I turned 18 and signed up for the MSF course. It was the logical next step. I'd loved bikes since I was a kid, the physics of leaning into turns, the wind, the feeling of movement that was somehow both mechanical and completely natural. A motorcycle was just that, with a motor.

My older brother took the course with me, same weekend, same parking lot. We each bought a 1974 Honda CB 360 from the same seller. His was blue. Mine was orange. Neither ran. "A dollar a CC," the seller told us, which felt like a deal until we were in the garage trying to figure out what we'd actually bought.

I got mine running. I'm not sure my brother ever did.

I rode that bike until I killed it on a country road. I knew machines needed maintenance. I just let the fun get in the way of worrying about it. That caught up with me when I pulled the inspection cover and saw silver paste inside the engine, what I now know was aluminum residue from spun bearings or seized pistons. Hard first lesson. The bike sat in the garage while I went off to college, and eventually my parents had the inevitable conversation with me about the thing taking up space. It got sold. I don't know to who.

First job out of college, I bought a 1993 CBR 600 F2. That was an animal. I loved it and I rode it, but the problem was I rode it mostly alone. Few of my friends were on bikes, and solo riding has its place, but I wanted to share what I was experiencing and there wasn't anyone to share it with. When a move made it easy to let the bike go, I did. Watched some guys roll it into a trailer with a handful of others, probably all representing the same quiet surrender. I'm sure they drove off happy. It was a hell of a deal.

That was nearly two decades ago.

When I tell people I ride now, most of them land in the same place pretty quickly. Isn't that dangerous? And what I've never told them is that dangerous is partly the point.

About five years ago I started coming apart in ways I couldn't explain. It was a perfect storm. Post-Covid fog, job pressure, kids getting ready to leave, a church board situation that was grinding me down. Then on February 26, 2022, I found out a close friend had a brain tumor. Six weeks later he was gone. I performed the funeral. Then I fell apart for real.

The anxiety that followed wasn't like anything I'd dealt with before. I'd wake up in the middle of the night with dread I couldn't name. Everyone in the house was fine, asleep, safe. Bills paid, nothing wrong that I could point to. But my body didn't know that. The sleeplessness fed depression, and the depression had been underneath things for a long time, longer than I'd admitted to anyone, maybe even myself.

At a routine physical, when the intake questions got to the one about thoughts of self-harm, I paused. And for the first time I answered honestly. My doctor didn't flinch. The conversation that followed was careful and kind. I left with a referral, called that day, and started a relationship with a therapist that turned into several years of work I should have done a long time ago.

A little while after that, I was visiting a friend in Nashville. He had a bike and offered me a ride. The mechanics came back immediately. That part really is like riding a bike. But something else was different. I was scared in a way I hadn't been in my twenties. Loved it and feared it at the same time.

So why buy one again?

Because so much of what I'd been living with had no name and no address. The fear just arrived, in the dark, for no reason, and there was nothing to do with it. Riding gave me a concrete thing to be afraid of. Real stakes. Something I could look at directly. Every time I turned the key I was making a choice: yes, this is scary, and I'm doing it anyway. That was new. For the first time in a while, I was in control of something.

The more I rode, the more I built something like a working relationship with fear. Not trying to get rid of it, just learning to ride alongside it. A healthy fear of a 106-horsepower machine on two wheels isn't a problem to solve. It's information. It keeps you paying attention.

And then another thing shifted. I knew I couldn't ride the way I wanted to and keep drinking. In 2023, when I bought my Triumph Tiger 900 Rally Pro, I made the call. The bike won. What I got in return was a cleaner version of what I'd been chasing anyway. A healthier high, a clearer head, a reason to be sharp.

Riding didn't fix anything. But it handed me a way to face things. That turned out to be enough to change quite a bit.

What keeps me on the bike now is something else. The dirt roads that lead somewhere I've never been, the people I keep meeting out there, the particular kind of friendship that forms when you're navigating something uncertain together. That's the part I'm still figuring out how to talk about. It'll come.

For now: this is why I ride.