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.