I will the machine.

Photo © Tristan Sheldon

“… a researcher’s precision, and a poet’s restraint.”

_____

My name is Genna. I’m a 31-year-old trauma-informed writer, creative, and ultra-endurance cyclist. In 2013, before graduating high school, I was kicked out of my family home by my parents after an adolescence squandered by domestic violence, hoarding, and narcissistic abuse. Fearful, consistently displaced, but convicted to remain the authority of my future, I picked up bike racing, using the deconstruction of generational and cognitive patterns to use meaning as a road map forward.

For five years, I lived in a classic van to self-support my ambitions, and have since broken the 240-mile women’s Katy Trail record twice, planned and completed multiple solo bikepacking routes, and am currently on a winding but firm collision course with an exponentially greater challenge- the Trans-Am Nonstop.

This is an ongoing collection of essays documenting my progress, exploring thought itself, and parallel stories of human endurance where I invite you, dear reader, into the pulse.

Latest Posts

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  • Newsletter 01

    This platform has been transitioning from a sort of online diary for me into a concrete publication. Because of that, I will the machine. is as much a primary focus of mine as the life and thought that feeds its material. I continue to have regular site traffic even during periods that I don’t write…

  • Department of the Interior: An Audio Essay

    If you’ve wondered how I arrive at the decisions to write about some topics, or are newly encountering this blog, I sat down to talk about the following points tonight in free speech: Step into my office.

  • Status [Initializing]

    “That felt better,” is what I said aloud. But, my body began to respond to demand once background programs were no longer running is what I understood. _____ I am in constant conversation with myself. The magma underfoot shows me where mind and body diverge. The crust rises as they meet. Almost three weeks ago,…

  • Chiaroscuro

    “You make everything a fight.” Actually, I’ve realized I’ve tolerated too much again. In summer of 2024, I moved out of my van and into a house with someone in a rural town. I had told myself that I always had the van as a backup in case that relationship didn’t work out. After having…

  • It Catches You, an Incredible, Ghostly Rider

    This essay is accompanied by an audio version below. Additional spoken commentary is included at the bottom of the page. “It does not bargain with you. It does not compromise. If you don’t respect it, if you fight back, you lose. You fail. You are not safe.” I understand. I hope you will forgive me…

  • Night Vision

    On a quiet street, a lone figure approaches a weathered Victorian home. The roof over the porch is sagging, the paint peeling, boards and railings brittle and bleached from countless lonely summers. Along the roofline, gargoyles are perched, and all are missing their heads but one. The surviving creature looks out into the lawn, its…

  • A Preview of Reorganism

    1. Transistor Radio I spent one night in a youth shelter after insisting to my case worker that I needed to be out of the house. I remember nothing about the conflict that drove me to that conclusion, but it’s arbitrary against the longstanding pattern in that environment.  The building felt sterile, detached, and the…

  • The Underground

    “Through the ether, my peace is dispelled by the wrath of How Dare You, an invisible cobra that spits venom anytime I remember what I had and through it recognize what was stolen.” –If You’d Known Me When I Was Older “The ground keeps moving. The snake moves beneath black dunes and I am immobile…

  • We Interrupt This Program

    If a friendly gesture that is not returned as expected prompts a negative reaction, what was the real intent? _____ In 2023, I was almost exactly in the middle of my first fastest-known-time attempt when I passed another rider stopped on the edge of the trail. Minutes later, this same person rode up next to…

  • I will the machine.

    It means that forward motion is authorized internally. The mantra predates this blog by nearly a decade, and for most of that time, it primarily revolved around bikes. But I have determined more recently that it’s also the language of a self that has always operated from endogenous permission because the authority structures in my…

  • The Rider

    When asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, I answered that I wanted to be a jockey. But I was the tallest kid in my class by the fourth grade, so even then, I quickly accepted where I did not belong. When I was still new to bike racing, a fellow cyclist…

  • Helm’s Over, Into the Channel

    Through the Fog on the Harbor, I come to port. _____ Someone told me recently that it surprised them that I still care what anyone thinks. I replied, “What people think of you informs how they treat you.” I spent so much of my life in waves pulled upward by the storms of people that quiet…

  • Solve for Y.

    “Fake it ’till you make it,” does not work for a person whose survival has depended on orientation to cold truth. And I’ve already received my rejection letter from the Dissociation Association. _____ The person I was riding with that day pulled ahead up the climb, and I felt my body raising its fist at…

  • All Available Forces to the Front Line

    “They don’t make movies about your kind of success.” No, we write books. Coming this year. Early into adulthood, people I spoke to about my history would make comments like, “Well, you don’t show it.” I attributed that result to having developed in spite of a childhood of neglect and instability, but as the years…

  • Ring 0

    My smile has no shortcut; it is not generated with a command prompt. It cannot be recruited as a firewall against emotional violence. It is not a productivity interface, nor a nostalgic CD-ROM. It is a background program that can truly only be viewed, or shut down, by those with the code. You won’t know…

  • What Are You Looking at Me For?

    _____ This might be my final post of 2025. I’m not entirely sure, because I’m not consciously in charge of the timing of my writing. The engine fires on its own—if I don’t jump in, it goes rogue. I had planned to finish The Microcosm and use it as my first-year finale, but I have…

  • The Ghost You Are Chasing is Behind You

    A Conversation with Tycho Wagner _____ I arranged to speak with Tycho at length about his recent self-supported Katy Trail fastest-known-time. We had met before, on a gravel road, at a group ride, at the start of a race, yet still hadn’t really met. I shook his hand as he arrived on the coffee shop…

  • The Torch

    Disclaimer: This passage contains themes around end-of-life and grief of Papa, the person for whom I wrote The Eulogy of the Man Who Always Came to My Rescue. But it will end well. I promise. _____ This piece is unplanned. And I know this passage will likely not hit anyone else with the meteoric impact the…

  • Cathedral Nouveau

    Just before dawn, an owl flew right up to the towering pane of stained glass and scraped the soldering with its talons. It crashed into the pane again and again, whilst the glow from behind the opaque window set fire to the bird’s eyes. As its shrill echoed off of great stone walls, the patron…

  • The Thoroughbred

    The spirit of I will the machine was fundamentally in conflict with my years riding horses. I was directing the autonomy of something else. Then, the bike raised my own to the second power. _____ Two years after moving into a van, a decision I made to stay committed to the expensive sport of cycling…