When I mention to people that I’m going to ride my bike around Scandinavia this summer the first question they usually ask is if I’m going alone. When I say yes the reactions tend to be split. The first group reacts somewhere along the lines of, “that’s awesome and I wish I was that brave” while the second is closer to “aren’t you scared that something bad will happen to you.” When it’s someone that I don’t know very well I’ll usually give a more generic response, that I am concerned for my own safety and am taking appropriate measures (like traveling in Scandinavia instead of Syria) but more times than I can count by now, they follow with, did you hear about those cyclists in one of the Stans?
They can’t know that I heard about those cyclists in Tajikistan, that they were so much more than cyclists to me, that it was only because of one of those cyclists that I started to really take risks in life and develop into the person I am today. They can’t know that those cyclists are the reason that I finally decided to take action on this trip instead of letting it sit inside my head undeveloped. I think they tend to get it as I choke up and my eyes start to well, that this wasn’t just some news story to me.
Like nearly all women, I know people who have been attacked and I know the dangers that exist out in the world for women, regardless how safe a place is perceived to be. In some ways I feel that traveling alone actually mitigates this danger but you must constantly be on your guard which is exhausting. This type of danger exists everywhere and I don’t feel that I am putting myself in any more danger cycling through Scandinavia than I am cycling to and from work in San Francisco.
Anytime someone responds with the second response, the “aren’t you scared that something bad will happen to you” response, I know that they either don’t know me very well or that they met me later in life. I think it’s related to how I come across in public, as a risk taker who does crazy things that the average person is too scared to do. In my own mind, I’m incredibly conservative and the thing I’m scared of is being too scared to deal with my fear. I’ve always done my best to mitigate risk in every endeavor I take. In this case I am testing my gear under varying conditions, I am learning how to repair my bike, I am choosing to travel to an area that is generally regarded as quite safe, and I pay attention to my surroundings.
I knew this in theory before but unfortunately I now know in practice that sometimes it doesn’t matter how well you mitigate risk. Sometimes that random event happens despite the fact that you’re in a safe region, that you are paying attention, that you are traveling in a group. Sometimes bad things happen. I know this and it saddens me but I can’t let the fear of this stop me because bad things can happen at home too. People asked me about my fear for my safety the whole time I was traveling around Southeast Asia; I came home, people stopped worrying about me, then a bomb went off where I had been standing ten minutes earlier.
For anyone who is still not convinced that I am taking my own safety seriously, those cyclists in Tajikistan, Lauren and Jay and some of their new friends, are at the top of my mind all the time. I started writing this as I was crying because I looked back at an old photo and saw a comment Lauren had left on it. As I plan this trip I keep coming up with questions which I would have sent to Lauren and Jay but now I can’t. I saw how the aftermath of their attack transformed my friends. I am so aware of the consequences of something bad happening and it’d be so easy to pull the plug and not go. That’s when I think back to the time after the bombing when I resolved to leave my comfortable yet deeply unsatisfying life and vowed to always remind myself that bad things happen at home too. There are risks to not making scary decisions and I’d rather take risks related to something I care about than risks related to things that I think I ought to care about.
