When I was a kid, I practically lived on my bike. I rode it everywhere. Down hills, up hills, to friends houses, to the ice cream shop where I would ride home licking the dripping cone the whole way back. No hands! I had my accidents too. I flipped over the handle bars, broke my arm, got a groovy cast, and got back on the bike the next day. I was fearless and invincible.
Somewhere along my teenage years, I ditched the bike. It grew cold and rusty as I pursued other "hobbies". I may have become too cool for the bike, I'm not sure. But after so many years of being cool and inactive, after lounging around and smoking cigarettes became my number one hobby, it was time to get back on the bike.
My whole family was down the shore for a good old fashioned summer vacation and everyone was headed to the boardwalk to ride. Everyone looked shiny and happy and I wanted to be shiny and happy too. So I put out my cigarette and walked over to the bike I was meant to ride. I swung my leg over it and sat down. I wobbled, the bike wobbled. It felt foreign and I was scared. My palms were sweaty on the handlebars and my legs were shaking. "What happened to that fearless girl I once was?" I thought. I left her back with my old bike, locked up in the dark. I had forgotten about her.
I rode shakily behind my family to the boardwalk. "Okay," I told myself, "the boardwalk is totally flat. I can just cruise at a comfortable pace and my lungs need not fear any steep inclines. I can do this." I smiled nervously at my family, my 65 year old mother hauling ass right past me, not a care in the world.
As I rode the bike, something strange was happening. My equilibrium was off. I gravitated towards everything I looked at: seagulls, light posts, the ocean. I rode in a diagonal, becoming dangerously close to other bikers. They shot me surprised and appalled glances as I became too close for comfort. I was a strange, sweaty girl with a smokers cough and I was suddenly there by their side, rubbing elbows. I couldn't help it. I was like a moth to a flame.
When they sped forward to avoid me side swiping their tires, and I was once again a lone rider, something else happened. The lines of the boards beneath my tires were drawing my gaze down like an optical illusion. Now I was gravitating towards the hard, unforgiving ground. What the hell? Had I ruined my eyes spending too much time trying to see the hidden pictures emerge from those magic eye posters in the 90's? I had bike vertigo, and I wanted to go home.
But it wasn't vertigo, it was fear. I realized that I had stopped doing a lot of the things that I once loved and my life had become stagnant. I lived so far inside my own head that the outside world became scary and threatening. I started to think that the world was for everyone else; that I wasn't worthy of the good things that life had to offer. I'm not sure how or why this happened, but now, almost ten years later, after I was lying on the boardwalk pinned beneath my rental bike, shiny happy people cycling around me, it's time to lose the fear.
I turned 32 a few weeks ago, and at a party my family threw for me, they presented me with a gift--a brand spanking new, shiny pink bike, equipped with a basket, a cup holder, and a bottle opener (in case I need to crack a cold one for some liquid courage). But when I looked at my new bike, I felt the fearless girl in me squeal with excitement. The world is for me too. I am worthy too. It's time to get back on the bike, and I'm ready.
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