Last week, while riding my ebike home from the gym, I got clipped by a car. It wasn’t particularly violent. I wasn’t gravely injured, there was no damage to my bike. The car tried to overtake me, obviously misjudged the amount of space it had in the lane, and it took its side mirror off on my arm. Some deep tissue bruising and a scratch were all I had to show for it.

But since then I’ve been experiencing a significant increase in anxiety while riding my bike. And it’s channeling in unpleasant ways. When I’m faced with riding home from the gym, I find myself acting in extremely risk averse ways. I take longer routes, I second-guess the space needed for oncoming cars when crossing intersections, I spend a lot of time checking over my shoulder (while still trying to maintain awareness at my front).

I’ve also noticed I’m far angrier at other road users when they perform unsafe overtakes now. This isn’t actually an entirely new thing. I used to get unbelievably angry at people who would try to bully me out of the lane I am legally entitled to simply because I was going a little slower than they liked. But over time I managed to overcome this—mostly by recontextualising the people who drove dangerously near me as ‘incompetent’ instead of ‘malicious’.

Hanlon’s Razor states ‘Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence’, and what I noticed when I’d inevitably catch up to my ‘would be vehicular assassins’ was that generally they were older drivers (I live in an area with many such drivers) who appeared genuinely shocked to see me next to their window serving them up for nearly running me into a parked car. My assessment? They were oblivious to my existence, not hoping it would end.

Now, though, I am having trouble reconciling the fact that oblivious or not, the threat they pose to my existence is very real. The person who hit me didn’t stop. They lost their side mirror on my arm (I went back and retrieved it from the scene of the incident, by the way), and they still drove off. If it was incompetence, they’ll get home and someone else will ask “What happened to your side mirror?” If it was malice, they know they lost their side mirror and they’re sad they didn’t do more damage with it. But the end result is the same—a hit’n’run, a scratch and some fear on my part.

I’m not 100% sure how I get over this to be honest. Anxiety and anger are very strong emotions, and even while sitting still I can have a hard time sitting in either. When I’m moving at speed on a road full of one tonne vehicles, it’s harder still. Sometimes I imagine all cars as Manta Rays. I went swimming with them one time, and our swimming guide told us they were like puppies that weighed the same as a Volkswagen Beetle. They were very playful, but I’ll never forget one rolling up and flopping itself on top of our guide for a few seconds. I asked him how it felt afterwards, because a lot of the other people on tour were excited that he got ‘hugged’ by one. He told me he was genuinely terrified. If it had wanted to sink to the bottom and keep him there, it could have. And then he told me to suit up, because there are more rays to swim with!

There are also mechanical changes I can make to my on-road behaviour, and I’ve made some. I’ve adjusted my riding. I now “own the lane”. I remember when I first told my dad (an avid motorcycle enthusiast) that I was riding my (e)bike everywhere, that was the one thing he told me above all else. “Own the lane”. That is, you are a vehicle on the road with as much presence as any other vehicle. Just because you are slower, you do not need to put yourself at risk to make space for others to pass you. It applies to trucks and cars pulling caravans just as much as bikes—and we saw plenty of people using it to great effect when we drove from Perth to Exmouth and back last year.

I had stopped owning the lane because I had mistakenly believed I was riding in a bike lane, but that simply isn’t the case in NSW, where I live. A bike lane must be marked with a bike and the word lane in NSW. Lanes with bicycles shoddily stenciled into them (as is the case around me) are not actually bike lanes (as evidenced by all the cars parked in them). So by switching to what I thought was a bike lane, I was giving up my position on the road, and needlessly put myself at risk by having to merge back when a car was parked in the not bike lane.

I don’t do that any more. My ebike can do 25km/h unassisted. I can pedal it up to 40km/h with some effort. That’s the speed limit at the location I was hit. I was clipped right next to a school. I’m not even slowing people down at that point. So they can sit behind me.

I don’t like being afraid. But (and this is related to the other post I had written last month when this whole getting hit by a car thing derailed posting it) at the end of the day, being afraid is ok. It means you understand the stakes. That there are stakes.

And I understand the stakes. I’m willing to ride my bike anyway. I don’t think ebikes are for everybody, but they’re definitely for me. So I guess I’ll suit up, because there are more rays to swim with.

In writing news, Book 2 of the Best Series is going awesome while Book 1 goes through editing. I am hoping to announce a release date for Book 1 any day now! But I’ll go into that in more detail in the second blog post I make for May, because I wrote an entire other blog post already that I put aside while dealing with the above.

And Till The Heavens Burst got its first sale on the Kobo store! That’s pretty exciting!