Excitement, Anxiety, Fragility...

I bought a bike! This is quite exciting, and I'm looking forward both to having more options for getting around and to doing some leisure riding at the weekends. I don't think I'm very likely to follow themidnightgirl into getting serious about cycling as a sport, but stranger things have happened.

Unfortunately as well as being exciting it's also quite anxiety-provoking because cars are scary and I don't really understand how roads work. I had an appointment in Hampstead this morning and cycled there and back, which was particularly stressful because I didn't really know where I was going so had to keep stopping to check Google Maps. I'm still feeling a bit overwhelmed a couple of hours after getting home.

I've booked an "Urban Cycling" lesson in a couple of weeks, which I hope will help. In the meantime I think I should probably only cycle to places where I know the route extremely well, and see if that lets me build confidence without too much anxiety.

I think I'm feeling rather more fragile than usual at the moment for various reasons, partly around having too much on my plate, which is probably making me both more prone to feeling anxious and less able to bounce back from those feelings, so I should take this slowly, but I am looking forward to getting past it.