Hybrids

So... um, happy new year?

Life's been crazy lately, and I'm sure I'll talk about why in another post. But this one's been simmering on the back burner of my brain for long enough that I need to just publish it and move on. Enjoy.

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A month or two ago I had a bit of an epiphany as I was on my lunch time bike ride.

I'd finally gotten myself another mountain bike, to replace the one that I lost in my big summer crash. It's a full-suspension bike, meaning that it has shock absorbers on the front fork, and also on the frame itself, below the seat. This is a first for me: I've owned plenty of road bikes, and my last bike was more rugged than a typical road-only bike, but this is my first full-blown "mountain bike."

Honestly, I'm having a hard time getting used to it.

The thing about full-suspension bikes, particularly the cheaper ones (like mine), is that they tend to be a little "bouncy": the shocks don't just cushion you from the big bumps, they operate pretty much constantly. So it leads to a bit of a weird rhythm that I can't quite get the hang of (yet, ze says hopefully...?). Plus it feels like I'm sitting too low, even though I have the seat post fully extended.

Maybe I just need time to adjust...

On the other hand, there's my new road bike, which I bought early in the summer (pre-crash) so that I could participate in the group rides that a friend in the area often does on Saturday mornings. It's tall—I almost have to get on my tiptoes to get my leg over the top bar—and the brake handles aren't where I expect them to be because it's a road-style cockpit, and my old bike had mountain-style handlebars. So on that bike, too, I feel a little unsteady. And frankly, a little unsafe.

I don't want to sound petty or ungrateful. This is definitely a "first world problem." The fact that I have a sufficient income to actually own two nice bikes during a recession is a real blessing. But I think my last bike really spoiled me.

My got-broken-in-the-crash bike was a crossover, sometimes called a hybrid. Ostensibly, it was a mountain bike, with the straight handlebars and shocks on the front fork, but the frame was much closer in appearance to a road bike's frame than to my new mountain bike's. I could ride it more or less upright, like a road bike, but the cockpit gave me the more precise and immediate control of a mountain bike. Its tires were also wider and knobbier than regular road tires, so I could ride the beat up, worn down streets around my office with confidence, then jump off the road and navigate dirt, rock and root-covered trails with equal aplomb.

I miss it.

So here's that epiphany I mentioned earlier: while riding, thinking about how weird the rhythm of my new mountain bike felt, and how I couldn't go as fast as I wanted to be going, etc etc etc, I realized that I feel the same way about my gender as I do about my bikes!

Yeah, shocker. :-P

Since last spring, when I started to earnestly examine my feelings of gender incongruence, I've been thinking a lot about what it means to me, what's really going on in my head. For years, I basically dealt with it by publicly acting more macho than I felt and rarely sharing my true feelings on a subject, and occasionally dressing en femme in private when the pressure got to be too much for me. I would swing back and forth between those two extremes for YEARS before I finally figured out that neither one felt entirely comfortable, exactly "right" for who I was.

Now that I'm out to my sweetheart, one thing she's felt very strongly about is that I not dress anymore, and I'm trying to honor that request by finding other coping strategies. For the most part, this has been easier that I expected it to be, because I'm finally allowing myself to be me, and not the totally-not-a-transperson-seriously-don't-look-at-me-that-way mask that I used to wear.

So I guess what I'm saying is, I think I'm slowly coming to the realization that I'm not the same kind of transperson as most of my online friends—and that's okay.