Boy am I busy. I love it. But this post is a bit disjointed as result. I also have a splitting headache and not surprisingly, I'm feeling slightly hyper in energy. I'm also strangely calm.
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I am currently in a hotel room in Olympia, WA. It's my first time in the Northwest. And it's raining. Or maybe it's drizzling. Meanwhile back home in San Diego, its 91 degrees. It's the middle of March.
Anyway.
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| Last week I rode on protected bike lanes in Washington D.C. where I was for the National Bike Summit |
I just had lunch with Barb Chamberlain, the executive director of Washington Bikes. She is the reason I will be speaking on Tuesday and the reason I'm in Washington's capital.
Barb and I talked a little bit about how we first "met" online when she began reading this blog in compiling her list of women bike blogs. And then we met in person at my first Alliance Leadership Retreat shortly before the organization that I currently run launched in the fall of 2012. And then later at many bike advocacy related conferences.
It's been a bit of a wild ride. I have some thoughts about that that I wanted to write about here...
This was my first post on this blog. I started this blog because someone complained on the local bike forum that there weren't enough blogs about biking in San Diego. And I figured, well...I'll start one. While originally this blog was about figuring out how to get around San Diego by bike...I was new to the city, it eventually morphed into a sort of a virtual living room where I ranted and raved about various things related to San Diego built environment and invited people to stop in for a while and chat...and maybe stay. I've met lots of truly wonderful people as a result of this blog. It eventually led...in a very convoluted way...to me running an award-winning organization (which has waaaaay more admin work than you can ever imagine, unless you too run an organization).
A short aside. The phrase "award-winning organization" came to me today as I walked across the airport to meet Barb. And it's true. We won an award. I am so proud of that accomplishment. And possibly for the first time...since I got the award, I broke into a wide smile (I'm a late bloomer).
In preparation for Tuesday's talk, I've been thinking about how to quite talk about this journey. How does one go from being completely uninterested in advocacy, bike advocacy in particular, to being knee deep in the trenches...feeling very viscerally every range of emotion based on what's happening out on the streets. How did I go from not caring about people who bike to crying when someone gets hit by a car? How did I go from writing a mostly ranty blog about the general terrible-ness of biking in San Diego, to intuitively grasping land-use policy ramifications? How did I go from not having a clue about political governance structures to having some sort of a relationship with electeds and their staffers?
It's so many things. The readers of this blog. The people I met as a result of this blog. The people I met on rides. The people I met at events that I attended because of people I met on rides or who read this blog invited me to them. The people who believed in the organization I co-founded. The people who donated to the organization and then told their friends about them. The people who sent me advice, or met me for coffee/beer/sandwich/pizza and gave me advice. The people who did nothing for years and thus motivated me to just try and see what happened. The people who criticized me, mocked me, belittled me, tried to manipulate me. The people who invited me to parties, camping trips, hiking trips, bike rides, networking events. The people who were patient with me. The people who talked up BikeSD or me on their blogs, their websites, organization newsletters, rides, speeches. It's a very complex web.
A lot of this trajectory has also been mostly unplanned and organic. Dottie and Trish emailing me to meetup when they were in San Diego. Will wanting to start a San Diego blog. Jeff offering so much advice on how to grow the organization. Elly writing about the power of blogs....where did it really start?
I had a hard time committing to bike advocacy. Why the hell would I want to throw away my mostly lucrative career trajectory to get into something I'd have to grow from scratch to make it financially lucrative enough to both keep myself engaged and attract top talent? I have a very caustic sense of humor that is not exactly widely appealing (yes, your local advocacy leader is currently listening to an old favorite by her favorite singer: Frank Zappa's Bobby Brown Goes Down). I hated public speaking, so that was not something I was drawn to. I've shut down blogs after getting more than 10 readers as I hate the publicity. Furthermore, I identify as a strict loner perfectly happy being by myself for long periods of time...why put myself in the midst of people?
Where does this drive to master communication styles, leadership as well as management capability, land use policy issues, not to mention advocacy and political rhetoric come from?
Boundless curiosity, maybe?
It's part curiosity. It's also motivated by boredom (the rest of my life is amazing). Maybe it's motivated by believing and wanting my city, San Diego, to be an amazing city. Cities are such amazing creatures...I'm also motivated by social media and media in general. I just got tired of reading people whine and I thought I could do better than bitch. So ego is a part of the equation. Being tired of being surrounded by negativity. Also...most women my age decide to have kids. I'm firmly in the no kids camp. So I have time that would otherwise be taken up with kid duties.
But I think curiosity trumps all of those reasons. It's that one thought: What if I just tried....how far would I be able to go?
I can't answer that question just yet, as I'm still on that journey.
