When the Spark Goes Out – encouraging an adventurous spirit when girls are young is only half the story

Igniting an Adventurous Spirit

Until I was five I only had my mom. Luckily for me, she was the kind of mom who was always encouraging, and pushed me to do things that scared me or excited me. She facilitated me to keep doing weird things even if she maybe didn’t quite understand, because she knew I liked to and outside opinion didn’t matter. I was also lucky that when my mom got married, she found a man who also believed (and still does believe) that I could do anything I wanted, because I was me. I was stubborn, I was clever and cunning, and I existed on pure determination.

One of the best parts of my mom meeting my dad was the fun and excitement and enjoyment that my dad brought into our lives. He liked to do activities that my mom hadn’t had the opportunity to introduce me to. He was big on things like white water kayaking, camping and mountain biking. My mom, being the go-getter she is, tried to participate in all these activities, but the only one that really stuck for her was mountain biking.

I remember so vividly when my mom started mountain biking. I remember going to bike shops and being so excited by the equipment I didn’t really understand. I remember going to watch her come through her first race, and thinking about how cool it was that so many women were there. And I remember when she joined the Sunflowers.

An all-women’s club, for an activity that was (and very often, almost 20 years later, still is) very heavily male leaning, was probably one of the coolest things “Young Me” had ever seen. Representation-wise, in different portrayals of media, in real life interactions and in just societal preconceived opinions, mountain biking was a “male sport”. I was still at that kid phase where gender wasn’t as starkly on my radar. I had boy and girl friends I picked because I thought they were funny. I played soccer AND I danced, I loved purple and green as favourite colours, and Thomas the Tank was my favourite show. I was raised very gender-neutral for a late 90’s to early 2000’s upbringing, but even so, mountain biking seemed manly and wasn’t something I had considered being an option for me.

I got to start going on trails with my parents when I was around 9-10, and when I was 11 and finally able to join the Sunflowers as a seed, I was so excited. From ages 11-14, I loved the feeling of being on a bike on trails. I joined my parents in races, I volunteered for the Sunflowers whenever I could.

The Spark Burns Out

When I stopped riding in high school, it was for a lot of reasons. My mental health was probably the biggest factor, as within the same 6-jmonth period, I quit dance, riding and swimming. I stopped leaving my bed for a while in there, so I definitely will attribute some of my refusal to get back on a bike to that. Another huge part of quitting riding in particular, though, was that I reached that stage of adolescence that only other people who grew up fem-presenting and female really understand in our bones, as it’s a universal experience.

In my periphery around 15, I started receiving and internalizing the message that, as a woman, (something I had until that point loved being,) it was my duty and responsibility to shrink myself, my interests, my personality, what made me me, in order to eradicate my presence in “boy spaces”. I don’t even know if it was ever actually a verbal message I received. Certainly not from my mother. But it was an unspoken, subliminal message. Even with all the feminism I grew up around, the efforts society had made toward women’s equality at that point, the effort my parents put in to build an environment separate from it, it was still a resounding, reverberating, ever-present message. And this is the part that highlights why groups like the Sunflowers are important.

Girlhood at its very core is finding truth and acceptance in being seen for who you are and what you stand for, what you enjoy, and what makes you into the person you really are. Female and fem presenting people spend our entire lives past that threshold of inclusivity in our childhoods trying to chase that wonder and belief in ourselves and understanding that we can achieve anything. We spend the rest of our lives hearing our worth is tied up in our (gender appropriate!) career, facilitating and fulfilling a desire to have a family and doting on our partner/husbands. We do all of these things with a constant feeling of something missing as we chase after the feeling we had when the world was ours and everything was within our grasp if we only just reached out for it.

Women-specific spaces in non-gender conforming activities/situations are integral for lightening the load of complicated feelings we carry. It is comradery in that shared experience of being excluded and seen as decorations and having our hopes and dreams downplayed and patronized and crushed until we don’t know who we are or what we like because we’ve spent so long being told we don’t, aren’t and can’t. I truly think my mental health would have been significantly less detrimental if I hadn’t felt like I was lost and unwelcome in my own body and life.

Rekindling the Spark

There was one point in my life being on my bike was one of my most favourite activities, and now this coming year it will have been 10 years since I’ve been mountain biking. And, to continue the spirit of honesty, I’m really scared to get back on my bike at all. I have body image issues and mixed with my anxiety I’ve created this horrible, irrational fear in my mind that plays out like this: I get back on my bike. I’m riding, enjoying myself, I’m soundtrack-playing in the background, happy. Then, record scratch, it collapses beneath me, I injure myself, and then I have to explain to people that I was too huge for my bike.

Now, I understand I have a massively unrealistic reason for my fear, but I think the sentiment is one that is shared and widely known among humans as a whole, but especially women. We’re scared to do something for whatever reason, so we don’t do that thing because of that fear, and perpetuate the anxiety, finally allowing the formation of a feeling of shame to go with it.

And this is what I was hoping to achieve. Going into writing this “testimonial” of sorts, the continual thought was “if I can help one person feel less alone and maybe a little bit more like they want to try to push themselves to face their fears, then it’s worth it.” I’m going to keep showing up and keep forcing myself to at least make an attempt to get back on my bike. And I really hope to see you out there too.

Meet, well...Me

sydnicks

Nov 28, 2023

9 min read

Young woman sitting on green outdoor couch with small white dog in her lap — Me and Lucky enjoying the outdoors

Well, hi! I realized it was probably important to write a little bit of a “get to know me” post, as my first post was just a small glimpse into a small portion of my thoughts, beliefs and feelings.

My full name is Sydney Robin Walsh-Hill Nicks, but I was born Sydney Robin Walsh-Hill, adding the Nicks instead of replacing the Walsh-Hill when my mom got remarried.

On paper, who I am is pretty simple with minimal but notable achievements. I’m turning 24 in December 2023, I received my BSci in Interdisciplinary Science in May, my concentrations being in biology and chemistry and I’m interested in learning more about the world of business. I’m both an older and younger sibling of 5 kids, two older and two younger, a true middle child. And I’m very passionate about things that a lot of people ignore or find redundant and unnecessary.

But this is why we don’t take people’s surface level, “on paper” description of themselves as who they really are. Because I and my story are so much more interesting than that very concise and, honestly, boring and tiny paragraph about me. All of those things are true about me. I am 24, I do have a degree and I am a daughter, a sibling and a lover of learning and growing. But what that doesn’t tell you about me is that I am also partially adopted. It doesn’t tell you that I have struggled with my mental health immensely since I was 3. It doesn’t explain that it took me much longer than my peers to get my higher education completed because I spent a long time trying to keep myself going to get where I am, even with my family issues and physical health issues and adversity. And I think it’s important for that transparency to be a part of this blog if we’re to help each other feel less alone.

My father died before I was born in a car accident, and that has really been a catalyst for what feels like the rest of my life. My mom is the coolest, strongest person I have ever met, because as I’ve gotten older and closer to being the age she was when she was pregnant with me and lost him, I get more and more awestruck at how it’s possible she’s so well adjusted. When she got remarried when I was five, it was to an endlessly kind and selfless man, who adopted me and has been my dad ever since I got to meet him. But for a lot of people, that has meant that my dead father shouldn’t have affected me in the way that it has.

I remember so distinctly being 3 years old and trying to figure out how I could die so I could go be with my dad. I remember the devastation of every friend I had having a mom AND a dad, and not being able to explain where mine was, because I was the only 3/4 year old in my kindergarten class who understood what death really was.

When I look back on it, I really should’ve been in therapy as soon as I was aware of my consciousness. Two year old me should have been in art, music, and play therapy. I think all the time about how different my life would be, how different I would be, if I hadn’t just raw-dogged dealing with being born into trauma. I’ve had anxiety since I was probably 3 realistically, and I only got diagnosed, treated and medicated when I was 18. It was a lot of unnecessary struggling for someone so young, and for so long.

All throughout my high school career, I deeply struggled with my eating, anxiety and depression. I really didn’t care about my grades, I skipped multiple meals every single day, I picked the absolutely wrong people to spend all of my time with, and I spiraled out of control with all of these things for years. When I was in 11th grade I was pretty much catatonic aside from doing the absolute bare minimum to seem like I was fine. I went to school, I went to a youth group one night a week and I went out with friends. Other than that, I napped pretty much every night after school. I had a lot of self-harming tendencies. I hurt myself physically, I was partying a lot, and I drank leftover alcohol alone in my room on particularly anxiety-inducing school nights. I isolated myself from a lot of the things (and people) that had made me happy at one point or another, because they turned into anxiety triggers. I am so grateful for my own strength in how I’ve spent the last 5/6 years getting a handle on my mental health. I took most of covid to learn how to turn that weakness into something positive about me, and that will always be something I am so proud of. But I am often saddened when I think about how loudly the girl I was, was crying out for help, and how many times it was completely disregarded and flat out ignored.

When I graduated high school, I struggled for a long time with my path post-secondary. I entered into a Bachelor of Paralegal studies and somewhat enjoyed that, but there was a lot going on outside of the classroom, both for me and for my family at home, and I ended up dropping out after the first year had ended, moving home. That September, I tried a general Poli Sci degree at Brock University, as it was local, I could be at home in case of emergency, and I was able to switch my major to a BioChem by second year if I proved with my grades that I was serious. But halfway through September, I got in a car accident on my way to class, and thankfully I was in my darling, trusty minivan and only came away with a concussion, whiplash and a smashed in door. But the trauma of being in an accident of the type that took my father from our lives completely shook me, for a long time. Every time I went to campus I cried. My car got sent to the scrapyard, which was way more emotionally traumatizing than it probably should’ve been. And I dropped out of yet another program, reinforcing to myself that school was too hard for me, and I was too stupid for it. After that, I worked for about a year, and then tried again to go take my Bachelor in Paralegal studies. Things had calmed down at home, I felt that I was in a better place than before, and I was desperate to prove to everyone around me, but more importantly to myself, that I was completely capable of completing something, anything really. And that turned out to be a complete disaster. I was not, in fact, in a better place. It’s possible that I have never been worse. I couldn’t leave the house without having a panic attack. I was hurting myself again, for the first time since midway through high school. And I was really unsure what the point of trying so hard to keep myself alive was.

For almost everyone, if you ask them what covid means to their lives, they’ll tell you that it was the worst thing they’ve experienced firsthand, the worst thing that has ever happened to them. For me, I think covid truly saved my life. I came home before the end of second semester, and I had to stay here for years. March of 2020 is what some people refer to as the beginning of the worst few years they’ve ever been through, but I like to call it the beginning of the rest of my life. I finished my semester, dropped out of something for the final time, and stayed home for the entirety of lockdown. I decided to try and do post-secondary one more time, and I applied, got into and registered for a Bachelor of Science. And I just worked on myself.

There’s something about having every single distraction you could come up with ripped away for the long foreseeable future that forces you to look at yourself, REALLY look at yourself, and really say, “what the hell am I doing, and who the hell am I? I sat for almost 2 straight years asking myself those questions. I did so much journaling, I can’t even begin to explain to you how much. I retaught myself piano and guitar and I wrote so many songs, something I really loved to do before it all went away. And I played the most intense, and hard, and necessary game of rip-yourself-apart and put-it-all-back-together. I will be thankful for what covid gave me for the rest of my life, because it forced me to give myself my life back. I really don’t know where or who I would be, or IF I would be, were it not for the forced period of learning self-acceptance, self-reflection and self-improvement.

Somewhere in there, I had a health scare. It was the beginning of 2021, I went to the doctor and got some weird blood-work results, which pole-vaulted my life into a new type of chaos. I spent all of 2021 and 2022 in and out of hospitals and doctors appointments and getting bloodwork. Having to do things in the health field during covid sucked, because I went through most of it alone. I wasn’t allowed to bring anyone with me, so when I had to go for 12 hour deep penetrating scans, or sit in the hospital waiting for an ultrasound I didn’t have time to sit on a waitlist for, I had to do that with whoever I had brought with me waiting in the car. My parents are wonderful people for doing that, because during that 12 hour scan, my dad sat in his truck outside the hospital, taking work calls and waiting for updates the entire time. In 2022, the protocols got a little more lenient, which was great because my condition had progressed and I had to go to the ER at least 5 times that year. I had gallbladder issues from stones from rapid weight loss, and that is a pain I could not ever wish on my worst enemy. It is, to date, the worst pain I’ve ever experienced. But it ended up that the stones were also caused by a diverticulum, or “little flap of skin” that had filled up and blocked one of my bile ducts. This was discovered, because on my last trip to the ER, they did my bloodwork, and I was septic. I had sepsis, from my bile being backed up into my bloodstream, and it had been happening for quite a while, causing an infection. In my blood. Meaning I almost died. I’ve never seen an ER doctor afraid before, and I hope to never see it again. I had to stay in the hospital for 5 days, waiting to find out whether my condition would get worse or not. Thankfully, I had an upper endoscopy done, they found the blockage and they cut it so it couldn’t happen again, and I got to go home finally. Then, within the same month, I got my gallbladder removed! No more blockage annnnd no more pain. But I look back on that year all the time, because that was terrifying, and changed the shape of my life and the way I view things forever. Very small things no longer feel as huge as they would have before that experience. I refuse to look at that awful experience as a bad thing, because I have come away with such a renewed sense of what matters and what just can’t.

And that brings me to now. I finally finished post-secondary school, and on time too, in spite of all the mental and physical strife I experienced (including taking an exam 12 hours before my hospital admittance!). I gained a lot of my weight back, which was disappointing, especially with my history with food. But, I also sort of feel a certain amount of excitement to be able to start over again knowing I can’t get deterred by my health that way ever again. And I’m also at multiple crossroads again. I’m still having issues with my overall wellbeing, I’m not sure what my next move will be professionally, and I sit here a little bit lost and confused once more. And this is why I feel I am creditable, capable and merited to blog about the things I hope to write about. I have been through so many hard things, and will probably go through so many more. And if there’s one thing I learned from going it alone through all the things I did, it’s that it is so necessary to be transparent, candid and open about the struggles we face and the failures we endure and the falls we take, because it is the only guarantee in life that someone else is probably going to be going through something similar. And what is the point of having the knowledge of experience if you don’t share it with others, if only to make someone else feel a little bit less alone.

When the Spark Goes Out – encouraging an adventurous spirit when girls are young is only half the story

Meet, well...Me

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