You got lucky; lucky that you didn’t hit him, and lucky that you got hit with the really of what can happen so early in your career. This experience is a right of passage.

Focus on your breathing, feel the sensations around you, and then start thinking. If emotions start getting too strong, accept them, thank it for warning you, and dismiss them with the understanding that it’s warning you of something that’s already happened.

Once you have control, let yourself relieve what happened. Focus on the facts, it was dark and probably wasn’t wearing a reflective vest, he wasn’t in a sound state of mind, and you don’t hit him.

I wasn’t the most attentive driver when I started training, then I almost ran over my trainer. I’d only gotten my CDL a couple months earlier and I thought my trainer had gone to watch me back into a dock. Instead, he was starting to open the trailer doors. If my tandems weren’t all the way forward, I’d have killed him. I couldn’t hear him scream over the sound of the engine, I only stopped because multiple air horns blared simultaneously.

He let me sit alone in the sleeper while we cooled off. I was able to accept that my trucking career was over before it started, but I couldn’t accept how close I got to killing him. When we spoke he asked me if I’d learned a lesson, I said yes and he gave me a second shot.

It’s one thing to hear that trucking is the 7th deadliest career in the US, but it never fully hits you until you experience it. Your experience has caused you to be fully aware of what can happen; now you can make the fully informed decision on if you want this to be your career.