Recently, I had a full-circle moment in the most unlikely place. Pacing nervously, I waited for my teammates to arrive on a canoe at Bellingham, Washington’s annual community race extravaganza, Ski to Sea. In truth, I’d pulled up to this function a little out of sorts.

 “What am I doing here?” I kept asking myself. As a professional freerider, I felt way outside my comfort zone participating in the cyclocross leg of a relay race. I was surrounded by people from every walk of life, all with number plates adorning their bikes. Nearby, an auctioneer shouted off team numbers from incoming canoes so fast that I started to feel like I was in a fever dream. After months of introspection, standing on the banks of the Nooksack River in spandex wasn’t exactly providing much clarity.

I do think it’s normal to feel lost from time to time. As life moves, so does our experience in it, thus necessitating moments of reconnection to our hopes or desires and adjusting course if necessary.

Those aren’t really my own words but, rather, a slight rewording of online advice I’ve come across about how to deal with hopelessness which, for better or worse, is something I’ve been Googling recently. Sometimes it feels easier to analyze a written description of an emotion than to tackle it head-on and embrace it as a part of my own lived experience.

My angst has tracked in parallel with a slowing of opportunities coming my way within the women’s freeride movement. This turbulence has left me needing to reconnect with myself in order to get my head out of the clouds.

Four years ago, after getting canned from a nine-to-five gig for not respecting a stale corporate culture of strict one-hour lunch breaks, I got a message from Red Bull Formation founder Katie Holden asking if I’d be interested in digging at the event. Of course, I obliged.