The hardest thing I’ve ever done mentally in my life… was trying to build my drift car. I’m sure everyone goes through these struggles, but this is how I finally finished my build.
When I first got the car, I was excited to start working on it… as you usually are when you get something new. The problem was that the car was stored 3.5 hours away from me. The other problem was that I knew nothing about the motor I was putting into my car. Which is fine. I needed to learn. In the beginning, I had to rely on others knowledge of the motor and build since it was my first rodeo. I understood the basics of motors and this motor that I could get by… only slightly.
My husband had to help me understand what I had to do next because I didn’t know what I needed to do to the motor to get it ready. I almost never wanted to work on it because I would be visiting him and would want to spend time with him and not work on the car. This made things go really slow.
Once I finally moved down with the car, another year went by that went very slow since I had my other car to drive. Eventually, I got sparks of motivation, but really only when I felt like it… this was few and far between.
Every trip to Pick-a-Part with my husband was helping me understand and get the pulleys or parts needed for the build. He helped weld up the motor mounts for me and got it settled so I could start work on other things. I basically needed him to tell me what to do… I also had another friend that I relied on for knowledge of the motor and parts that would work together. This mixed with the continuously long breaks taken between working on the car made me have to remember what was discussed every time. I had remember things I didn’t understand and even relied on my husband to remember a project he was barely working on.
I felt nothing but frustration every time I worked on the car which made me want to work on it less. I didn’t understand what the next steps were which made me frustrated at myself. The build was not going well… I was not enjoying it. I wanted to say I built my car, but I started to think I was in over my head. The car was also stored outside which made getting tools for it annoying. Once it was in the garage though… nothing changed too much. The car still didn’t make me feel inspired. That and I made a huge change… I originally had an NA motor, but now… I was adding a supercharger. Which was what made this build sooo much harder for me. That was the hardest part of all of this, but ended up making me learn so much about the motor itself in the end.
Then… we bought a house. We had a barn built and renovated just about the entire house. I had half the house striped down to the studs. I even took down a load bearing wall and had an engineer help me understand how to support it. The majority of the work took 9 months and then I just needed to save money to finish the rest. The car… it’s already been 3 maybe 4 years at this point.
My car was then put into our new garage and after all the renovations I should be motivated, right? Not really. Don’t get me wrong… I wanted to do this, but my negative experiences overran my drive for the build making me still unmotivated. I cried. I was mad at myself. I could not finish my projects. My husband needed space in the garage so my car got moved to our tiny storage garage that was hard to get tools to and space was obviously tight. I was having PTSD at this point. This whole time I had been working on it but at a snail’s pace.
After a while, I got frustrated again at the conditions I was working in and told my husband I needed a space in the garage. After all these years he and I did not have confidence that moving the car into a workable space was going to do much, as it hadn’t before, but I was determined.
He had helped me figure out some things with my car and I was starting to get closer. At this point, I had made my own mistakes trying to figure out how the motor went together from changing NA to SC. I started looking at pictures of other motors, I had to figure out wiring, I realized that the injectors are in different parts from NA to SC, I learned how to get AN fittings to work with my oil filter relocation and power steering… my husband had just been a great help (and helped me fight through my struggles) and at this point my brain was finally thinking a little bit for itself. I was learning and making mistakes that allowed me not to rely on others and that I started to understand how these motors went together… all the problems they have, and don’t even get me started on the pins for wiring… I had originally pinned for an NA… yeah. But with some helpful info I was able to get things situated.
Were things finally starting to come together? It seemed like maybe I could actually finish this thing. I just had to cry, kick and scream long enough and I’d find the inspiration – find the light at the end of the tunnel. Then, I set a goal for myself? What? That’s crazy. I wanted to get the car ready for Halloween Bash 2019. I started putting fluids in the car and figuring out what belts I needed. I was ready to start it.
It cranked but didn’t turn over. My husband helped me for a while and we finally figured out it was a wrongly pinned MAP sensor. It then started right up. I was shocked. Then went the process of hiring someone to tune it. I’m still shocked every time I touch the wiring on my car and it still starts. Hell the car ran once only being grounded to the body of the car and not the negative of the battery at all! lol.
Anyway, this was it. I did it. I felt excited. Some hurdles got me frustrated once again. This time, I used that drive to push myself and just finish the task already! Also, I got to a point where I just wanted to drive my car on the road (since I didn’t have anything fun to drive anymore and I just wanted to be happy again) and that pushed me to get some other things done so I could finally drive it! It was just a few more tasks… that’s it. And I ran to get those done. This was motivation I never had before… if I had this motivation the whole time the car would have been done a long time ago. The thing is… I could never see the end and so there was no hope. But, once I saw the end and the closer it got… the more I pushed to finish because this was something I really wanted. Driving my car on the road having others admire the car and drifting with my friends make me incredibly happy.
Through all of this, I worked on the car a lot more and now I work on something for it just about every other day like it’s just something I do now. It runs and drives and that’s all I need it to do.
I get frustrated easily… my hands and arms are not as strong as a man which makes a lot of what I do really hard for me. I always need leverage or a man lol. Every other thing I did with the car required knowledge or strength which made the process so slow and made me frustrated a lot. For me, I just had to cry through my frustrations and the strength was always on the other side. I don’t like to be emotional like that or think that “I’m such a girl I can’t deal with this”… no. I’m such a girl and I cry through this sh*t and I fight for this sh*t!
I’m still working on my frustrations and patience. I’d like to think that I’m a hard working person, but honestly I worked through the mental pain more than any physical work I had to do for this car. This build was in my the head the whole time. While it seems to some I didn’t work much… I worked a lot mentally. I can only thank everyone who has supported me and gave me hope to finish the build. I can’t go without saying that my husband didn’t have struggles with this either… he did. He is such a hard worker and just wanted to see me succeed and didn’t understand why I didn’t push myself to finish something I cared so much about. I think his work ethic rubbed off on me a little.
Fight through the hurtles in your life because through all of the kicking and screaming you’ll find that it was all worth it.
Actual Post Date: November 11, 2020
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