The Performance of Goodness

Sometimes I just want to eat the world. Anger rises and I want to bite something, so perhaps the most rational thing is to bite something that feeds you.

Beneath my anger sits grief. The piercing of the chest. The slow simmer. My anger looks like light and heat. When the nerve of meaning is touched, anger rises, naming the line that has been crossed. If you allow it to surface without rushing to silence it, it shows you precisely where you care. My eyes spit thunder and I’m glaring hard. My bull is raging. I notice it and I continue anyway.

I am angry at myself. For letting my emotions get the best of me, for being so reactive. I can write about sitting still for ten days, and yet, six months later I struggle sitting still in an argument with someone I love. I can talk about equanimity, describe it, but if I’m looking for calm headedness in an argument, I rarely find it. I am a hypocrite, intoxicated by walking a thin rope of open mindedness and close mindedness. And yet, I will do it anyway.

Agency over desire begins with the smallest choice, what to eat, what to wear, and the ripple runs outward: outsource the small choices and you have already outsourced the self. It really boils down to choice. Even if you have no choice, and even if secretly you wanted the outcome, not having choice feels suffocating. People want to feel like they are calling the shots. Push and pull of want this, don’t want this. I have gates within myself that will draw a line, so that I don’t seem too eager. I want distance first before I decide that I want to be with you. I want to be apart but I want to do things with you. I will draw a line before I cross that line, and I won’t even realise that I actually just want to be with you. Is that what it is?

People surround themselves with mirrors instead of differences. Echo chambers form. Ask yourself why most people you know think the same way you do.

Ignorance is bliss, they say. I say, ignorance is ignorance. I am aware and suffering, but I am looking it in the eye at least. Shame buries me under, face red, body hot, I am ashamed.

I check on my gravel steed, Salazar. I press my finger into front then back tire checking for pressure. All good. Slightly soft but will just add comfort. My wheels thick 650b x 48 tires feeling like riding on donuts. My own monster truck. Girlbeast. Red frame purrs past traffic in my high block booties. Swerving, manoeuvring on the road like my own dance only other cyclists and motors recognise.

No traffic to wait through. All intuition and manoeuvring. A car can growl at me, a driver can look down on me, ask if I’m embarrassed not knowing how to drive. And every time, I am not. Not even slightly. The question doesn’t land because the premise doesn’t fit.

The road is mine in a way a sealed machine never offers. I feel the air. I can sing if I want. I can stop whenever I choose, to drink water, stretch, look at something unplanned. Brief human interactions without explanation.

Autopilot is so cheap, you just pay with your soul. Comfort is so easy, you just pay with your life.

To preserve what truly matters, fight your battles wisely. What to argue with and what not to even start.

I have held anger like a fist closed around something I couldn’t let go. And I have learned, slowly, to open the hand. Letting it stay until it has finished saying what it came to say. First you hold it close, because you need to know what it is. Then you observe it, palm open. Then it flies away, once it’s done its part.

Life will bite you. It will growl and clamp down on the thing you were most trying to protect.

The bike is like this. Cooking is like this. Devotion that feeds rather than feeds on. There is a fine line between wanting to serve the person you love and the fear (someone else’s fear), worn as if it were your own. Of what it means to be a woman who cooks for a man. Domesticated, the word says, as if care were a cage rather than a choice made freely, remade every time you choose it again.

Kirúg a hámból, we say in Hungarian, kicks out of the harness.

Loving the bike comes with its own guilt, because the bike refuses the script. Unladylike. Irresponsible. Reckless. What they must mean is a cycling won’t seal me away from the world, protecting me from life.

I’d much rather struggle on my own path than walk someone else’s. And when the anger comes, and it always comes, I get moving.