Authenticity: The Courage to Be Ourselves

This year, I keep coming back to the same three words.
Intention. Alignment. Authenticity.

Not as aspirational ideas. As daily practices.

We don’t stumble into alignment.
We choose it.
Again and again.

Sometimes those choices are quiet and private.
Sometimes they are public and a little ridiculous.

Ours involved tricycles.

After one year of friendship and four years of dating, Jim and I decided to get married. It wasn’t the first wedding for either of us. We were older. Wiser. Less interested in spectacle or debt, and more interested in meaning.

We didn’t want a big production.
We wanted something casual and real..

So instead of planning a traditional wedding, we hosted a joint birthday party celebrating one hundred years on earth. Jim turning sixty. Me turning forty. We invited friends and family to a church-turned-café in the Hudson Valley. Finger food. Champagne and sparkling water. Gluten-free cupcakes. A live band. About sixty people dressed casually for a May afternoon.

Only a few knew what was coming.

We made our entrance wearing our Cycle Club Kingston kits. Not on road bikes, but on CycoCycles. Adult-sized, low-riding tricycles that are equal parts joyful and awkward. A little silly. Completely us.

The room erupted in laughter.

Cycling has always been part of our shared language. It’s where we learned trust, communication, pacing, and play. Riding in that way was our way of saying, this is who we are. We love movement. We love joy. We are not afraid to look a little silly in service of what matters.

Then we disappeared and returned in different clothes.

Our engagement clothes.

In the middle of what everyone thought was a birthday party, Jim proposed. Live. Unscripted. Surrounded by people we love. There were gasps, tears, cheers.

And then, because alignment rarely stops at just one brave yes, we went a step further.

Jim’s cousin Diane stepped forward holding a marriage certificate. She was licensed. Ready. We changed clothes one more time, this time into wedding attire. A balloon arch appeared. We stood in front of our people and said vows we had written ourselves.

Jim said, “You are my best friend, and there is no one else I’d like to spend the rest of my life with. I prayed for this happiness. God sent you as the gatekeeper of my heart. The Universe custom-made you for me. You are my imagination come to life.”

I said, “I offer you myself as both a gift and a challenge. I dare not promise smooth roads or constant tailwinds, but I will ride each mile with you, wherever the road leads. I promise you my love, my admiration, and my respect.”

There was laughter. There were tears. More than one person told us it was the best wedding they had ever attended.

For us, it simply felt honest.

Playful.
Sacred.
Ours.

And that’s the part I keep returning to.

There are moments in life when we are invited to be real. In relationships. In our work. In our bodies. In the ways we mark transitions. Too often, we shrink. We perform. We follow scripts that were never written with us in mind.

We worry about how it will look.
We worry about what people will think.
We worry about getting it “right.”

But alignment doesn’t ask us to perform.
It asks us to pause and listen.

Authenticity is not a personality trait. It’s a practice. One we step into and return to every day with consistency. It’s a willingness to tell the truth about who we are and what matters to us, even when it doesn’t fit the mold or isn’t what everyone else thinks or expects.

Especially then.

When we stop performing, our people find us.
Our nervous systems soften.
Our lives begin to feel like they belong to us again.

The courage to be ourselves is not loud or flashy. Sometimes it looks like tricycles at a wedding. Sometimes it looks like setting a boundary. Saying no. Choosing rest. Choosing joy. Choosing a different pace.

Perhaps that, too, is a kind of victory.

Living on purpose.
Choosing alignment over approval.
Trusting that authenticity is not a risk, but a calling.

This is how we choose to live.
This is how we choose to love.

And it’s the road I’m committed to riding, one brave, intentional choice at a time.

This story is adapted from a chapter in my forthcoming book, Cycling Shorts: All I Really Need to Know I Learned While Riding My Bike, a collection of life lessons told through the lens of cycling, love, and resilience.

©2026 Lori Ann King