the city, wolfing down chili-spiked mango, drenched in lime juice, from behind the wheel.
But I long for my freedom again, to be unhindered by an emotional impediment. I miss the person I once was and ache to embody her again. It may not happen all at once; likely it will be a slow process, one freeway ramp at a time.
Understanding one of the world’s oldest civilizations can’t be achieved through a single film or book. But recent works of literature, journalism, music and film by Iranians are a powerful starting point. Clockwise from top left: The Seed of the Sacred Fig, For The Sun After Long Nights, Cutting Through Rocks, It Was Just an Accident, Martyr!, and Kayhan Kalhor.
NEON; Pantheon; Gandom Films Production; NEON; Vintage; Julia Gunther for NPR
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NEON; Pantheon; Gandom Films Production; NEON; Vintage; Julia Gunther for NPR
Few Americans have had the opportunity to visit or explore Iran, an ethnically diverse nation of over 90 million people which has been effectively shut off from the United States since the Iranian revolution of 1979. Now, with a U.S. and Israeli-led war on Iran underway, the ideas, feelings and opinions of Iranians may feel less accessible. However, some recent books, films and music made by artists and journalists in Iran and from the Iranian diaspora can help illuminate this ancient culture and its contemporary politics.
These suggestions are just a starting point, of course — with an emphasis on recent works made by Iranians themselves, rather than by outsiders looking in.
Books
For the Sun After Long Nights: The Story of Iran’s Women-Led Uprising, by Fatemeh Jamalpour and Nilo Tabrizy
There are quite a few excellent titles that deconstruct the history of Iran from ancient times through the rule of the Pahlavi Dynasty to the Iranian Revolution. But there are far fewer books that help us understand the Iran of 2026 and the people who live there now. One standout is the National Book Award-nominated For the Sun After Long Nights: The Story of Iran’s Women-Led Uprising by journalists Fatemeh Jamalpour and Nilo Tabrizy, which chronicles — almost in real time — the Woman, Life, Freedom movement that began in 2022, during which Jamalpour was working secretly as a journalist in Tehran. In 2024-25, Jamalpour (who is now living in exile in the U.S.) and I spent a year together at the University of Michigan’s Knight-Wallace fellowship for journalists; her insights into contemporary Iran are among the best.
Gold, by Rumi, translated by Haleh Liza Gafori
If Americans are familiar with Persian poetry at all, it may well be through popular “translations” of the 13th-century Sufi poet Jalaluddin Rumi done by the late American poet Coleman Barks, who neither read nor spoke the Persian language and detached the works of Molana (“our master”), as Iranians call him, of references to Islam. (Instead, Barks “interpreted” preexisting English translations.)
In 2022, Iranian-American poet, performance artist and singer Haleh Liza Gafori offered the first volume of a corrective, in the form of fresh Rumi translations that are at once accessible, deeply contemplative and immediate. A second volume, Water, followed last year.
Martyr!: A Novel, by Kaveh Akbar
This 2024 debut novel by Kaveh Akbar, the poetry editor at The Nation, is an unflinching tour-de-force bursting with wit and insight into the complications of diaspora, the nature of identity in a post-War on Terror world and the inter-generational impact of the 1979 Revolution on Iranians. The protagonist, the Iran-born but American-raised Cyrus Shams, has struggled with addiction, depression and insomnia his whole life, and is trying his best to make sense of a world at the “intersection of Iranian-ness and Midwestern-ness.” As with so many other of the titles here, fiction and fact are woven together: the story centers around the true story of the U.S. downing an Iranian passenger plane in 1988 during the Iran-Iraq war.
The Stationery Shop: A Novel, by Marjan Kamali
Marjan Kamali’s 2019 love story is the wistful tale of a young woman named Roya and an idealistic activist named Bahman, who meet cute in a Tehran store in the 1950s, but whose planned marriage falls apart due to turmoil both familial and political, as Iran’s democratically elected government falls in a U.S.-British lead coup that ends with the installation of the Shah. Roya flees to the U.S. for a fresh start, but the two reunite in 2013, wondering: what if life had spun out in a different direction?
Movies
Coup 53
This 2019 documentary directed by Iranian film maker Taghi Amirani and co-written by Walter Murch recounts Operation Ajax, in which the CIA and Britain’s MI6 engineered the removal of Mohammad Mossadegh, Iran’s democratically elected prime minister, and installed a friendly ruler, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, in his place. (The Shah was ousted in the 1979 revolution.) As Fresh Air critic John Powers noted in his review, “What emerges first is the backstory of the coup, which like so much in the modern Middle East is predicated on oil. Shortly after the black gold was discovered in early 20th century Iran, a British oil company now known as BP locked up a sweetheart deal for its exploitation. Iran not only got a mere 16% of the oil money before British taxes, but the books were kept by the British — and the Iranians weren’t allowed to see them.”
YouTube
Cutting Through Rocks
Sara Khaki and Mohammadreza Eyni’s film Cutting Through Rocks is up for an Oscar this season after premiering at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival. This inspiring documentary follows Sara Shahverdi — a divorced, childless motorcyclist — as she campaigns to become the first woman elected to the city council of her remote village, and who dreams of teaching girls to ride and to end child marriage.
YouTube
It Was Just an Accident
The latest film from acclaimed director Jafar Panahi — who has officially been banned from making films in Iran — is 2025’s It Was Just an Accident. Panahi, who has been jailed multiple times for his work and was recently sentenced again in absentia, has said in interviews that his inspiration for this brutal – and shockingly funny – thriller was people he met while in prison: an auto mechanic named Vahid finds himself face-to-face with the man who he is fairly certain was his torturer in jail, and eventually assembles other victims to try to confirm his suspicions. Fresh Air critic Justin Chang called It Was Just an Accident “a blast of pure anti-authoritarian rage.”
YouTube
The Seed of the Sacred Fig
This 2024 thriller — shot in secret by director Mohammad Rasoulof — centers on a family whose father, Iman, is appointed as an investigating judge in Tehran. But it soon becomes clear that his job has nothing to do with actually investigating. Iman, his wife, and two daughters come to suspect each other in our age of mass surveillance, as the city streets below erupt into the real-life Woman, Life, Freedom protests.
YouTube
Music
Kayhan Kalhor
One of the primary ambassadors of Persian classical music has been the composer and kamancheh (an Iranian bowed-instrument) virtuoso Kayhan Kalhor. Although music, like poetry, has been central to Iranian culture for centuries, all kinds of music were initially banned after the 1979 revolution. Since then, however, Iranian classical musicians have ridden many looping cycles of official condemnation, grudging tolerance, censorship and attempts at co-option by the regime.
Despite those difficulties, Kalhor has built a thriving career both inside Iran and abroad, including winning a Grammy Award as part of the Silkroad Ensemble and earning three nominations as a solo artist. Back in 2012, I invited him to our Tiny Desk to perform solo. “Didn’t know I could have goosebumps for 12 minutes straight,” a YouTube commenter recently wrote; I couldn’t put it any better.
YouTube
Saeid Shanbehzadeh
Among Iran’s 92 million people, about 40% of come from various ethnic minorities, including Azeris, Kurds and Armenians among many others. One of the most fascinating communities is the Afro-Iranians in the Iranian south, many of whose ancestors were brought to Iran as enslaved people from east Africa. Multi-instrumentalist and dancer Saeid Shanbehzadeh, who traces his ancestry to Zanzibar, celebrates that heritage with his band, and specializes in the Iranian bagpipe and percussion.
YouTube
The underground metal scene
Despite ongoing restrictions on music — including the continued ban on female singers performing in mixed-gender public settings — Iran is home to a thriving underground scene for metal and punk. Though it’s fictional, Farbod Ardebelli’s 2020 short drama Forbidden to See Us Scream in Tehran — which was secretly filmed in Tehran, with the director giving instructions remotely from the U.S. via WhatsApp — gives a flavor of that real-life scene and the dangers those artists face.
YouTube
Sen. Tillis To Kristi Noem
ICE Killings Are Like Dog You Killed
Published
Fireworks on Capitol Hill … Sen. Thom Tillis ripped into DHS Secretary Kristi Noem during a congressional hearing … comparing American citizens killed by immigration agents to a dog she killed.
Check out the video … the Republican Senator from North Carolina says Noem has shown terrible leadership and decision-making as Trump‘s DHS Secretary.
AP
Tillis says the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis by ICE and Border Patrol remind him of a passage from Noem’s book … where she recalls killing a dog she brought on a hunting trip.
Noem said the 14-month-old dog, Cricket, was misbehaving … so she led the dog to a gravel pit and shot her.
X/@DHSgov
Sen. Tillis told her straight up … “Those are bad decisions made in the heat of the moment. Not unlike what happened up in Minneapolis. We’re an exceptional nation, and one of the reasons we’re exceptional is we expect exceptional leadership. And you’ve demonstrated anything but that.”
In 2021, Zhao made history as the first woman of color to win the best director Oscar for her film Nomadland. Her Oscar-nominated drama Hamnet has made $70 million worldwide.
Bethany Mollenkof for NPR
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Bethany Mollenkof for NPR
It took a very special kind of spirit to make Hamnet, which is nominated for best picture at this year’s Academy Awards. Chloé Zhao brought her uniquely sensitive, mind-body approach to directing the fictionalized story about how William Shakespeare was inspired to write his masterpiece Hamlet.
Zhao adapted the screenplay from a novel by Maggie O’Farrell, and for directing the film, she’s now nominated for an Oscar. She could make history by becoming the first woman to win the best director award more than once.
Zhao says she believes in ceremonies and rituals, in setting an intention, a mood, a vibration for any event. Before Hamnet premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival last year, she led the audience in a guided meditation and a breathing exercise.
Zhao also likes to loosen up, like she did at a screening of Hamnet in Los Angeles last month, when she got the audience to get up and dance with her to a Rihanna song.
She, her cast and crew had regular dance parties during the production of Hamnet. So for our NPR photo shoot and interview at a Beverly Hills hotel, I invited her to share some music from her playlist. She chose a track she described as “drones and tones.”
Our photographer captured her in her filmy white gown, peeking contemplatively from behind the filmy white curtains of a balcony at the Waldorf Astoria.
Zhao says she believes in ceremonies and rituals, and makes them a part of her filmmaking process.
Bethany Mollenkof for NPR
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Bethany Mollenkof for NPR
Then Zhao and I sat down to talk.
“I had a dream that we were doing this interview,” I told her. “And it started with a photo shoot, and there was a glass globe –”
“No way!” she gasped.
It so happens that on the desk next to us, was a small glass globe — perhaps a paperweight.
I told her that in my dream, she was looking through the globe at some projected images. “We were having fun and it was like we didn’t want it to stop,” I said.
“Oh, well, me and the globe and the lights on the wall: they’re all part of you,” Zhao said. “They’re your inner crystal ball, your inner Chloé.”
“Inner Chloé?” I asked. “What is the inner Chloé like?”
“I don’t know, you tell me,” she said. “Humbly, from my lineage and what I studied is that everything in a dream is a part of our own psyche.”
Dreams and symbols are very much a part of Zhao’s approach to filmmaking, which she describes as a magical and communal experience. She said it’s all part of her directing style.
Chloé Zhao used painting and dance to connect with actors on the set of her latest film Hamnet.
Bethany Mollenkof for NPR
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Bethany Mollenkof for NPR
“If you’re captain of any ship, you are not just giving instructions; people are also looking to you energetically as well,” she explained. “Whether it’s calmness, it’s groundedness, it’s feeling safe: then everyone else is going to tune to you.” Zhao says it has taken many years to get to this awareness. Her own journey began 43 years ago in Beijing, where she was born. She moved to the U.S. as a teen, and studied film at New York University where Spike Lee was one of her teachers. She continued honing her craft at the Sundance Institute labs — along with her friend Ryan Coogler and other indie filmmakers.
Over the years, Zhao’s film catalogue has been eclectic — from her indie debut Songs My Brothers Taught Me, set on a Lakota Sioux reservation, to the big-budget Marvel superhero movie Eternals. She got her first best director Oscar in 2021 for the best picture winner Nomadland. Next up is a reboot of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
“A creative life,” she notes, “is not a linear experience for me.”
Zhao still lingers over the making of Hamnet, a very emotional story about the death of a child. During the production, Zhao says she used somatic and tantric exercises and rituals to open and close shooting days.
She also invited her lead actors Paul Mescal and Jessie Buckley to help her set the mood on set. They danced, they painted, they meditated together.
“She created an atmosphere where everybody who chose to step in to tell this story was there for a reason that was deeply within them,” actress Jessie Buckley told me.
Buckley is a leading contender for this year’s best actress Oscar. She said that to prepare for her very intense role as William Shakespeare’s wife, Zhao asked her to write down her dreams “as a kind of access point, to gently stir the waters of where I was feeling.”
Buckley sent Zhao her writings, and also music she felt was “a tone and texture of that essence.”
That kind of became the ritual of how they worked together, Buckley said. “And not just the cast were moving together, but the crew were and the camera was really creating dynamics and a collective unconscious.”
Filmmaker and Hamnet producer Steven Spielberg calls Zhao’s empathy her superpower.
Bethany Mollenkof for NPR
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Bethany Mollenkof for NPR
That was incredibly useful for creating Hamnet — a story about communal grief. Steven Spielberg, who co-produced the film, called Zhao’s empathy her superpower.
“In every glance, in every pause and every touch, in every tear, in every single moment of this film, every choice that Chloé made is evidence of her fearlessness,” Spielberg said when awarding Zhao a Directors Guild of America award. “In Hamnet, Chloé also shows us that there can be life after grief.”
Zhao says it took five years and a midlife crisis for her to develop the emotional tools she used to make Hamnet.
“I hope it could give people a two-hour little ceremony,” she told me. “And in the end, I hope that a point of contact can be made. That means that there’s a heart opening. But it will be painful, right? Because when your heart opens, you feel all the things you usually don’t feel. And then a catharsis can emerge.”
As our interview time came to a close, I told Zhao I have my own little ritual at the end of every interview; I record a few minutes of room tone, the ambient sound of the space we’re in. It’s for production purposes, to smooth out the audio.
Zhao knew just what I meant. She told me a story about her late friend Michael “Wolf” Snyder who was her sound recordist for Nomadland. “He said to me, ‘I don’t always need it, but just so you know, I am going to watch you. And when I tell that you are a little frazzled, I’m going to ask for a room tone … just to give you space.’” she recalled. “‘And if you feel like you need the silence space, you just look at me, nod. I’ll come ask for a room tone.’”
I closed our interview ceremony with that moment of silence, a moment of peace, for director Chloé Zhao.
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