Raised a Rider

I started riding motorcycles at age two. In my mind at least.

I was sitting behind my dad, holding onto him. As we passed car after car, he used to tell me we were fishes in the sea, eating all the fish in our way. All I wanted was to swim through the sea and eat the fish ahead.

Growing up, riding was my place for play. It was also, ironically, my place for safety. As a matter of fact, the first thing riding taught me was to measure myself by the amount of play and safety I could handle, emotionally and practically. Put simply, riding is the management of limits — learning how to ride out the balance between how much you can push, lean into the curve, or can handle before losing control. For me the bike was never a place for recklessness, it was where I learned to make decisions and own up to them.

More importantly, bikes were my safe place because it was a family affair. On weekends we’d leave town on motorcycles — one for my mom and one for my dad, each with one daughter in tow — to venture into the Italian countryside. As soon as my sister and I were of legal age to ride, we upgraded from weekends to month-long trips off the beaten path, in search of the authentic side of our homeland. Riding alone, together.

It’s in these familiar circumstances that my dad taught me how to ride, and since then riding is how I live beyond the motorcycle. Just like wheels, I see things in constant motion, looking for the nuts and bolts behind everything around me. Rubber on the ground and eyes on the road, I ride through places and spaces, hyper-aware of what I’m riding through but with my sight fixed on the horizon.

At age 18, I moved out. And not only out, but to another country. First it was Paris. New everything — language, home, friends — yet close enough to home not to interrupt the family bike adventures. Then, two years later, it was New York. Once again, new everything — language, home, friends — but this time around I longed for that familiar place for play and safety that a motorcycle is to me. By instinct, I bought a messed-up Honda from ’72 on the corner of 1st Ave and 7th Street.

This time, however, something was off in my connection with my motorcycle. Before, the bike was my family, my territory, and in my helmet I could be whoever I wanted to be. Now, all of a sudden, everyone around me had an opinion about me riding — a young woman, on a bike, alone. And foreign on top of that. Everyone felt entitled to draw their conclusions, ‘Oh, you’re a bike person,’ ‘a bike chick,’ ‘you must be so tough / down for whatever / obnoxious / just looking for attention.’

From being a safe and playful space, riding suddenly turned into a vessel for navigating this assigned identity I had never been aware of. It is no longer about the act of riding itself, it is the process of claiming my ground as an individual by assertively protecting my freedom and dodging others’ assumptions about me like bullets. I am own my version of a biker just as I am my own version of a woman.

It’s not easy but it’s crucial, because riding is my home — it’s where my raw emotions live. In my helmet I sing, fight out loud, have difficult talks with myself, profess my love, laugh and cry for a good reason or none at all. I protect this space like I would my family.

To this day, riding my bike is still not an act of rebellion. It’s not an act of escapism. It’s not a place where I welcome other’s ideas of what I should look or feel like. It’s most certainly not about you either. Being a rider teaches me to grown into the woman I want to be, the person I want to be. No excuses and no comments.

I had been mulling over this experience when, by a charming coincidence, during a recent visit to New York my father read me a quote from the book he packed for the trip. The author, Marguerite Yourcenar, embodies the Roman emperor Hadrian when writing: “The true birthplace is that wherein for the first time one looks intelligently upon oneself; my first homelands have been books, and to a lesser degree schools.” It hit me.

As for me, I first looked intelligently upon myself on my bike. My first homeland has been a motorcycle, and to a lesser degree a place on a map.