ACTUALLY, I CAN...

i am excited to share this post today! i wrote this piece several weeks ago. i had seen on IG that liv cycling was holding a contest called "actually, i can". they were asking for women to share their story (& a pic) on what those words mean to them, how riding helps you train your mind and face fears. the contest began on april 8, 2016 and runs until september 30th, 2016. a weekly winner is selected every friday until september. if you win on a friday, you are then eligible for the grand finale prize draw which is a liv bike of your choice!

"oh liv, you light up my life!"

well, that sounded right up my alley! plus, i ride a liv bike so i'm partial to the brand too! but i was a bit hesitant and scared to go for it. self doubt and anxiety kicked in whenever i sat down to write my 'actually, i can' story. i told the hubster about it and he encouraged me to go for it. not too long after that, taylor and mara dropped by for a visit and i was telling them about it too. taylor said,  "do it, mom! do it right now! otherwise you won't." 

so you know what? i did. i wrote it that evening with all the kids encouraging and supporting me. at one point, i got very overwhelmed and so anxious that i wanted to give up...or at least put it off for another day. plus, i felt so bad that taylor & mara were over and i was sequestered in another room writing...so much for family bonding! i told them, "i can't do this. look at me all up in my head trying to write while you are here to hang out and i'm not even visiting with you!" 

but they just laughed and kept encouraging me and yelling, "you can do it!"

i finally finished writing. then mara designed the graphics on my photo. then we submitted it just in time for the first friday of the contest. i had a lot of anxiety and 'not good enoughs' running through my head... but i was also excited and hopeful i had a shot at winning. 

friday dawned and i nervously checked the liv cycling IG account...

i didn't win.

i felt so deflated...whooosh....just like someone let all the air out of my tires.

neither did i win the next week.

or the one after that or the one after that.

:(

then today my picture and story were posted on the liv cycling IG with this message attached;

"One of the very first submissions for the Actually, I Can contest came to us from ticks and trust. Ever since, we haven't been able to get this amazing story out of our heads. At Liv, we are believers that a bike is more than just a bike and it is stories like these that prove bikes can train your mind and make you realize...Heck, yeah, I can! Congrats  to {ticks and trust}, our week 5 winner!"

i promptly burst into tears and then did a happy dance! 

i am truly honored and delighted to be chosen! riding has/is helping me re-define how i see myself and that i am more than the sum total of my illnesses and struggles. life is hard - each and every one of us carry with us pain and suffering. my hope is that sharing my story will inspire other women to believe that they are MORE THAN the fears they face and the challenges they live with.

the following is the piece that i submitted (albeit, there are a few extra wordy details here that had to be cut out in order for it to post on IG):

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

this past summer (2015), i tried down-hill mountain biking for the first time.

and i LOVED it.

like totally and completely LOVE LOVE LOVED IT.

all it took was that first ride down a mountain bike park to put biking in my blood. it was one of the most liberating, revolutionary, empowering, life-changing moments i have experienced.

i am obsessed with it now.

like i can't get enough of it obsessed.

it was during that first rip down that mountain at silver star bike park that i realized actually, i can get my life back.

i lost almost the entirety of my 30s to a chronic debilitating illness called neurological lyme disease. i spent half of that decade of my life hooked up to daily IVs and struggling to get out of bed. 

in the darkest hours of the past 10 years, i feared i had lost the 'best years' of my life. even if i got some semblance of health back, what kind of life awaited me? most of the time i was terrified and in pain and now i was over 40.

and isn't it all downhill after 40?

oh yeah baby it is!

on my bike, i am liberated from the pathogens that wreak havoc on my body and my mind. when i ride, i feel strong, brave and wild. my bike keeps me grounded and makes my fly. i'm not better {yet} but mountain biking has given me a belief in my recovery, trust in my body and is restoring my mind.

and it makes me feel like a fearless bad-ass to boot.

when i rip down a mountain i know to my inner most being that i am strong. i am brave. and actually, i can get my life back. one ride at a time. 

thank you to liv cycling for the amazing work you do to encourage and empower women! 



**got my fingers crossed that i win the bike in september!**

WONDERLAND

i'm just another Alice who's trying to find her way out of her head

 and into a wonderland. 

                                  ~V. Nada

wonderland trail - fall 2015

as i mentioned in healing takes courage, i've been dealing with a flare up of panic attacks, uncontrollable vomiting and endless, pink tears recently. i'm not entirely sure what is all contributing to it but it had the markings of what a strep flare (pandas) looks like with me (sore throat, sudden onset panic attacks, intensifying anxiety and rapid weight loss) i'm pretty sure there are other factors at play as well but for the time being, i'm back on amoxicillin and awaiting a phone appt with DR H (lyme doc) later this week. as per usual, the amoxi brought me back to baseline anxiety & stopped the panic attacks within 12 hours of first dose.

that's the magic of moxi! lol 

when my anxiety is heightened, i feel caged and edgy. i have an inner trembling that i cannot shake and i can't sit still. since august (2015) biking has been my escape from that. so last week when i had a sudden and abrupt intensifying in my anxiety i pushed myself to go for a ride - even though i wasn't feeling all that well physically.

about 45 minutes into the ride - i had my first outburst of uncontrollable sobbing followed by a panic attack (this would be the first of what would be many in the days to come but the first time it's ever happened on a ride)

the fact that it happened during a bike ride fully did me in. 

Wonderland - Spring 2016

riding is the one place and the only time i am totally free from anxiety - my head is clear and i feel happy and free. and yet, there i  was on my knees on the side of a trail sobbing and shaking and feeling like i was losing my mind.

i was unable to escape this sense of overwhelming grief and alarming sense of doom, my thoughts spinning wildly, chest raggedly heaving, stomach painfully constricting, and an inner trembling so intense it knocks the wind out of me and causes my legs to give out beneath me. a panic attack is like toppling head first into a rabbit hole -

Rabbit Hole - the term comes from Alice in Wonderland where she fell down the Rabbit Hole into some bizarre stuff. It is commonly used as an expression or euphemism for a portal to a bizarre world with significantly strange happenings and extremely surreal situations.

its a chaotic whirlwind of surreal images and overpowering emotions and it tosses me mercilessly to and fro - the gale force winds of anxiety quickly sweep away my ability to discern truth from lies - during an anxiety or panic attack, i truly believe that this is me, this is how i always am and how i will always be - i am wholly convinced of that as fact not fiction. i don't lose touch with reality but i can't find my way out of the rabbit hole...and now that was happening on a ride!?!

are you freaking kidding me?

that overwhelmed me with a sense of desperation, sorrow and rage.

is there no part of me that can be untouched by the scourge of strep? is there no place left untainted by the sting of lyme? is there nothing sacred nor any place protected from where the loathsome tendrils of anxiety seeps in and chokes life into a limp, lifeless, tear-stained rag doll.

it eventually passed and i got my back on my bike and rode down the mountain. but i was left rattled. unsettled. grieved. and fearful that i had lost the one thing that literally keeps me sane.

could it happen again? 

biking is my happy place. the sense of wonder and joy and freedom i experience on my bike is something i cherish. 

could that have been taken from me now?

i've lost so much to these diseases - could i have now lost this thing that has been my beauty in the ashes?

Wonderland - Spring 2016

those questions and thoughts haunted me over the next few days...i knew i'd have to set about to answering them with another ride but i was too physically and emotionally drained. 

6 days passed.  

then sunday dawned and i looked at the hubster and said, 

"today we ride for tomorrow we may die."

ok. i didn't exactly say that...i'm almost but not quite that dramatic. lol.

we tossed around some ideas on where to ride. i had it in my mind and heart, that i wanted to head up to squamish and ride a trail called 'wonderland'. we had ridden up there once before (fall 2015) and i just remember that wonderland had filled me with wonder - with it's spectacularly vivid hues of green, eclectic mix of vegetation and towering, moss laden trees it had felt magical and majestic. plus the name of it in context with my life seemed rather fitting (and yes i am dramatic enough to think of that).

off we went.

the trail was everything i remembered it to be 
and
i was everything i am when i am on my bike. 

free. happy. hooting and hollering. alive. giddy.


i was ripping along and thinking, "oh, its just so pretty i should slow down and take it all in...maybe even stop and take some photos..." - but then i thought, 'nah.' - once i'm riding it's hard to stop. i just wanna go. and i wanna go fast.

mere moments after having those thoughts, i got some air going over a drop and my tire hit the end of a root that was poking through the loam. instant flat. i have tubeless tires so that takes skill! 

but the flat did not deflate my mood.  i took the moment to stop and smell the forest. hear the birds. to be still. i snapped some photos...and i even learned how to change a flat.

wonder of all wonders, i was able to be fully in the moment without movement or sound. 

sometimes, i listen to music when i ride (just one headphone in) because it helps me with balance and rhythm. ironically, when the flat occurred, i was listening to twenty one pilots song called 'ride'...

"i've been thinking too much. help me.

oh, oh, i'm falling, so i'm taking my time on my ride"

so i took my time on my ride down wonderland. then we booted up to alice lake and had a nice climb up a trail called '50 Shades of Green' and a fun shred down a run called 'Credit Line'...which was full of rocks, berms and root drops that made my heart sing (and no more flats - so no pictures from those trails!)

it was an incredible day soaking in the breathtakingly vibrant vegetation and rad trails...

best of all, it was all ride and NO cycling thoughts!

PS
Wonderland is also a walking trail. so if you don't ride you can still enjoy it - i highly recommend checking it out!

PPS
it's tick season so be tick aware! wear repellents and do tick checks!

CHRONIC SORROW

"chronic sorrow is the presence of recurring intense feelings of grief in the lives of parents or caregivers with children who have chronic health conditions. at it's core, chronic sorrow is a normal grief response that is associated with an ongoing living loss. it is the emotion-filled chasm between "what is" versus the parent's view of "what should have been" 

                                                                                          ~susan roos

purged some pent up grief today...

sometimes out of nowhere you are struck by a torrential down pour of overwhelming emotion...some days i have a profound sense of grief for all that has been lost during the past 10 years of chronic illness. there's been a lot of loss. there may be many more years of it to come. adding to that, sparky's recent accident and subsequent hospital visits triggered many painful and distressing memories.

sometimes life just feels overwhelmingly sad and tiring.

grief. fear. sadness. living loss. they are emotions you feel with your whole body, mind and spirit. they are heavy and they suck and it hurts to walk thru them.

healing is hard. it's a steady uphill slog. it's hard, exhausting and ugly. plus i'm dealing with a minor major hair color disaster at the moment so totally NOT feeling so cute right now either. (just keeping it real). part of me is like, "ok, shan, whatever it's ONLY hair" but on the other hand, it is really NOT nice. it's orange and yellow and that's NOT okay.  

some days nothing feels okay and everything feels sad and ugly.

and it all suddenly overpowered me as i was riding up a mountain bike trail on mt. seymour. all i could do was sink into a crumpled heap on the side of the trail, helmet askew over my fried hair, doing the big, loud UGLY CRY.

the grief, the pain, the sadness just bubbled to the surface and tears flowed unchecked down my cheeks splashing on my glasses before slowly rolling off and free-falling to the earth.

as the last few fell, the settled and remained on my glasses. through my blurred vision their pretty purple-pink hue caught my eye.

i saw my pain on my glasses...but the pain on my glasses was reflected in a beautiful light.

PS sorry the snotty kleenex made the shot! but a good cry is very cleansing - especially of the nasal passages! also, i have no idea how or why my tears were pink. probably from too many chemicals on my head 

WHY I RIDE

"when i ride, all the chaos and noise in my head disappears and a calm settles upon me and i find total peace. on my bike i am liberated from the pathogens that wreak havoc on my body and my mind. my bike keeps me grounded yet makes me fly." ~s.

i ride because mountain biking is helping to heal me - mind, body, soul. that is the condensed version...however, the reasons behind riding are multi-faceted. i began writing this 'why i ride' piece several weeks ago. in the course of hammering out my thoughts on riding it morphed into 4 separate pieces on mountain biking. (all of which i'll be posting at some point.)

turns out there are many reasons that i ride. what led me to downhill/enduro riding is the anxiety disorder i have because of the post-strep auto-immune illness i developed in spring of 2014. (read about it here - this is my brave)

here's the thing... the strep thing and resulting mental health issues it caused - broke me mind, body, soul. it shattered my faith. it is something i am still grappling to come to terms with. there is something about being tossed over the edge sanity and plummeting into a rabbit hole of inescapable terror that unmercifully rips you apart and strips you to the core of your naked humanity. 

being blind-sided by intrusive thoughts that come out of thin air and are then accompanied by compulsions to follow through on is a terror i still can't quite find the words to explain. 

Riding is a flight from sadness...it also clears the head as does the hubster's photog skillz

anxiety is a mind trip and it tears down the core of who you are and what you believe yourself to be. at least it did for me. it made me feel weak. useless. unworthy. cowardly. ashamed. i blamed myself for it. i thought i sucked for not being able to suck it up. and i was pretty sure everyone around me thought so too. 

while i am a true, solidly INFJ introvert who needs copious amounts of alone time, being social is something i have always enjoyed. i like people. i like parties. i give speeches. i bare my soul on the internet. so to suddenly live in fear of social interactions has been confounding. painful. isolating. destructive. demoralizing. social anxiety makes you ruminate over every conversation until the words of it - of what you should have said and the dumb things you did say - swirl though your head as a mind-bending tornado of cascading self-doubt and self-hate. 

living with all-consuming fears and a sense of impending doom that i could identify as irrational but still become completely consumed by (despite using all sorts of psychological tools to combat it and prayerfully & fervently pleading for deliverance from it) left me feeling fatally flawed and spiritually defective. 


so that is bit of an insight into my brain on strep... 

i've worked hard in therapy to heal from that and to overcome the residual anxiety that lingers... and the resulting emotional fall out that comes from having your brain, body and life hijacked by multiple chronic, invisible illnesses. i've put in hours and hours and hours of extensive brain re-wiring, trauma work and many other methodologies of healing body, mind and soul - (there are several fundamental processes - as related to lyme -  that i have struggled to integrate as well...but more details about that another day) and they have all been valuable tools in my recovery but no matter how hard i've worked at it, i've struggled with putting the pieces of myself back together and finding peace...until i started biking.

i started single-track trail riding just shortly after my strep diagnosis in spring 2014. when the hubster (who as been riding for his entire life) suggested we try downhill at silver star bike park in vernon, bc this past summer (2015), i was not so sure about that. i googled it. ack. it looked pretty extreme and scary to me...and about the last thing i wanted to do was expose myself to any sort of fear stimulus. after all, i was recovering from another bout of strep throat that had caused a relapse of intense neuro-psych symptoms. i had already been on antibiotic treatment for a few weeks by that time which had brought the worst of the symptoms down to a dull roar but i was still contending with a higher than normal level of anxiety and intrusive, cycling thoughts. i really enjoyed single-track and knew it helped alleviate some of the chaos in my brain but downhill was a whole other world of biking. somehow the thought of barreling down a mountain on 2 wheels didn't seem exactly like a calming activity but i sure as hek did NOT want to get left behind. i knew that would mean spending the day alone with my endless, cycling thoughts. nope. nada. not going to happen. 

i figured being left on my own was scarier than anything any mountain could throw at me.

Up, up and away...on the chair lift at silver star

here's the bottom line:

when your brain is on fire seeking relief over-rides everything...even the physical limitations that lyme holds over my body and the fear of fear itself can motivate you to try something you never in a million years would have tried before ...and maybe that is the silver lining in all of this. after all, fear is what brought me to silver star mountain that day. and that day was a revolutionary, life-changing day for me and it also birthed in me an absolute passion for riding.

you would think that barreling down a mountain as fast as i can go, riding over logs, dropping off of rocks, sling-shooting out of berms and getting airborne would contribute to anxiety but for me it does the opposite. 

riding is my ativan. it is the ONLY thing that relieves my anxiety.

on that first downhill adventure i rode for 6 hours. i took jumps. i did drops. i rode blue. i rode black. i rode as fast as i could go. i hung on for dear life. i had unintentional dismounts. i even face planted. let's be honest - i looked ridiculous...but what i lacked in technique and skill, i made up for with loud enthusiasm.

My first downhill adventure. lol.
i was not trying to look like a flying bandit - the bandana was to help keep the dust out of my face

i whooped. i hollered. i laughed with unbridled joy after every.single.run. just recalling it makes me giddy. my unadulterated enthusiasm totally embarrassed the hubster and sparky but i didn't care... because i had no fear. no anxiety. no cycling thoughts. all the noise in my head just ceased to be. i was free and that was intoxicating.

i was fully present and fully free for the first time in a very long time. i felt strong. wild. free. brave. fierce. capable. independent. happy. bad-ass. i felt all the things i thought i no longer was. and that changed me.

i ride because riding brought me back to me.