Last month, I got my motorcycle license. It is something I have wanted to do for a number of years but either money, time—maybe it was laziness, definitely a bit of fear—kept me from getting it. But I did, and the week after I got my license, I bought a sweet little Royal Enfield INT650. It’s a bit more bike than I was ready for, but after three weeks of riding almost daily, she feels comfortable and smooth, and I am in love.
To try to explain how it feels like you are flying on a bike is hard. I got the bike up to sixty-five miles on the back roads, tilting and gliding over the asphalt, my body in sync with the bike, the leaning into the curves, the wind pushing into my chest, the rush of the wind through my helmet vents. All of it is as if I am levitating. The sense of peace and calm that comes over me is like meditation. All thought goes away. The focus is on the road, on the bike. It’s a pure focus. It is pure exhilaration. I told a friend that riding is almost as good as sex, definitely better than mediocre sex.
As part of my processing the break-up, I started to do all the things I didn’t do during my relationship. Being single and heartbroken gave me a sense of freedom. Since I feel things deeply, I found that doing things that scare me, truly scare me, made the heartache lessen. The motorcycle class was my first big fear. Riding the motorcycle now is still a little scary. It takes intense focus for me, being a new rider, to ride the bike. So, fear and focus pushes all other thoughts away. It has given me a reprieve. This sounds like it is counterintuitive to embrace the feelings and release them, but part of my therapy is to practice kindness and patience with myself. And there have been a handful of moments in the past month when I needed to give myself some space. The bike has been perfect for that.
Fear is an almost all-encompassing emotion, right? There’s little else to think or feel when fear is in your face. When that fear is confronted, whether it is overcome, strength builds up in us. We prove to ourselves that we can handle hard things. My method of confronting fear in a controlled environment (e.g., motorcycle class, in June tandem skydiving) is bolstering my confidence. I have new data points about what I am capable of. Each time a fear is confronted, I know something new.
The tandem skydiving I’m doing in June scares me the most. I am afraid of heights. Even thinking of looking out of the plane to the endless expanse of sky and horizon makes my stomach drop and my heart beat fast…and this is just writing it here on this blog. I can’t imagine what I’m going to be like in the ascent to jump height. I only know that I have to do it. I only know that, as Will Smith said about skydiving, “God placed the best things in life on the other side of fear.” And while I’m not a religious woman, I do believe in the sentiment.
Maybe this is what exposure therapy does? Or fear extinction, where our conditioned fear responses decline with exposure to the fear. I have a diverse group of friends when it comes to fear and hardship. Some are on my extreme, pushing into their fears and difficulty. Some are happy to lament about how stuck they feel, and the anxiety it produces. To those friends, I want to scream at them to move in the direction of the anxiety, to run headlong into it, become friends with that fear. I think when we constantly avoid that which makes us uncomfortable or afraid, each time the experience takes something away from us. We start to believe we are incapable. Not confronting fear makes us a less human being. The opposite is true, too. Moving into fear—even if the fear remains, and you find you never want to do the fear-inducing activity again—we become more of a human, we become more of ourselves, we learn what works and what doesn’t.
Am I off base here? Is this incorrect? It may be my experience, but who knows if other people feel this way about fear. I worry that experience is not always the best teacher, right?