Today I rode a bicycle for the first time in more than five years. The last time I remember riding a bike was sophomore year of high school, when I was a shy teenager who wanted to be a writer. Since then, I've learned to drive, applied to college, and accepted two internships in science communication. In other words, a lot has changed.
But that's not supposed to matter. As the old adage states, "it's like riding a bike." You don't forget how to do an essential life skill. At least that's what people kept telling me today: my roommate, as I retreated indoors after spending 20 minutes trying and failing to mount the bike outside our temporary Cape Cod home; my neighbor, as I walked the bike down the street to give it yet another go and she politely asked, "are you having some trouble with that?"; and my boyfriend, who should know better, as I later confessed over the phone the trouble I was in fact having. "It's like riding a bike," they all said. It was supposed to be comforting, I think.
That phrase has never really meant much to me.
I was a competitive gymnast for almost 10 years, and by far the biggest factor that caused me to stop competing was fear. If you haven't heard, gymnastics is scary. A lot of it involves throwing yourself backwards and hoping your hands and feet find the ground before your head does. But if you persevere through the fear, it can be a truly spectacular experience. And though the moves get scarier as you work your way up, they also become more exciting.
The problem I had was that I would learn how to do a cool skill, and then I would lose it. I'd forget how, or I'd stop believing that I knew how to do it. The back handspring on the balance beam, for instance, was the bane of my existence. I've done that move thousands of times, but I've spent even more time standing atop the beam, frozen in place, not unable but simply unwilling to make the jump backwards.
Many days at practice, after I'd spent hours alternating between standing frozen on the beam and crying, my patient but exhausted coach would say something along the lines of, "it's like riding a bike." As in, you just did this move yesterday. There's no reason you can't do it again.
This attempt at morale boosting was ironic for two reasons. 1) I didn't even know how to ride a bike at that point (yes, it's true, I didn't learn how to ride a bike until age 12 - thanks Mom and Dad), and 2) all the evidence pointed to the fact that I could forget how to do things. Even if we pretend that riding a bike is easy and you can never forget how, neither of which I really believe, that didn't apply to my experience with gymnastics.
When I was 12 years old, I stopped gymnastics because I, along with many of the people that cared about me, was tired of the constant mental tug-of-war. I was tired of learning new skills and forgetting how. I was tired of being scared. I wanted to try something easier - maybe something like riding a bike, which I'd heard so many good things about.
Though my time in gymnastics is long past, I never really escaped that feeling. Since then, I've seen numerous echoes of my experience with gymnastics in my everyday life. I forget how to do things and lose confidence in myself all the time. Sure, I'm not going to forget how to tie my shoes or make macaroni or whatever. But I've learned that many things, no matter how many times I do them, can still be scary.
Conducting interviews, a fundamental skill in journalism, is like that. In my classes and internships, I've had to make dozens of calls to experts and have approached plenty of people in the street to ask questions. Yes, it has gotten easier over time, but it hasn't stopped being scary. I don't think I'll ever feel completely comfortable making cold calls - I doubt any journalist ever really does. But I do hone my skills a little bit every time.
My current job is to write stories about the science that's happening at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) in Cape Cod. This position, I've discovered, involves incremental blocks of time spent reporting and interviewing multiple people, followed by hours of solitary writing. Both of those activities have their scary parts. Once I get through the hullaballoo of putting myself out there and asking questions, I feel relieved. But when I sit down at my computer to write the story, I always have a moment of paralysis where I'm worried I forgot how, or I won't be able to do it this time. It's in my nature to doubt myself. My editor tells me that feeling eases with experience, but also that it never completely goes away.
Being a science writer is not like riding a bike. It's a lot more like the back handspring on beam. It's like being afraid to jump backwards, and hopefully doing it anyway. And I think that analogy also applies more generally to being an adult.
Today, I spent a humiliating hour and a half pedaling laboriously up and down my street and trying to catch myself from falling. I don't really remember how to ride a bike - though I do remember now that I was never very good at it, and that I find it kind of scary. But by the end of the day, I was biking around the neighborhood with at least some degree of confidence. I even found my way to the beach, despite my notoriously poor sense of direction.
It was fun. I'll do it again tomorrow. But it'll probably still be a little scary.
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