I was never very good on a bike as a child. I learned how to ride one kind of late in my childhood--we lived on a really steep hill so there was never a good place to start. We would drive to a big open area or go a few streets over where it was flat, and my dad would set me up, giving me a little push, and I would fall down or just kind of lean to the side when I got overwhelmed with the movement and lack of control of it all.

I finally got it one day, suddenly, when the bike was on the ground in the driveway and a neighbor mentioned my inability out loud for what was maybe the first time. I picked it up, hopped on, and rode away with her.

I've always had this fantasy of living somewhere that allowed me to bike everywhere. Minneapolis was probably that place, but I didn't know the area too well and we lived really close to a highway and the winter is long and icy. When I lived in downtown Roanoke as a graduate student, I would hop on my bike, books in the basket, and ride to the coffee shop to work on a paper. Those nights always felt really magical.

When I was in college, I dated a boy who rode a bicycle but never really understood me. When I was anxious or sad, he'd ask me to be calmer or happier, thinking it was helpful, but it always felt so impatient to me. His mom served whole grain bread and overcooked pork chops and listened to church sermon podcasts in the kitchen. She was kind and I loved her so much but I just didn't fit with her son. Maybe she knew. It took him a while to figure it out. I think I always knew, but I kind of held my breath and hoped that no one would catch on. We shared just enough things in common to confuse ourselves into thinking that we were right for each other--among them a love of running, J.Crew sweaters, and political values that I later abandoned.

I really never think about him, but I am grateful for some of the things he shared with me--mainly his Regina Spektor collection, but also the things you learn when someone you really love breaks your heart. How to be on your own. How to love yourself despite feeling shitty. How to give cyclists enough room on the roads when you're in your car. How to move on; how to look back years later and smile.

This post is in response to the following prompt: "Tell me a memory associated with a bicycle." (From Old Friend from Far Away, page 67.) If you write a response of your own, please share a link below in the comments! For a list of some previous prompt, you can check out this post (or just search the Old Friend from Far Away category below).

I have tried again with so many things in my life--wakeboarding, meal prep on Sundays, certain books I started but never picked up again, not killing another succulent, kombucha--but the most important one has been my consistent attempt at a life with less anxiety.

I am afraid of so many things. Swimming in open water, the possibility that my jaw is moving out of place and a surgeon is going to have to break and reset it. But I used to be afraid of so many more. The apartment I lived in right after college. Flying. Darkness. That my high school boyfriend would cheat on me again. That my second college boyfriend would cheat on me for the first time. The basement of my parents' old office. Living alone.

Over the summer, I lived in Minnesota by myself while Rob worked in Charlotte all week. It was the first time in several years that I had slept anywhere without him or a roommate or even a parent in a room down the hall, and it was not nearly as easy as I hoped it would be. But, even halfway across the country from my friends and family, I found a way to make it work.

There was a time, two or three years ago, when I would call my parents from my apartment in the middle of the night and proceed to completely freak them out--sobbing and unable to move from my bed, unable to put into words what was wrong with me. One of them would offer to come pick me up, and I would only get more upset, embarrassed about being a woman in her 20s who couldn't seem to get her shit together enough to go to bed.

Sometimes I still get overwhelmed at a random moment one afternoon. Sometimes I wake up suddenly in the middle of the night, struggling to catch my breath and calm down enough to fall back asleep. Now I know to pop a Valium and give myself fifteen minutes. And when I wake up the next day after a panic attack or having given in to the urge to bolt in some crowded bar or concert venue, I know to be kind to myself--to not beat myself up over the way I felt when I was being irrational.

Every day that I decide to treat my anxiety with patience, love, and understanding is a day where it leaves me alone a bit more. We all struggle with something, don't we? But we're all in this together, and we're going to be okay.

This post is in response to the following prompt: "What did you start over again?" (From Old Friend from Far Away, page 246.) If you write a response of your own, please share a link below in the comments! For a list of some previous prompts, you can check out this post (or just search the Old Friend from Far Away category below).

This is a wish: When you are writing about a radish, that you and the radish meet face to face. That you stay specific, present, and direct and through your true intention the radish becomes RADISH. You instantaneously summon the particular and also give life to the essence of that buried root plucked up red and edible...

Listen to wishes like you listen to the wind. You don't think: what is it saying? You let the wind howl. That's all. Autumn will come, the night turn blue, the harvest over. Radish will grow grainy and zinnia will freeze. Someday you, too, will be gone...Let your root and flower have an earnest intention and a light touch...

What wish do you have, that you hold and can also let go of?

--Natalie Goldberg, Old Friend from Far Away

More often than I'd like to admit, I feel a bit overwhelmed. I feel like I go weeks and weeks without writing something of worth. I haven't really read a full book in months. There are boxes to pack and this blog to maintain and a newsletter to send out and sometimes I find myself wishing I went to church? I don't know what church I want to go to or what I'm looking for there, but when I feel a little bit lost I often feel jealous of devout Catholics and Baptists and Mormons.

I imagine that moving to North Carolina and living in a two bedroom apartment will somehow change something about me--that I'll become much more organized, with my desk sitting in a room that isn't the living room or our bedroom. I will work out every day instead of say "I should really work out today." And I will cook more meals and clean the kitchen immediately after and we will have friends over for dinner and random afternoon visits with cups of coffee on the couch and expensive candles lit on a pretty tray next to a vase of fresh flowers from the market.

Rob and I hope to stay in one place for a while after this, but then I wonder--what will life be like without that reset every August or so, when we pack up our things and do something else? I tend to burrow into my life and get comfortable in a way that's almost lazy; but I'm hoping that this keeps me grounded in a way I haven't known before. That I find some roots and dig them deep, and finally throw away the boxes.