Any attempt by me to ride any sort of bike has been an abject failure, bike riding is not something I am destined to do in this lifetime.
Balance Is Not My Friend
Sound sensitivity (read hyperacusis) affects me in different ways, and one of the key ones is that my balance if awful all of the time, worse when I am tired, and impossible when I ah stressed. Why most people don’t notice is that I automatically adjust and rarely mention the difficulties I am having. People don’t or don’t want to understand so I just adapted in ways that are automatic now.
And sometimes how it affects my balance is amusing, at least to me, because my clumsiness is simply who I am and instead of letting it get to me, I embrace it as simply who I am.
I Grew Up Different
We didn’t have bikes as kids, none of us. I don’t know if it was a common thing in Australia at the time, but it was never for us. Mum was super careful with us as children and our lives were very limited.
We lived vicariously through our next door neighbours, they had all the cool things we were not allowed to have. They had three wheeler bikes that we could ride around the back yard, or we lived in a court and it was deemed safe to ride there. I was so jealous.
There Was One Time I Was Successful
I was 15, in the US as an exchange student, and my host father was horrified that as a kid I couldn’t ride a bicycle. He took it upon himself to teach me. It was in winter on our icy driveway. After many, many tries I was able to do circles on the driveway, but I never took it past there.
Maybe because it was winter when I learnt and by the time spring arrived my focus was elsewhere. I was happy with walking (less likely of falling) and there was a bus at the bottom of the hill we lived on.
So I Bought a Motorbike At 17
My boyfriend at 17 (yes I have had a few of them) was into motorbikes, and so was I by proxy. I figured past failures were no reason that I couldn’t ride a motorised bike. After all how hard can it be?
So I went ahead and bought a Yamaha 125 silver motorbike. Now I couldnt ride so my boyfriend S offered to teach me how on his new off road bike, and the outcome gave me a bit of an insight as to how this would all go.
We met up on a Saturday morning near his home on an open piece of land ringed by blackberry bushes. Now I sat on the bike and drifted off when he told me what I should do, I didn’t hear a thing. I came back to reality when he said my name, and not understanding the correlation between a clutch and an accelerator, and had no idea with the brake. So I bunny hopped and stalled the bike.
I couldn’t do the kickstart thingy, so he started it for me and gave me the instructions again and this time I actually listened. Certain that this time I would get it, I released the clutch, revved the engine too much, and performed an elegant bunny hop (a really big one) into the centre of a big bunch of prickly bushes.
By the time we were able to extract me and the bike from the thorns, I was no longer welcome to have lessons on his precious bike.
Relegated To Formal Classes
I got this. There was a riding school close to me, they used mopeds, no clutch, so this was going to be a piece of cake, right? So I rocked up, about 5 in the class and I was allocated the bike I would ride.
I tried, I really tried, but every time I started moving okay, my instinct was to put my feet down (looking back it was my balance imbalance) which is not great, and throws everything into a spin. No matter how many times I tried I could not overcome this reflex.
I was asked to leave the class, I was a disruption. That was a low point.
I did try private lessons after this, but the same thing happened over and over. It felt like I was not meant to ride a motorbike. Not everything we try we are meant to do, and the balance thing does restrict me in some ways, and I just had to accept it.
pEace Out