The VIR 2024 Story, Part III

The sun had just set over the Appalachians and we still had another 7hrs in the car together when he launched into his plea for me to reconsider. I couldn’t blame him - I had just given him a small taste of something that was otherwise out of reach to most and he knew it was slipping away from him because of my actions. He had sat slackjawed whilst I sparred with our other housemate the night before, and the only acknowledgement I offered the following morning was “yeah, we’re done here. Let’s just focus on what needs to be done today and talk about this later”. So, I owed him my ear, even if I wasn’t actually listening. My mind was made up, but I still allowed him to spend the next hour-plus trying to fix it and convince me that I had made a mistake.

He was right - I had made a mistake… but it had nothing to do with anything he was talking about. Not long before we set off from VIR, I sent a text that would be one of the last straws for someone close to me who held a good chuck of my future in their hands. I knew the second I hit send that I made a mistake, and every moment that the text went unresponded to ate away at me. I finally received the “Um, what? That’s not cool…” response two hours into the trip, and although I tried, I knew that no amount of backpeddling would undo my mistake.

The thing is, the text wasn’t even the biggest mistake I made that weekend, but it was a consequence of it. In my formative years, I always wondered how someone could stay in an abusive relationship. A decade later, I found myself in two mentally/emotionally abusive relationships without realizing it. I shook the first one in moving on from my engineering career, and I thought I was clear of the one in the paddock as well. I wasn’t, and I somehow made the mistake of getting sucked back in again at VIR. I was trapped in a “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” love triangle and I for whatever unbeknownst reason chose the wrong side. While this had nothing to do with the quarrel at the Airbnb the night before, it significantly affected my 2025 season by fueling a text message that should have never been typed let alone sent.

So yeah… I was done there.