A blindingly brilliant sun shone in the bluest sky I’d ever seen as I watched my friend, Sage, ride away into the distance. A canyon with steep, rocky walls swallowed her whole. I was standing next to my then husband and her then boyfriend, and we were all waving at her as she departed on a two-week long solo bike adventure in the Rocky Mountains.

Still vivid to this very second, the jealousy I felt reverberate in my bones. I wanted to be her. Rather, I wanted to be as brave. The guys turned away after she was out of sight while I stood there motionless, a dry breeze playing with my hair. I remember thinking, I could never do that.

Years later, after life had its way with me for over a decade, taking on a solo cross-country bicycle tour was suddenly the only thing that made sense. Over the winter of 2017-2018, I followed the Pacific Ocean down from San Francisco to San Diego and then turned left to cross the United States by myself. By then, I’d been on many a self-supported bike tour with my by then ex-husband and our gaggle of Colorado friends. So, planning, gear and route-finding was in the bag. What was out of the bag was my entire future.

Even so, a deep-seated part of me had chosen four and a half months on the road. In other words, the most unpredictable classroom. The harshest of teachers. And sometimes, an entity so unbelievably generous that it made my heart hurt.

Rising to challenge after challenge, and surviving extreme weather, unsavory encounters with strangers, bike malfunctions, aggressive dogs and sheer isolation, her concept of what was possible expanded outwards like an exploding star. Thus extended, it would never go back to the way it was before. Instead, limits would keep falling way every so often. Shedded like an old, worn out skin.

With all that time alone, I had begun to dig deep into the soil of my upbringing, my ancestry, my conditioning and my beliefs about my self and the world. Hours and hours on the bike, under the sky and whatever chose to fall from it (or not) will pull every last truth and myth out of a person. Apparently I needed that kind of cleansing. So, I surrendered to it.

Somewhere between western Arizona and southern New Mexico, I became aware of certain ways of thinking–and particularly of dialoging with myself–that I hadn’t been aware of before. I believe I’m not alone in these kinds of thought patterns and ways that I used to keep myself small and what I then called safe, so I’ll list them below. I used to say:

• I’ll never/I could never do ______.
• I suck. (After messing up, typically).
• ______ always happens.
• Nothing ever works out for me.
• What’s the use? Nothing will ever change.
• Why even try?
• But actually, we’re really good together much of the time/this job is better than a lot of others/it’s not actually that bad of a place to live (and a million other small, insidious justifications).

I have chosen not to speak to myself anymore this way and have become particularly aware of how I use the words “never” and “always.” Instead, I talk to myself about all the exciting possibilities out there in the world and inside of me that I probably haven’t even discovered yet.

If you, too, realize that you speak to yourself in these limiting ways, first of all be kind to that little voice inside. It’s probably been conditioned by well-meaning friends and family, great disappointments, generational trauma that was handed down to you, cultural expectations that we soak up like sponges, and the anxiety and fear we are so often strategically bombarded with. Give it a hug with the warm hands of your heart, and then go about asking that quietly insistent voice why it’s there. What it thinks it’s keeping you safe from. How it came to be. And then lovingly and slowly, give it a crack to slip out of.

Turning back to the epic bike trip once more, I had been enjoying the crashing waves of the Atlantic ocean outside my room when I remembered the moment in which I stood there so many years before watching my friend ride into the canyon. I threw myself on my bed and belly laughed until I was gasping for air because I’d just ridden myself from one coast to another. Along the way, a new woman had emerged, so far from the one in Colorado that we could’ve almost been doppelgängers passing each other in the hotel corridor.

So. Whatever your so-called 2-week solo bicycle tour (your “I could never do that”) is right now, look it in the face and say “Well, anything is possible!” And then imagine with every fiber in your being that it really, really is. Let that reality seep into your bones, and then don’t be surprised when your world starts opening up before you like a pair of French doors.

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