Evidence of Who We Are
It was a Friday evening on the south end of the island I call home, the regular meetup for my veteran adventure motorcycle riders group. Most of them work together, and for years they've been meeting here for beers almost every week. Earlier this year, our paths crossed. We discovered several overlapping circles of connection, and friendship came easily.
A few years earlier, a young woman named Alex had been riding with them. She had recently picked up a motorcycle and was finding her way into the world of riding. One summer, she died on a ride.
The day we learned about her death, my friend and I had just come off an incredible camping trip. We'd let loose. At one point, we'd ridden down a mountain forest road with one of us sitting in the passenger window, hanging out the side. We bounced along laughing, singing badly to whatever terrible song was playing on the radio. We were happy, out in one of our favorite places in the world, where there is no cell service and the rest of the world has a way of disappearing.
By midday, we were headed home across the mountain pass. We stopped in a little one-shop town to grab something to eat, and our phones exploded with notifications.
Earlier that year, Alex had joined the roller derby team my friend and I coached.
As the messages came in and the full weight of what had happened settled over us, we sat beside the road in the dust next to my truck. My friend had been closer to Alex than I was, but neither of us was prepared for the news. We became two studies in an approach to death. The drive home would take four hours. For one of the first times in our ten-year friendship, we spent most of it in silence.
Years later, I was coming back from Seattle, where I'd watched my best friends return to playing after a year spent recovering from a badly broken leg. Instead of making the long drive around, I took the ferry back to the island. There, I ran into a few guys on motorcycles. They turned out to be members of the same riding group, and they invited me to their weekly beer meetup. They seemed to know me already.
“Kay Oss? Yah, we know all about you,” one of them said.
Kay Oss is the pseudonym I've skated under for fourteen years. I was wearing a team jacket with my name on it. I've spent those years with the league, as a familiar face in the community and in various leadership roles. Sometimes people know who I am before we've ever met.
Still, I wondered what a stranger could know about me. What stories had they heard? Who had told them?
Alex.
She had talked about me. She'd told them stories about me as a coach, about things that happened at practice, and about her admiration for both my friend and me. Before I ever met these guys, Alex had already introduced me to them through her stories. I had no idea.
Now, sitting with these same guys, I'm listening to them recount a recent trip to the Arctic Circle and back on their motorcycles. Their story moves between individual strengths, different memories of the same adventure, and the embellishments that seem to find their way into any good story. Each of them brings something different to the telling. I'm hearing the version they want me to know: who they are, what they accomplished, what the trip meant to them.
I love that. I love the image of themselves they're offering me, the person they believe themselves to be. I believe it because they believe it. Maybe the details get polished along the way. Maybe the story grows a little bigger with every telling. I don't think that necessarily makes it a lie. Sometimes we're describing who we are. Sometimes we're describing who we want to be. Sometimes we're still figuring out the difference.
Off On Another Adventure
I've been thinking about this a lot over the last week as I prepare for ten days of off-road motorcycle riding through the sand in Tunisia. The story I'm telling is that I've been planning this trip for a year, that I've been preparing for it, that I'm excited and a little anxious but committed to doing something epic and badass. A big part of me believes this is who I am. But there's also a third eye watching from somewhere inside my head, questioning everything. It looks at the same woman making these plans and wonders whether she's getting ahead of herself.
Is this image of myself as capable built on a story I've told often enough to believe? Am I actually ready for this trip? What the hell do I think I'm doing?
Last year, I went on my first really big motorcycle trip, a solo, self-guided adventure that turned out to be life-changing. In the lead-up, I started posting photographs with long captions on my social networks. It became a countdown, a way to focus my thoughts. I wrote about the minutiae: what I was packing, which skills I was working on, the details of the trip. The posts were superficial in some ways, but they needed to be. The small details gave me something concrete to hold on to while I prepared for something that felt enormous.
Once the trip began, the posts changed. I'd write a short summary of the day, mention a highlight, and then find myself writing about something much more introspective, emotional, and raw. I wasn't trying to build an audience or manufacture a narrative. I wanted to document the journey so I could reflect on it later. Somehow, writing for an audience made me pay attention to the trip and its importance, while my private journal became the place where I tore apart my emotional well-being and heartache.
This was the trip that came shortly after my breakup, the one during which I found out I'd been laid off from my dream job. I carried both losses into those miles. I didn't have a neat story about what I was doing or where I was headed. I felt lost, hopeless, completely adrift. I was trying to find my footing in a life that no longer looked the way I'd expected it to.
I didn't know then how much those posts would come to mean to me.
Every so often, I go back and read them. The story comes back, familiar enough that I can almost step into it again. Then I remember the other things happening that day, the emotions and moments I never shared, the parts that didn't make it into the caption.
What surprises me is the woman I find there. The writing shows someone untethered but still moving, someone hurting but paying attention, someone who seemed to understand, at least in part, that she could find her way through. I didn't feel grounded at the time. I felt adrift. Yet there it is, in my own words: evidence that I was making decisions, noticing the world, and finding my way forward even when I couldn't recognize that as strength.
I had been telling a story about being lost. Looking back, I can see another story running underneath it.
Now, as I prepare for Tunisia, I've started posting on social media again. The posts are different this time. There's less emphasis on logistics and more attention to the emotional work, to recognizing where I am and who I am in the present. I'm telling the story as it happens, with as much rawness and honesty as I can manage.
I think about it throughout the day, but not in the sense of wondering how to craft a good story. Instead, I ask myself what feels important today. What am I wrestling with? What am I noticing? What feels worth paying attention to, even if I don't yet know why?
That shift has brought a surprising amount of awareness into my life. I'm not just preparing for a motorcycle trip. I'm paying attention to the person preparing for it. I'm watching the excitement and anxiety coexist, noticing the confidence and the doubt, trying not to decide too quickly which one tells the truth about me.
Alex told stories about me that I never knew existed. Those stories traveled into rooms I hadn't entered and introduced me to people I hadn't met. My old posts have done something similar for me. They've preserved a version of myself I couldn't fully recognize at the time, one I can return to now and see with different eyes.
Nine days from now, I'll fly to Tunisia. I'm already telling the story, but I don't know yet what it will become.
I wonder what I'll see when I read it again a year from now.
BOOK: The Accidental Adventurer: Memoirs of the First Woman to Climb Mount McKinley- Barbara Washburn This book was gifted to me by my Uncle with an inscription "May Your Life fulfill your sense of Adventure". It is the story of a woman who had a job at Harvard, met a man, and soon after they exchanged vows was part of a climbing team making first ascents of peaks in Alaska. In 1947 she became the first woman to climb Mount McKinley (Denali).
SONG: I Did it Tired - Kara Holt
I listen to this as a reminder that there is what I feel.... and there is what people see. They see the end result, the hard work paying off. They don't see me crying, scared, anxious, frutstrated. The only difference between me and the 'non-badass' isn't that I am better and don't have the crappy feelings, the difference is I did it while feeling those crappy feelings. I just believed I was something else than what was happening and feeling in that moment.
Thank you for reading my post. This post/essay, like many of the ones I write, is a blend of my personal experiences, travel, memories, stories, and shared conversations. These solely represent myself and my opinions and thoughts. When it involves personal friends I have given them nicknames unless they have given explicit permission to use their given name. There are times that I am able to pull from what I wrote down in my journals at the time an event happened, others I am trying to recall memories that have been altered by brain injuries and a lifetime of simply living. I may not always get it right, so please forgive me for some unintentional variations.
I always welcome feedback and thoughts on my posts. Please feel free to send me an email or comment below.
Love from the road,
Nic & Rally
Comments