Making Sense of It All

Ms. Lee Etscovitz, Ed.D.

Freedom

When summer arrives, I often think of the time in my life when riding a motorcycle was the epitome of personal freedom. In fact, for twenty-three years I owned and rode a BMW, black with white pinstripes, equipped for touring with a full windscreen, side cases, and a trunk. Most important of all, the bike had 750 cc's of power, the most one could get at the time I bought it. I really loved that BMW, but less so as the years progressed. So eventually I sold the bike and bought a computer with the money. Now I travel the Internet rather than a network of roads, writing to my fellow readers rather than waving to my fellow riders.

What did it mean to be free, particularly on a motorcycle? And why did that feeling of freedom become insufficient in my life? What, if anything, has taken its place? Perhaps I can best answer these questions by first sharing with you a poem I once wrote to describe what riding a motorcycle used to feel like for me. The poem is called, "Two Wheels and I."

Two wheels and I
scoop up the morning air
and exhilarate
over endless roads
to everywhere.

Free at last
for serious play,
we brace the tonic wind
and surge headlong
into a chrome-bright day.

We pass an auto
stalled at sixty
and disappear
around a bend in time.

Then bike and I
own road and sky,
and life is meant to rime.

There you have it: a biker's euphoria, a moment of exhilaration, a moment of freedom defying time and space, when life stands still for a moment, even at more than sixty miles an hour, leaving behind for an instant the desks and demands of a timebound world. But it was all only for an instant, only for a moment, a moment of freedom living more in one's memory than in one's ongoing life.

That freedom, with all its exhilaration, was not sufficient for me. I was momentarily free on the outside and even on the inside, but I always returned, not just to a garage, but also to a psychological and spiritual closet where time and space stared me in the face and weighed heavily on my soul. My gas tank may have become empty, but it could be refilled. My soul was empty, too, but I had no idea as to how I could fill it. After several years of riding over endless roads to everywhere while my soul went nowhere, I finally sold my cycle. Selling it was not as easy as it may sound. I never thought I could live without that bike, but I also could not go on living without my soul. The decision to let go of my BMW became easier and easier as my soul became emptier and emptier. After a while the bike was riderless, for I was no longer really present on it, not even for a moment of freedom and exhilaration. A riderless bike is a dangerous bike or at best useless.

I wanted a freedom that was lasting, that I could continue to enjoy on the highway of life itself, not just a temporary freedom manufactured for a back road fling. When I finally sold my bike, I found myself free from what had been a semblance of freedom hiding my life as a whole. I was free to be me, because I was willing to search for my sense of self on my inner road and with my own inner power. I even found myself in the company of other inner seekers who were finding that self-recognition and self-acceptance, in this case in terms of gender variations, were the real roads to inner freedom. No bike ride could match that freedom, that quiet inner peace that comes from an inner trip visible only to the inner traveler.

My gender journey, with all its inner and outer difficulties, was the real road I had been avoiding for years. Facing that road, with all its ups and downs and challenging turns, has become more exhilarating and more rewarding than all the bike rides put together. I never seem to run out of fuel, and the road is as long as my life.

I do still yearn for a bike ride once in a while, for the hum of an engine announcing its powerful and exhilarating advance down the road, seemingly defiant of life's limitations. But such defiance is only a momentary game, only a pretense, aside from the sheer fun of it all. To advance down the road of life, humming my own inner tune, is more than serious play. I can be free inside, and whatever inner freedom I have earned will not dissapear around any bend in time, except perhaps the final bend of all. Instead, my life can rime all the time, inside and out, even when it rains.

Want to comment? Send email to Dr. Etscovitz at hmdm@voicenet.com.


© 1997 by Human Dimensions & Transgender Forum


Back to Transgender Forum's home page