Every Day

I want to quit literally every day. I never intended to be a local advocate (my profession is as a global writer) and I hate it (which is why I’m completing this shift-in-focus starting November 1). I’d like to get to the point with bike riding that I am at with growing healthy food (for which I used to advocate as much as I do for bike stuff now) — it’s just something I do.

But every single time I leave my house on a bicycle, I take my life in my hands and the egregious, pervasive actions that misrepresent actual rubber-hits-the-road safe access by numerous cities throughout Metro Atlanta just keeps getting worse. My local leaders in the City of Dunwoody, in particular, should be ashamed of themselves. I am deeply, deeply disappointed in them because I know them personally and I know they know better.

Plus, my Twitter timeline is filled with death, death, and more death of people riding bikes (often children) all over the USA and collectively we can’t seem to turn the tide. (Well, yes we can, but we don’t.)

So I carry my rollerskates with me everywhere now and I make a stop or two every single day (usually right after yet another driver threatens me, or I experience yet another city-led indignity) to re-center joy (in all its conundrum).

And almost every day as well I get a message from someone close to home or around the world telling me that something I said or did or wrote in one of my books made a difference for them — or they need some sort of support that I can provide from my lived and learned experience. And that has been helpful to me. So if that has been you, thank you. It has kept me going for one more day.

And, hopeless optimist that I am (still, despite it all), maybe that one more day will finally, finally be the tipping point.