And then, I let them wilt. I walked into the house one day, having forgotten to top the vase off with water, and saw them drooped on my desk. That was enough for me to come apart again.
I filled up the vase, and half of them came back by the next morning. I’ve been staring at the cuttings half standing, half collapsed, for days.
Dear reader, this is a heavier post than usual. I haven’t written it yet but the fact that I’ve hesitated to do so foreshadows it. If you aren’t ready, just take the metaphor my hydrangeas left for us and come back later (or don’t, it’s okay). But if you want to come closer, keep reading (I need that).
_____
I want to bring you a success story one day. You might argue that I already am one, but to let that be enough, isn’t. One of my strengths is that I won’t wait until I’ve arrived to show you the path. That means I’m opening myself up to being labelled as “negative,” or “stuck in the past,” but I have a feeling those of you who keep returning to this blog aren’t that type of people. I also have a sense that when titles like My Power Grows garner the most reads, you’re hoping that opening those posts will finally lead to a theme of “onward, and upward.”
And then you read the opening lines and realize the dichotomy I live inside of- the more I lose, the more I realize how I’ve even gotten here against all odds.
My body is screamingat me to stop all of it.
The bike accomplishments do not show it, but I have been just barely making it since I was about 13. That was when I started to subconsciously track the deterioration of both my physical environment, and my psychological one. Not long after, I started to step into the fray in a futile attempt to stop it. I was vocal, proactive, and far too aware. And as the physical and emotional violence in my house intensified, I rose with it.
“It’s hard to believe it was that bad. You’re not screwed up enough.” That is one of the hardest-hitting statements anyone has ever said to me.
And because I walk into rooms noticeably wired differently, but coherent and exacting with my language, I get dismissed.
“You’re strong. Brilliant. You can do anything. You’ve got this.”
You’re excusing yourself to leave me to my own devices, again, when you say that to me.
I don’t want to hear how strong I am anymore. I know that. I need you to hear what it costs to be that way.
I lost the job I loved this past week because I couldn’t keep up anymore and they expected me to just pretend the best I could. It’s another ding in my visibly jumpy resume that will make finding stable work a difficult task, again.
I fought like hell to stay reliable for them, and for me. I couldn’t drive without risking getting stranded with an impossibly expensive vehicle to tow. I rode 80-damn-miles every day when I could and risked the drive when I couldn’t. After only three weeks I couldn’t hold the pace and my van’s wheel couldn’t hold air. The last day I rode, I couldn’t even crawl the last ten miles home.
I’ve been so depleted I’ve had to hide to avoid snapping at people. I try to be on my bike still because that has been my means of survival in so many ways. The bike is my liberty, my conduit. And I’m not talking about gentle rides to coffee or jaunts down the trail. I need to start dismantling myself at 5:00 a.m. and be reconstructed by 5:00 p.m. at least a few times a summer. The only other habit in my life that has been around for eleven years is my ability to tell you how sacred that is to my processing.
But my body and mind can’t meet me there like this. I’m terrified. I’m stuck. I’ve been here before, but it’s worse.
I have exceeded the threshold of what one person can hold. I’ve been shot down when I try to go beyond it. Over and over.
Innumerable times since my years in that hell of a house.
I’m stalled not just because of this recent chain of events, but from the mass collective of ones that I’ve had to carry because to resolve them means being able to rest in safety I cannot find.
And on top of it all, people still don’t fully believe me.
And because they don’t believe me,
“You’re strong. You can do this.”
I bought myself flowers because I wanted to set them on my desk as a gesture of grace for what I’ve had to endure.
And then I thought about if the first time I’ll ever be fully met is over the flowers at my funeral.
_____
I don’t mean to sound ungrateful for the supporters that I have had over the years. I hope you understand this isn’t about you.
It’s just that people like me need more than short-term intervention. We need structural security on ground that does not move beneath us. My resolve does not make me better at carrying this.
It just makes the consequence less visible. Even when I can so easily tell you- Iam not okay.
I wonder what I could be if I wasn’t spending so much energy just trying to keep myself alive. What I have to lose now are my pursuits on the bike, and myself. The floors beneath those are making noise now, too.
A couple of my readers have sponsored me to ride to a race next weekend. If I can’t recover, I’m going to let them down.
I am presently living rent-free in a house that I will have to leave next month. I am waiting for new wheels for my van that are on backorder, and currently have to air up a brand-new tire with my bike pump every morning if I want to drive. I did this all last week because I rely on my bike and body to solve problems pretty often, and after three weeks of that, it said stop. So, ten minutes of pushing air into that tire it was.
Yesterday, I had my 90-day review at work. It shook me that it was already here for two reasons; one, I love this place and time roared by.
And two, it marked three months since I had to get out of another abusive environment where I at least had a little bit of logistical stability, and traded it for freedom that meant everything else was going to be very, very hard again.
I expected some critique from this review. I got it.
I also got an effective-immediately cut to part-time hours only. Despite consistent praise from my coworkers and the woman I was a direct assistant to, for not only catching on fast but also riding 80-mile days to work to keep showing up reliably (Strava for proof), I wasn’t measuring up.
It had nothing at all to do with the consistent conversations in the hall that major account holders had paused orders and that we had become “unusually slow.” I’d never consider that this place would blind-side me with some performance deficit on my part to conceal a cost-cutting maneuver. Maybe one of the many other places I had worked that operated under a deceptive status-quo would handle it that way, but certainly not this place that I was looking forward to staying loyal to, finally.
I cried in the conference room, while I drove home, late into last night, as I slithered out of bed, and pumped up that tire to get coffee this morning.
I’m back to writing this afternoon. I am coming back here more often as the pressure builds, and pausing bigger pieces to “we interrupt this program,” again. The three pillars of support, housing security, gas-guzzling vintage metal toaster vehicle, and now my already meager income, are all broken. I’m leaning heavily on the scaffolding now.
I have a brand-new Patreon to work in tandem with this blog, so subscribers who want to support my stability while I swing this sword at multiple problems at once can support me monetarily. Don’t worry- my blog posts will ALWAYS be free to read, regardless of whether or not you choose to subscribe. I can’t in good faith put writing that people have told me helps them behind a pay wall, but supporters can help me stay upright enough to keep spending time on it. My Venmo is also linked in the Support tab above this post, if you’d prefer a one-time donation. If you want to help, I am finally letting you. As Aaro puts it, “I shouldn’t take that option away from people.”
_____
I want to get back to riding for ambition. Summer just started, and it’s already slipping through my fingers. I have to ride for utility even more now that I’ll still have to be at work five days a week (while I look for other, closer opportunities; I won’t be defeated) for significantly less money (I am dramatically more fuel-efficient).
I am not a “look at the bright side” person. I am a “look at the reality of this situation, even if it’s through tears” person. The reality right now is… the shit sandwich has just been served with a side of fries. My history of “if I am not enough, I am not safe,” means blows like this amplify this terrible hiss in the back of my mind that says I am not allowed to succeed. I was at my limit weeks ago; it just got deeper. I have the resourcefulness to solve it all, but time is not on my side and money is even less so. It’s a downward spiral on a staircase of crumbling sandstone steps.
The greatest devastation in my life actually isn’t not having parents. It isn’t that I’m rootless and uncertain of my immediate future, consistently. It’s not the constant coming and going of people that is a fairly universal experience, but perhaps a more detrimental one when you don’t meet them with a protective mask.
It’s that those people are in and out because they expect me to step through a door they won’t walk out of themselves, and won’t tell me. Most would prefer to wrap themselves in their dissonance so securely that they aren’t fully conscious that its harm still comes from what they won’t say. It’s cold outside, and it’s uncomfortable.
And I find myself a loner in every space because I can’t live that way.
“Your blog is definitely resonating with me. I appreciate your honesty and transparency as we need more of that these days. Makes me not feel alone.”
I receive a message like this once or twice per post. I answer these with a full willingness to connect rather than a passive “thank you,” because it matters to me.
This time, that reply led to a connection with someone that, upon first impression, seemed as willing to let me know them as I am. I’ve experienced it before- you put two people like that in the same arena and the show moves at warp speed. He drove two hours to visit me, and the energy was just as I had hoped it would be.
All of the week to follow was ceaseless banter and vulnerability. I was wary of that because I had seen this used by a manipulator in my past as a way to get me attached so that I’d be more likely to tolerate the toxic behaviors to come later. But I allow people to be different than those I have known, and leaned in with my eyes open.
During the course of our conversations, I was clear that my life was messy, and unpredictable. I had a habit of just… having enough and leaving relationships, jobs, states even. And he told me he was in the middle of some legal matters to which I collected enough context and asked- were you married?
He was. It wasn’t until later that it clicked that he still is. But the context mattered, and I stayed present because part of valuing transparency is allowing for the mess it always reveals. What I didn’t do was lose my discernment.
Fairly impulsively, he decided to come visit again the next weekend. I was on the phone with him on my drive home from work that Friday when he talked indirectly about how he really needs his own space at home, and so I was forced to ask- wait, do you still live together? The pause on the other side had already answered for him, but he admitted that to me too.
But only after I had asked. He explained it away and we hung up the phone. I chewed on that for a little while but the softness I had was already dishonored. The lightness in my step was gone, just like that.
I called him again after he had begun the drive my direction. I said, “Before you get too far from home, I think you should turn around. I’m not comfortable with this.”
He explained it away again, and kept driving. And in the freeze of wanting to be gracious, but not walked all over, I let him show up. Because don’t I know the complication of being stuck somewhere toxic, fully checked out in all ways except physical. I understood the deep need for somebody safe, and it’s a privilege that because of my writing, people feel safe with me.
But I was never on board with being someone’s escape when I wanted something sustainable. I am not an emotional crash pad just because I am open. And despite another awesome weekend with a person that matched my emotional fluency, I still found the incongruence between action and word. He spoke respect, but still drove to me despite my asking him to turn around. He didn’t disclose major information about himself despite his admiration for my honesty. He still danced past a couple other boundaries and wrote it off as play. He opted out of uploading a ride we did together on Strava despite saying it was “silly to worry about” being seen with me. Even a joke about “are you going to write about me too?” was a subtle tell.
And none of that is actually, truly honest. And so, I do the thing I’m so painfully well-practiced at now- I walked away.
That was yesterday. I’m writing about it because people either need to understand this, or feel understood. It takes me so little time to decide that a potential relationship isn’t built on anything stable even when my emotions haven’t accepted it, and I went from “let’s talk more about this,” to “this isn’t going to work,” inside 45-minutes. It’s that sword-brandishing, automatic pilot that keeps me safe when I haven’t fully digested what’s happening in front of me.
Today is the sad and angry part. The part where I’m showing my teeth again because another person came to me, and still didn’t come fully as themselves because they thought I might walk away.
But the kindest thing you can do for someone you feel something for is give them their freedom to make that choice. A mask is still deceptive even if it only frames the eyes. I stand a chance of standing next to you in the middle of your storm if you show me exactly where you are.
But I can’t, if you won’t.
Let me.
_____
My next post, ‘Projection, Your Honor: Learning to Trust the Part of You that Knows,’ deconstructs the subliminal messaging I learned to read in toxic dynamics in my past. The intuition that something is off in any given situation is a primordial trait we all have- learning to decipher it and respond in real-time is something that gets talked about less. Let’s get into that.
“I haven’t made a plan. I don’t know how I’m even getting to work, 40-minutes away, on Tuesday, let alone the days after that.”
In the hours after I was crumbling on the patio of the coffee shop I wrote that from, remembering how many times I had been there…
I remembered how many times I had been there, and how I had handled it. I looked over at my bike and felt something ease.
I rode 40 miles to the lab, worked my nine-hour shift, and then 40-miles home that Tuesday. I was out the door at 4:30 in the morning, and back to the house after 7:00 in the evening. I ordered pizza, took a shower while I waited, and was in bed again just after 8:00. The schedule on Wednesday was the same. On Thursday I borrowed a car to stay out of the thunderstorms, and on Friday I was back on the bike. The van was delivered to me at work with a new pump, and I drove home. Reluctantly.
That week was rough on me, but it felt good. So after I realized that another of the van’s tires was leaking from a bad rim (the spare was already on from the last time), I just kept going. A brand-new set of wheels for the van is on backorder but will be here in two weeks. I’m riding 80-mile days when it’s reasonable and babying the leak on the days I need to drive. It’s a little pathetic, but satisfying that I can sustainably handle this in a way that is absolutely unreasonable to many; my willingness to take the unfathomable path is my edge.
I don’t know that I can ever translate the intensity of the emotion, the inadequacy, that I feel when I struggle like this often and have few people I can call even just to talk about it. People tend to minimize it, unintentionally, because each instance is small in isolation, and because my methods of independence lead me to solutions like 2.5- hour bike commutes twice a day and living in a van from 1985. The acceptance of extremes like that make me look so capable. But for me, a person who has teetered on the edge of not being enough for over a decade, it feels like I am somehow destined by some divine joke to lose anyway. To be cosmically, comically, torn open and kicked every time I take a step. It feels like I’m supposed to give up and to stop kidding myself. All of that is heavy even on a spirit that is just trying to survive, let alone chase something great.
_____
In June of last year, I moved in with a partner that eventually told me “You live your life by the edge of a sword.” The comment had multiple layers to it. It was observational, and I agreed with it, but it also held a nuanced implication that I was “too” something again. To him it meant I didn’t trust.
To me it meant I didn’t trust sooner than it was earned.
That relationship became dysfunctional over the course of ten months. Twice he told me to get out of the house and go to my van like I was a dog that had been caught chewing the furniture. His own family members told him how damaging that behavior was, and it transformed into just kicking me out of the bedroom because he needed his space. A space he had said was equally mine in words, but obviously not in practice. I had only had my new job for days when I picked up that sword, held it across my chest and said “enough.” In the couple of hours it took me to pack up everything I could take with me in the van, I watched him devolve from antagonizing to stupefied as I held up that standard I had warned him about. “If you think you’re going to relegate me somewhere else out of punishment because I’m my own person in your space, that’s where I am going to stay.” I flipped the choice he kept making, in an act of control he thought he had, and I cut the line.
I have already lived that life once, and survived. I wasn’t going back.
That was all at the end of March. I cried once- not because it didn’t matter to me, but because I have my wits so about me about what can and cannot stand that my own self-trust rocks me to sleep. I’ve been here so many times before. Although that snake still lifts its head and rattles “this is all your fault,” one side of the blade whispers back “you aren’t meant to stay here.”
I listen faster each time. I am not faultless, but I am also not tactless. Over the years, through the thicket of so many friendships and romantic connections based on half-truths, or devoid of truth entirely, my eyesight and steel have both been sharpened. I’ve paid for that in advance by holding grace for longer than was quoted- the quiet part that the snake tends to ignore.
I am back in this instability because I listen to the quieter voice. I am dealing with nearly incessant setbacks because that is the consequence of choosing to walk away from harm that comes from people. My parents, unhealthy partnerships, friends that aren’t really. Many can’t afford to leave toxic dynamics because of this very consequence- it doesn’t suddenly get sunnier when you leave.
The vines often get thicker.
And so, I draw my sword.
_____
For once, I am letting the unpredictability of the near future be. I have reached the limit of what I can control, evidenced by a wave of burnout in recent weeks, and using the bike as a tool of survival again. The fitness I’ll gain from riding to work for the summer (it isn’t a bad way to live even when the van is back to 100%) will be a hefty deposit in the bank for the future I have promised myself, even if I don’t know when it will come.
Once I get there, I’ll get the added gratification of these posts to remember where I came from.~
I have two longer posts in the works. ‘Projection, Your Honor: Learning to Trust the Part of You That Knows’ is scheduled for Sunday, June 22nd.
And ‘The Microcosm’, my full monty of my five-year run of living in my van (that may or may not be over yet) is still in progress. This one is a hard write, but it deserves the time it takes.
This post is edited for errors, but not for anything else. I’m writing straight through this night, no stops.
This past Wednesday I gave a condensed version of everything I post here to a room of about 30 people to promote a small tour I am doing at summer’s end. I’m garnering looks with the extremes of my experiences on a bike to draw interest to the rural communities I’ll be visiting and staying in and telling their stories like I do mine. I wrote my script exactly how I write these posts- a little messy, but very honest. At the end, one man said “have you considered being a motivational speaker? Because you had this whole room glued to you.” One woman came up to me in the parking lot before I left to tell me how alone I was not, and she gave me a tearful hug. Twice. One represented a tangible reward for my reflectivity; the other gave me a spiritual one.
The critics in mine own mind are sourced from the people who moved through their lives with harshness. Endless criticism for what I wasn’t doing right, and relative silence for what I was. They shouted “I can’t help you, do it yourself.” Over time I realized that not only was that spray unfair and venomous to a teenager who was blockaded from normal development, but was also just not a characteristic of a family system that could stand on anything even distantly resembling love. None of them could exemplify anything that I wanted, so I never listened, but the scribe was still behind his pen. As I’ve said in past writing, I learned gentleness from its absence, but the sharp ridicule of generational abuses persists while I try to separate its fiery breath from my own. I heard so much automatic vocal feedback while I delivered my presentation that I intentionally paused after the heaviest lines to see if those moments singed them to any degree that they had me, because those past voices still gaslight me even though their owners are no longer in my orbit. They did. And so my speech was not just the retelling of a story- it was an active soldier in my internal defense. I learned that my experiences are unfortunately common, but still abnormal. And that paradox is what I’m currently chewing on while I go even deeper into my inner world because expressing its contents outwardly is not only what I feel purpose in doing, but is an act of combat when so many people haven’t yet felt capable of fronting theirs. Though, they will apparently come inside my fight with me without even flinching.
And so, I draw my sword again.
The power steering pump in my van sprung a heavy leak a little over two weeks ago. I kept the fluid topped off and was assured it would get me by in the meantime while I worked on the complicated logistics of getting a vehicle you live out of worked on with little time, little money, and few fail safes. I’ve had access to a vacant house to allow me some reprieve from all of the other complications of vanlife, but have been doing an excessive amount of driving between it and a new job. I’ve been moving so fast despite a breakup and residual move-out, and a PTSD attack during a huge race that resulted in bailing out, that the next part invites those voices to call back and say, “these are the consequences of your poor choices. This is what you deserve.”
Yesterday, I took the van to a garage to address the leak and form a plan. Four minutes after I pulled in, the return line on my power steering pump broke at a connection by just the touch of a finger. It had at some point, before I ever owned the vehicle, been sealed with JB Weld instead of being repaired properly. It held for six years at least, and I never knew. So here I am, now grounded in front of a bay, with no replacement pumps available locally until the middle of next week. I’m 20 minutes from work, and an hour from the house.
This saint of a mechanic, Jeremy, engineers a temporary hose connection with industrial-strength glue and a dream. He sends me on my way with a cautious optimism that it would get me through until a new pump arrived, and sent me on my way.
20-minutes later, my steering bricks up as I’m turning into the next town. I muscle it to the gas station down the road and again to my job just down the street (thanks for that at least, universe), but that location unfortunately leaves me no access to a shower at the very minimum. So I call for a ride back to the house, despite the cobra in my throat hissing that I am an inconvenience, a disaster, and that I need to get my act together. For the second time in a few weeks I go almost deadpan as my friend Aaro picks up, but the siege, and that cobra, descend on the base of the castle that has already been cracking and tumbling since time immemorial.
The ground keeps moving. The snake moves beneath black dunes and I am immobile with my blade across my chest. I bring you to ground zero as it plays out because I can’t afford one more bad step after all of these recent hits. I haven’t made a plan. I don’t know how I’m even getting to work, 40-minutes away, on Tuesday, let alone the days after that. All of my silver has been spent on the sword, and I’m so profoundly tired of holding it.
And the cobra is well fed today.
~
This is another interrupter. Trying to accomplish more than the basics when I keep bottoming out creates this dichotomy- an intense and automatic drive juxtaposed with the smell of smoke of another impending fight. If I’m going to have to keep doing that (I will), then I’m also going to continue weaponizing my awareness before I ever even reach the end. And I won’t reach the end, until I can no longer speak.
Part two of this post, ‘The Edge,’ is on the way. But I have to let its contents happen first, I fear.
One of the universal languages in endurance sports is that of “the dark place.” It’s where the human mind goes when you’ve experienced so much depletion that the governors of pretense retire, and you’re left with just the raw material of the self again. You meet you.
I feel like I lived in that space before I ever picked up a bike. My childhood was destructive (if you’re new here, see My Mother’s Shadow Sister) and I was powerless over it, despite having the gift of so much inherent awareness that allowed me to resist it. I turned inward to keep myself safe because, I’ve said it before, I trusted me. I saw through it then, and that vision cuts sharply now still. This past weekend, I saw something so acutely in myself that I’m afraid of the potential limitations it places on my future efforts in ultra-cycling. I already have so many barriers that I’m chipping away at- learned hyper-independence, a very fragmented support network, housing insecurity, frequent and unpredictable mechanical problems with the old van I have lived in off-and-on for almost six years, and most recently, exiting an unhealthy relationship that struck all of my old wounds like a drum.
I sorta kinda knew better than to throw myself at the 340-mile Central Missouri Circuit last minute. It was a race that I was ecstatic to see appear for the first time but when crunch time came around, I just didn’t think I had it together enough to take it on. I had been fairly isolated living in a rural town reliant on someone else for my security, and moved back into the van and started a new job only six weeks before race day. I was very disorganized. My phone was destroyed by water and I got locked out of all of my vital accounts and couldn’t contact anyone for a few days, I got a police knock at a campground for no discernable reason, my van started to threaten a mechanical days before the race, I’d already been struggling with some other interpersonal stuff, and I just… I knew how much weight all of it was even though I was practiced at carrying it.
Oh, but to be passionate about something. To love it severely. You let the dream take the wheel instead of reason. And let me clear, I don’t regret that. My heart won’t let me sit things out and my best friend, Gerrod, reminded me of that to wake me up, and so I registered three days before the deadline. Multiple climbing-heavy and rugged 200’s, point-to-point solo rides with 100+miler-per-day averages for days on end, and a hyper-fixation for covering ground that deepens as the fatigue builds; I thought this was a fair step up.
On event morning, I found myself in the middle of a lively group of women with some hardcore histories. In a sport where I’ve found myself a general outsider with a tendency to hang on the fringes, this was a serious marker for how much I had evolved in a short period of time. It set me up well as the anticipation of the start bubbled up, and made the grand depart taste sweet.
As a rider with road power, I found myself at the front of the women’s field early and briefly rode with Nichole Baker, a newcomer to bikepack racing but no stranger to big efforts. My computer soon spontaneously changed the route map to running in reverse, and I had to stop briefly to reset it. I caught Nichole again and she said, warmly “I have a feeling we’re going to be seeing a lot of each other today.”
One day she’ll know how much I needed that. The unfortunate part is she disappeared as we hit swampy singletrack early into the race, and I never saw her again. Major congratulations on your win, by the way. It would have been an honor to have chased you further.
Let’s jump forward because recapping all of the mundane details of a race I didn’t finish isn’t actually why I’m here. At mile 114, I hit the second store stop on the route and made that a long break before I had to face the onset of night. Last summer, I took on another ultra race where the combination of invisible dogs, trespassing, too much hiking, and wrong turns ganged up on my inexperience and had me retiring at 1:00 a.m. Jamie Wilgur, eventual third-place finisher, had come up behind about 10-minutes later and I asked “would you mind if I sat back and rode with you for a while? I don’t handle the dark that well.” She obliged and let me know she likely wouldn’t talk that much.
We ended up sharing quite a lot of back-and-forth that night, and that’s what kept me afloat. At that store stop, I realized my power bank was not charging my computer. It was at 45% with only 47-miles to go to the next stop where I’d have access to more solutions, so I rolled on. Not too long after we got a good rhythm going, I hit a pothole hard and the stitches on my feed bag straps broke in two places. I had to stop and haphazardly tie it up to my seat bag where it rubbed my tire with every pedal stroke. Obnoxious, but hardly a problem. As the last of the light left us, we entered the creek bottoms where I began to feel a chill. I knew the temperature was to drop overnight, so I had packed a thermal base-layer, neoprene gloves, and thick wool socks. Jamie stopped to pull on her jacket and I made my swap while she graciously waited for me. It was there that I observed the charge on my headlight, only on for about an hour, was already low. I didn’t know what the life on my headlamp was if I had to rely on it exclusively. My computer battery was also struggling now that both my navigation and backlight were running. I had to turn both off and became extra dependent on Jamie to lead me to St. James. I also realized that my bottle cage bolts were backing out for the second time that day, and one had already jumped ship. Nothing was melting down, but in my mind I was already running a bunch of programs on how I would handle it if any of those things failed and I were to end up alone.
Dear reader, I have historically been a manic problem-solver. I grew up in a household where I was frequently left to fend for myself, shamed for needing help, and if I did accept help, the result was under someone else’s control. To minimize the consequences, I had to start predicting the result of hangups before they ever happened. My imagination for being stuck was and still is vivid, because if I can imagine it, I can survive it.
And so now, cold, necessary devices low on power, my feet wet and frigid from a deep creek crossing mere minutes after changing into warm, dry socks, and my bottles threatening to abort the mission, I’m moving forward but trying to stave off the stress that is a permanent resident for me regardless of how minor the problems may seem on the surface. That stress doesn’t keep me from showing up, but it does keep me from enjoying the adventure the way others do on things this epic. Adventure means unpredictability, and unpredictability to the survivor of long-term trauma means I am notsafe.
Nine miles to St. James. Everything is hanging on and I realize I’m in the clear, but I am cold. That combination meant I would not be pushing on through the dark with Jamie after another stop. I trialed a new charging cable for my power bank which solved that problem, and then asked a hotel if I could sit in their lobby for just a few hours to let my devices charge and to warm up. I pulled out a foil blanket to knock off the clammy chill, and fought off the drowsiness that quickly set in after I sat down.
It was too long to sit with my thoughts. At 4:00 a.m. I was in a bitter arguement with myself about just getting back out there and hitting the road hard until the sun came up. I was frozen in that state until dawn touched the trees at 5:30. I was losing a lot of ground to others who had gotten to sleep and started early again, and those who hadn’t stopped yet at all. I was even more wide-eyed and indecisive as the compounding feelings of vulnerability, being underequipped, sleep-deprived, and inadequate had a row with each other like it was an open bar. I was losing. I was failing. I was notsafe.
Adversity is the expectation at events like this, not just a possibility. Calling for help from the outside means disqualification, and calling for help hasn’t even been an option for me at significant points in my story. I have incorrectly thought twice now that I would be well-adapted to that since it had been the theme of my entire life and I’ve always just sloppily bulldozed through it even with the stress and the pressure always quietly (or sometimes not so quietly) gnawing at the inside of my throat.
But it catches you, an incredible, ghostly rider in its own right. 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.
Crying, I sent a text to my emergency contact to let him know that I was planning to push on but that the possibility was high that I would need to be extracted. I left town at Mach 5 to warm the engine back up, but also to try to foolishly use force again to bypass the alarms that had already been tripped. What I didn’t realize until after I started writing this passage is that, even though I had gotten through my hangup successfully and there was nothing but the chill to ride out now, I had already been shaken. I had already imagined losing,failure, and not being safe. I had not, and I was not, but my body was already signing off without my permission.
I have experienced this on the bike a number of times prior in various contexts- the high-heartrate crying and hyperventilation that comes when I no longer have control. I am not a person that cries easily. I move with composure and vocalize emotion in a clinical way most of the time, which is why I have such a propensity for writing about it. Something about the bike takes that away from me. I process so much in that space, but when the wound gets struck, I am absolutely, unmanageably, not at the fucking wheel anymore.
I so wanted to break through it this time so I stopped to recover at three different points. I missed a turn which set me back again. I slid my back wheel out correcting the mistake and it hit me once more. I shivered my way up a minor climb as my body entered full shut down, where despite having so much physical ability to give yet, everything just said “no.”
Now at mile 177, I hadn’t yet made the call to stop when my emergency line texted me back saying he was headed to my location. I didn’t argue. I knelt over my bars and collapsed completely, knowing that force, now, would only extenuate the damage. It would no longer get me safely home.
~
I don’t know how to solve this. I can’t write, or ride, my way out. Time has done a lot of heavy lifting since that first experience back in 2016 on a cyclocross course, but it still feels like a gargoyle barring me out of what I could accomplish if everything just went right. That reality doesn’t exist.
But I also have to remember, that of course I experience that stress and its consequential overload. You don’t survive a volatile, unpredictable, and unsafe childhood without maladaptive protective mechanisms, and they don’t disappear or rewrite themselves just because you no longer need them. That’s the capital message that I want more people to understand about those of us with severe trauma, whose responses to life aren’t always congruent with what might be happening on the ground. I am lucky that mine still allow me to take on extreme trials like ultra races even if they fairly consistently break my heart. Some can never reach outside their invisible iron prisons.
For now, I am stepping out of racing temporarily to pick this apart. I can’t keep allowing my goals to be short-changed by it and a repeated cycle to continue to crash my confidence. Trans-Am is a mega-version of what I just tried and lost, and it’s probably a blessing in disguise that I am now seeing the deeper impact from the past that I wasn’t fully aware of. For so long I just thought I lacked a little bit of mental grit, but no.
It was over fifty years ago when they lost the Sun. The whirling, faintly glittering Mists rolled over the earth and changed the way of life for everything. The sky lowered and fused with the sea, and everything on the earth entered delirium. The only sign of stars or moon for mortals was the iridescence that pulsed through the clouds in soft colors as the light from the heavens dispersed.
Idiga, the lead hunter for a small pack of coydogs who lived where the high desert met the crags, narrowed her eyes toward the west. Sometimes, before the mist faded from pale blue, to soft violet, and then to black, the world was washed in intense light and the Fire burned in the distance. Tonight the flame licked the swirling shroud like it intended to finally boil everything it touched. The pack stirred little as their vision left them for another heavy night, and Idiga lied amongst the sagebrush and let the dull wind whisper her to sleep.
She awoke to dust blowing urgently across her nose, to a cloud of yellow and gold that hastened her as if to say another morning of opportunity had finally come. High winds meant the gull-like winged things that built their nests on the sharp ledges of the crags would be grounded or they risked being tossed into the abyss. Larger prey, advantaged by poor sightlines in the Mists, was increasingly elusive, so Idiga adapted. She roused the hunting party, all the most lithe and sure-footed of the pack, and led them out into the open desert toward the Edge.
Idiga took a wide stance as she peered over the rocky ledge and smelled the wind for hints of the winged things. She could hear their shrills even as the turbulent air ripped up against the walls of the crag. Calling over two others of the party, she sent the last downwind to descend the rocks and stage himself just above the Line, the boundary that no dog dare go beneath or risk never returning home. After a few moments, the runner below barked sharply and the dogs above heard the winged things scatter. Once the first frightened shadow pierced the veil, Idiga launched forward, tucking her front feet beneath her chin, and dove toward the rocks below. She gaped her jaws and locked her teeth around the creature and continued to fall, extending her feet and letting the ground come to her. Her paws struck the ledge below and she absorbed the hit like a wild cat. Balanced, she shook the animal in her grips until its struggle left it and dropped it to the rocks. The next dog came behind her to retrieve the prize while Idiga immediately shifted her eyes toward the cloud again for the next target. After four more strikes, she climbed back up to the Edge for rest.
Panting, Idiga took a count of the group’s kills and paused. The dog running the Line hadn’t returned yet. She turned and cried out into the shroud, and began to scout the Edge when she heard the missing party mate’s reply. She found him sitting, bleeding from the face. He told her he was struck by a tremendously large flying creature as it stole his catch from his grip. Puzzled, she asked another dog to substitute as a runner and told her injured hunter to rest for the time being.
Idiga breathed in a deep fill of air, again poised on a jutting rock, and peered down into the Mists. She dove off the side toward a shadow directly beneath her, but the agile winged thing narrowly slipped through her open maw as she clipped a rock with her shoulder and slid to a lower ledge. She caught the glimpse of a darting shadow and rapidly turned to coil herself for another jump. Patient, her nose twitched as another one scuttled on the rocks upwind. She watched it for a moment before quietly crouching to the earth and creeping across the sharp face. Just then, a loose stone came rattling down the crag and startled the winged thing into flight.
Instead of jumping at that moment, Idiga waited. A sharp blast of air cut across the wall and spun the squalling winged thing over on itself. She barreled off of her perch furiously and, a second before grabbing the creature’s wingtip, a large white figure struck her in the face with its talons splayed. Idiga tumbled to the rocks on her haunches, and rolled down to another ledge in a spin. And then to the next, and yet to another. She crashed down the walls of rock and soil past the Line, down into the abyss, and pierced the confines of the Mists to a bottom unimagined.
Like an ethereal hand, thick, tall grasses cradled Idiga’s body. She opened her eyes to a warm and gentle wind. The ground smelled damp, yet sweet. The soft blades brushed the battered dog’s wounds and as she slowly regained her senses, they seemed to cool her pain. She found her feet and rose from the thicket, and hobbled out to the sound of rolling water. A crystal brook ran delicately nearby, a spectacle. She walked over and took a drink as two white feathers drifted past her bloodied muzzle.
Idiga’s eyes widened as the cold water rushed her throat. She rose from the stream and whipped her head around, breaking from the assumed dream and remembering every moment of her crash into this world. She made out the faint shadow of the wall, looming through a pale yet bright green fog. Slowly, she moved toward it. She then heard something stir in the grasses, and another pale feather drifted across the ground. As she approached, she was met by a large, disheveled winged thing- a gyrfalcon. It held out its ripped-up wings, dragging them by its sides, leaving a trail of white and bloodied feathers behind. Its icy grey eyes locked intently onto Idiga’s green ones, and they stared each other down for a long, silent moment.
Idiga’s injuries would heal, and here she stood with ample water, a hidden place to recover, and an immediate opportunity for a nearly effortless meal, but she remained still as the falcon began to speak. The swift winged thing had been watching the dog pack’s ingenious hunting style for the cliff gulls and sought to capitalize on their blindness. Idiga was astonished. This winged thing, whose name she learned was Vrail, could see with pristine sharpness though the Mists. Idiga asked the bird about this new landscape, and Vrail described a world of color the dog could not fathom. The valley she had fallen to was traced on either side by enormous bluffs and funneled toward the Sea through the thick Forests. Idiga asked of the Fire, and the bird said, casually, “that is the Sun.”
And so, the two struck a deal. Vrail would not survive flightless, and Idiga would never find her way home in the Mists; they had something higher to offer one another. The gyrfalcon would become the coydog’s sight, with all of its knowledge of the land, and the coydog would become the gyrfalcon’s protector. Idiga crouched to let Vrail pull herself up onto her shoulders, where she would ride for the uncertain journey before them.
The light in the Mists rose and fell in a full spectrum for weeks on end as the pair regained their strength. The vegetation grew dense. Giant ferns sprouted tendrils and wrapped their arms around towering red trees that would periodically glow when the Fire would come. The soft grasses caressed the dog and the falcon as they walked, always leaning delicately forward, as if to show them an invisible path. Idiga had been sustaining them both on a steady diet of rodents, and eventually, large pheasants that would spring from their hiding places as they spooked. Vrail would perch patiently on low branches, and Idiga would catch the fat, vibrantly-plumed winged things in the air like she was dancing. Vrail had begun to pluck the pheasants’ feathers while they fed and placed quills of red, blue, and gold into her wings. She could not yet fly, but her wingspan soon looked full, painted, striking as she filled the gaps.
It was a particularly damp and heavy evening that Idiga decided to travel late. The air was hung in navy and silver as the Forest was irradiated by the Fire. Over the pair’s shoulders, the the light burned white through the Mists, casting long shadows with a depth Idiga had never seen before.
They weren’t aware that not far downwind, a native teenage boy was helping his grandmother collect clay and foliage for her crafts. Their people knew little trouble in the valley, but as the night closed in the boy collected their sacks and urged his grandmother to start heading back home. Suddenly, the Fire lit up the earth around them and an incredible shadow met the boy’s eyes. He pulled at his grandmother’s sleeve and they both stared in bewilderment as a fantastic figure moved slowly toward them- a wolf-like creature, with wings spread out at its sides as if it had just landed and was shaking off the dew.
The old woman and the boy hurried back to their village and shared the incredible sight with everyone who would listen. They were met by those who were mystified, skeptical, and fearful. The village had lived in peace since the Mists had come, but some wondered still- had the boy and the elder mistaken their vision, was trickery afoot in their valley, or had a god descended to the earth? The chief called for an end to speculation, and the boy, along with all of the hunters in the village, were called to assemble.
Idiga and Vrail awoke the next morning to the commotion of black winged things in the trees. They squalled and screeched and shouted, “You must leave, beware, there will be death in the Mists!” The dog and the falcon roused in alarm, and Vrail hustled onto Idiga’s shoulders again as they sought a path away from the riot above their heads.
The squabbling faded as the pair travelled deeper into the Forest, but the urgency had been amplified. On this day, despite the blanket of anonymity that the Mists wrapped so many things in, the Forest felt like it had eyes on them today. Vrail had slowly begun to rebuild her strength to fly by gliding from branch to branch, occasionally working her way up to the canopy to look into its vastness. It was then that Idiga caught a vile smell, and the falcon descended to her guarded perch on her back.
A spear suddenly pierced the shroud from behind them and lodged itself into the brambles. Idiga bolted as the sound of men crashing through the brush closed in, and more blind spears rained from overhead. The coydog weaved in and out of the trees as she ran to disorient the assault.
“Vrail, I need you to find me the wall!” Idiga shouted. Vrail shot through the canopy and quickly found the valley’s rocky boundary. She dove back to Idiga and pulled on the dog’s scruff to steer her to their escape. In mere moments, the pair found the bottom of the wall and Idiga leapt up onto the rocks, quickly scaling them without knocking a stone out of place. Once high enough that the Mists could conceal them, she stopped, exasperated and shaking. Vrail stared out into the woods and watched the men’s silhouettes scour the ground for their trail, but it appeared they had lost it.
“Humans,” Vrail scoffed, “they almost never look up.”
Below, the boy who had first seen the pair’s winged figure the night before scanned the ground. The head hunter approached him and handed him back his spear.
“Have you found something, Andu?” he asked.
Andu rose from his crouched position with feathers of white, blue, red, and gold in his hands and said nothing. The party gathered momentarily and after a brief moment, retreated into the treeline with their weapons.
The pair spent several hours recovering on their desolate ledge until the light in the Mists began to dim again. The Fire cut through the valley in a waltz of pale blue, to yellow, to scarlet, and the warm wind beckoned Idiga down to the grass. Vrail lept from Idiga’s back and glided into the trees below and called to Idiga once she observed the perimeter to be clear. Idiga descended as the shadows of the tree trunks became long and deep again in the brief intensity of the setting Fire. She watched it for a long moment when Vrail came back, and asked the falcon to tell her about the Sun. They travelled deep into the night as Vrail described it and all of the rest of the world she had seen, and that Idiga had not.
Over the course of the next several weeks the pair was trailed by the hunting party. They had learned man’s habits and determined how to evade them efficiently, but Idiga was growing ever more weary as opportunity to eat and sleep became infrequent.
Another morning had come as Idiga and Vrail reached a bend in the valley, where the ancient River had once been diverted and carved a new serpentine path towards the Sea. The undergrowth cleared and Idiga found herself approaching a new wall, and a theater of rocks and broken trees laid before a sleeping fire circle and an incredible swath of images drawn in clay and ash and bone. It was there that the tangible world of beasts flirted with the illusions of man and the coydog and the falcon found themselves staring at a large, winged canid painted upon the rock. It was adorned in white markings and accented by imagery of a golden orb, but its face was hollowed to the bone.
Idiga gazed at the images in silence until Vrail tucked down on her back and warned of an approaching figure in the woods. The pair slipped into the brush just before Andu stepped into the clearing and set his spear and a leather sack on a log. He approached the painting of the dog with the feathers he had picked up from the first pursuit and held them up to its wings.
Idiga slinked low and crept deeper into the woods as the sound of the rest of the hunting party drew near. The pair kept close to the wall, with Vrail scoping its face for climbable points in case the hunters got too close again.
But as Vrail’s strength grew, her flight improving rapidly by the day, Idiga was tiring. Their meager rations over the weeks had been adequate for the falcon but minimal for the dog. She forged ahead through the Mists, but the Mists seemed to finally be infiltrating her mind and washing out her resolve.
“Vrail, I don’t think I am of service to you anymore,” she muttered. “You’ve led me this far, but man will catch up to me soon and you’ll fare better getting far away from here.”
A gentle rain began to fall as Vrail sat quietly upon Idiga’s shoulders. A crack of thunder rolled distantly. While the falcon’s silence grew louder, as too did the shuffling of footsteps on the forest floor. Vrail took off from the dog’s back and beckoned her to follow as quickly as she could. The rain began to come down harder the longer Idiga ran, and the clouds above boomed with pending violence toward the clouds below.
The hunters took pause as the storm intensified, and their leader commanded everyone to fall back to camp. But Andu, young, intent, and unproven, broke from the group, insisting that the rains would wash away the trail of the creature they had been fervently after for weeks. He did not obey when the head hunter ordered him to turn back, and instead struck out into the storm alone with his spear brandished.
Vrail led Idiga toward a corner of the wall where a gap opened wide in the rock and they both could take shelter from the rain. The coydog dropped to the ground, her coat soaked through to the skin, and the falcon sat on her back draping her wings over her friend. Vrail saw the light escaping Idiga’s once-lively eyes with every stroke of thunder that bounced off of the bluffs.
“I won’t rest until I can show you the Sun, ” Vrail said softly. “Please sleep.”
But there, in the bleak, all of their cunning and wit still hadn’t bought their freedom from their stalker. Through the Mists, his cloak heavy with rain, Andu had followed Idiga’s muddy prints straight to his prize. His commitment to the chase had rewarded him with a legendary trophy now just moments away. Idiga’s glowing green eyes were all he could see as he raised his spear over his head, took a bold stride forward, and launched it with all of his power into the crevice.
Just as the spear had left Andu’s hands, Vrail had thrown herself toward him, her decorated wings carrying her like a dart into the storm, her talons reaching as the weapon cut the rain. An extraordinary white flash and sonic blast then struck the spear as it collided with Vrail. The bolt carried through to the sopping earth, busting trees and shattering rock in all directions. The ground current shot through the crevice and the unearthly light stole Andu’s vision. The boy fell to the mud writhing, and the dog’s eyes didn’t open again until hours after the rain had stopped.
Idiga awoke to the crows above her head again. This time though, instead of screaming warnings and threats to her, they tried to shake her from her trance.
“Do you see? Do you see?” the winged things demanded. She stared blankly at the light outside of the rocks for what could have been minutes or hours, but when her memory returned to her, her eyes widened, and she scrambled out of the cage of loose rocks that had fallen around her and into the open air. She spun around aghast as her consciousness was flooded with the convergence of realities that Vrail was gone, their predator was curled up nearby and shivering in his cloak, and the Mists had broken into a curtain of light more intense than Idiga had ever seen. Her eyes welled as they burned from the hot, white orb that looked straight down on her from overhead, and the heat travelled through her face, down through her shoulder and left front leg all now turned snow white from the lightning. She opened her mouth and cried out a desperate, scream-like howl that shook the thick Forest for miles and sent all of the crows scrambling into the air.
Andu’s eyes were also turned white by the strike, and his sight was devoid of all figures. He slumped against a tree with tears streaming from his face, somehow again clutching a handful of colored feathers.
“I’m sorry!” he shouted as Idiga cried out, “I’m so sorry for what I’ve done!” He shuffled around for his bag and dumped its contents onto the ground, but never dropping the quills. The sound grabbed Idiga’s attention away from her overwhelm for a moment and she turned to approach the blind boy with her teeth bared and a deep growl vibrating in her throat. Andu fought to catch his breath as he felt for food rations to toss to the dog, but she paced by everything he threw to her with her eyes acutely fixed on his sorry throat. Then as she came within steps of him, her glare shifted to the feathers in his hands, and the lifeless white winged thing draped delicately in his lap. Idiga closed the gap and as if the human ceased to exist, lowered her head and nuzzled Vrail’s broken body. Andu sat frozen. After several moments passed, he slowly lifted his shaking hand and placed it on Idiga’s head. She didn’t respond. Several more minutes went by and while Idiga said her goodbyes to her friend in silence, Andu awkwardly tied the bundle of feathers into her fur with thin leather string.
As the sun glittered down through the canopy, Idiga was compelled to speak to Andu at length. Hours passed and both of their worlds widened even in the wake of disaster, and as if Vrail herself was nudging Idiga forward, the two struck a deal. The coydog would lead the blind boy back to his village, and the boy would advocate for the coydog’s protection.
To the people of my village, truth was stranger than myth. Idiga was fostered back to health by those amongst us who had been endeared by her shadow and appeased by those who had sought to bring her down. A few of us had spent many sleepless nights listening to Idiga recall her journey and honoring the memory of the one who had spent the rest of her life leading her home.
Before Idiga left our village, my grandmother painted the bold image of a falcon on her white face, a mark that would protect her from ever being hunted by man again. The chief fastened a metal band around the feathers I had tied into her fur so that what remained of Vrail would never be lost.
To this day, nobody has seen Idiga return. But with so many of our children unhappy with that ending, I tell them this:
Idiga made it to the sea at fiery sunrise one morning. She followed the sands around the pillars of rock that marked the end of the valley and ascended to the high plains and forged home to the desert beyond them. With the gift of sight through the Mists, she led her pack to prosperity back here in the valley. Sometimes, when the Sun sets and brings the Fire back through the trees, I think I can somehow still see the silhouette of her looking back at me with wings wide open, grown back from the falcon’s feathers.
I will the machine. 