The DR650

I've been on bikes since I was eleven. Dirt first, then street. Forty-six years of knowing exactly what to do.

A few months after the SDH in 2016, my neurologist made a point of motorcycles being off the table while my brain was still healing. That even a parking lot tip-over with a helmet on would wrap me permanently, so I sold them. Not just because of the risk. The finances were shaky, the business was in ruins, the reputation I'd spent years building was gone. A result of the prior six years clutching the delusion of holding full-time caregiving and a one-man business simultaneously. Gen X, I'm looking at you.

So the bikes were just part of what the avalanche took.

The neurologist cleared me in early 2020, just ahead of COVID. By that point the illness cascade (poly-autoimmunity and the rest of the stack) was in full swing. Then esophageal cancer surveillance had entered the room. So there were more pressing matters than getting back on a bike. Thus the clearance sat there, unused.

That was a long time ago.

The DR650 is my ex's. Been stored at my place. Not mine to sell.

Last few months, traffic and fuel prices climbing since the Iran situation. Six plus dollars a gallon for California gas made it make sense. No moment, no decision. Just a Tuesday, and the bike was there.

First thing I noticed was instant familiarity. Zero hesitation, forty-six years doesn't go anywhere, apparently. The hyper-awareness, reflexes, timing, muscle memory, and it's still there. Needs a little dusting off, but it's all there.

I think I expected to have to work harder to find it again. It was just there waiting.

Riding was such an embedded part of my identity, and before that so was fishing and hiking. For a long time, losing the capacity for those things felt like losing the things themselves — and that felt like losing who I was.

That's not quite right or even true, but it's hard to see with so many years invested.

What I've come to understand, slowly, over the better part of a decade is that the things we do are not who we are. There's a huge amount of grief and loss that comes from capacity loss, and no amount of reframing makes that not true.

Wellness culture wants to skip straight to adaptation, I'm not so sure you can. For me, I had to sit in the grief, the loss, the identity that was built around those things. I needed to work through the trauma underneath before rebuilding capacity could even make sense as a project.

The work came after. Not instead of.

I'm not back, not the way I was. The remote alpine fishing dream is still a project in progress. The long rides are still ahead somewhere.

I rode to the gas station on Tuesday on someone else's bike, and forty-six years of knowing was still there, intact and it made me smile.

Still rolling.

Connective Tissue:

→ Grind-Induced Zero Day
→ Aliveness at the Edge
→ Act Zero: Prologue

Related:

→ Layer One: Start Where You Are
→ Trauma-Illness Connection
→ Raising the Floor: Tools That Helped Me Function Again

Also:

→ Rebuilding Purpose After Trauma-Driven Achievement
→ Connection, Not Completion: What Are We Healing For?
→ The Quiet Return

← Back to Field Notes

* peer reflections: not medical or therapy advice. *