Kate L

I haven’t quite developed a “ritual” or routine yet, but I have been getting up much earlier. I usually go day by day – sometimes I’ll do some cleaning in the morning, or sit and do some writing and contemplating. I’d like to get more into a routine as far as what I spend my morning doing, but I can’t quite decide whether that time should be spent on doing “me” stuff, or getting chores out of the way to free up my evening. Still though, at least waking up in the morning has become less of a dreadful prospect.

We drove down to the John Heinz refuge to practice biking today, but it was sort of doomed from the start. I guess I was feeling kind of cranky, and Greg taking forever to get ready and then giving me a hard time about what I was wearing didn’t help things. We got there and I just had a really hard time. The terrain was rougher than we’d remembered with lots of gravel and hills that, while walking are imperceptible, but riding felt like mountains. I kept stopping and starting and kind of falling and generally felt really frustrated and inept and exhausted. Halfway through I had kind of a breakdown and started crying and yelling at myself (while no one was around), and that kind of sent me off the deep end. I just feel like I’ll never really be able to do it. I’ll always feel wobbly and have to skid to a stop when I get nervous and then have a slow painful start. When I caught up with Greg and he saw that I was crying and frustrated, he kept saying we should stop and go back, etc, which kind of just made me angrier. I don’t want to just give up, I give up everything. Yes, it’s frustrating and painful and I feel like everyone in the world has mastered this stupid simple thing except me, but I can’t give up. I just needed to be pissed at myself and cry and fall and work through it, but he just didn’t seem to get that. After that I did a bit better on the ride back, going for five or so minutes at a time without stopping. When I got back to the car I was trying to explain the feeling to him, that feeling of being so frustrated because it’s this thing that almost every eight year old can do but I can’t, and he kind of didn’t get it. He sort of just brushed me off saying, “Yeah, it’s hard, but learning new things is hard” and said it was hard when he learned back when he was eight. I guess I was feeling sorry for myself, but I kind of feel like it’s different than just “learning something new.” It involves being more nervous and awkward than you probably are as a kid, and putting yourself in kind of a humiliating situation, and potentially injuring yourself, and above all it’s something that I should’ve done twenty five years ago. So yes, I’m sure learning how to swing on the trapeze and white water kayak and ride a unicycle are also difficult, but those things are kind of like a bonus. I feel like I’m a step below all of those people because I’m trying to do something that most people have been doing all their lives, and that’s almost a necessity in life at some point.

So yeah, kind of frustrating day.

I was just reading a few entries from other people on this subject, and I wanted to share my feelings about it. I made it a point a while ago to stop hiding the fact that I don’t know how to ride a bike. I used to feel embarrassed that I had never learned, but of course as you get older you feel less awkward about things like that. So I’ve just decided to own it. I figure if someone sees me – a 32 year old woman – trying to learn, they’d have to be a pretty terrible person to laugh or make fun of me. I find that people admire someone who’s courageous enough to do something like this at my age. Not to mention, once you tell people you don’t know how to ride, you’d be really surprised at how many people say the same thing – that they either never learned, or haven’t done it in years because they’re scared.

Today when I was riding around my in-laws cul de sac, a man and his little girl came outside and I said hello, and said, “I’m just learning to ride!” The man didn’t even flinch – he said, “Awww…you’ll get it, it just takes a little while. I got on a bike for the first time in years and I was wobbly at first, but I got it after a bit. You’ll be fine”

I think at this age it would be much easier for me to just say, “The hell with it, the ship has sailed on this one and I’m never going to learn.” So as long as you’re willing to laugh at yourself and be open about your nervousness, I think people will admire you for trying.