a change of scenery

And so one era comes to an end and a new one begins (or is it just the restart of an old one? Depends on how you choose to look at it, I guess).

Cooper moved to his new digs this morning (read: my trainer’s barn, ten minutes down the road from the barn where I’ve kept him for the last three and a half years). I’m incredibly excited but this change is also incredibly bittersweet.

When I stopped riding a little under five years ago, I was just… burned out. I was burned out on horses, on riding, on every part of it, because I didn’t know why I was doing it anymore. I’d had all sorts of dreams as a kid—competing at a 5*, going to the Olympics, owning horses and having it be my career—which had never come anywhere close to materializing at the time, and while I don’t think they’re going to come true these days, everything felt impossibly far away then.

I spent years trying to convince myself that the program that I was in was good enough, that I could be happy as long as I was riding, that I could go and do derbies and do jumpers and that I was a good enough rider that I would be successful, but I wasn’t happy. How could I be, when I was crying in the car on the way home from the barn on a semi-regular basis, when I would literally have panic attacks about things relating to horses, when this thing that had been my safe space in life for so long had become something that I dreaded? Showing held no appeal for me. Riding held no appeal for me. Somewhere along the way, the whole thing had stopped being fun, and I was a college kid riding on a college kid’s budget, so… I walked.

I walked away, and I didn’t know when I would be coming back to horses. I made excuses to myself, told myself that I was just growing up and moving on like so many people do, told myself that I would be fine, that I could go work and travel and find other things with which to fill my life, but… once a Weird Horse Girl™, always a Weird Horse Girl™, so of course that uneasy peace that I’d tried to create for myself didn’t last. I got to the end of the summer and into the fall, started my full-time job post-college and realized that I didn’t really have anything else. All I did was work, basically, and I missed riding. Of course I missed riding. I’d spent over half my life doing it, and it was such a huge part of my identity, but I didn’t know where to go.

I didn’t want to go back to lessons. I didn’t want to go back to stress, and feeling like I needed to keep up with other people, or pressured to go to shows that I had no desire to attend. I didn’t want to be tagged in listings for horses that I couldn’t afford even if they were in the discipline that I wanted (they never were) or feel like I was expected to do anything other than exist. At the end of the day, at that point in time, all I wanted was one thing: I wanted to go for a canter.

That was it. I just wanted to go for a canter. I wanted to get in the saddle and go for a ride and enjoy being with horses in a way where I didn’t have anything to prove.

I made a post expressing those feelings on the horse Instagram that I’d started (though not in so many words), the one that had seen so little use over all those months, and in return I got an unexpected invitation to come ride from someone that I could really only call an acquaintance at the time.

I say “at the time” because now she’s my friend, and I owe her so much for the last four (and a bit) years. My (now former, brb while I cry) barn owner is the reason why I had the opportunity to remember why it is that I love this sport so much. She barely knew me at the time, had only really seen me school horses and said hello in passing back when we were riding at the same barn, but she still trusted me enough to let me have the ride on Ice, those first few months.

He was only four at the time, and (to her credit) a very brave and honest horse, but he was a baby, and I was just trying to teach him what I could—teach him to relax, teach him to bend, teach him to wait, teach him to use himself—but there were never any expectations. I came out to the barn when I could, and we would ride together, and I started to feel better. I didn’t have to do anything. I wanted to give Ice a good ride because she trusted me with him, but I wasn’t being expected to prepare him for anything. I didn’t have to take him to shows. I wasn’t prepping him to be sold. I was just… riding for the sake of it.

I didn’t think I was going to buy a horse within six months of that first ride. I didn’t think that I was going to fall back in love with the sport so quickly. I didn’t think that I would be in a position to even think about buying a horse at that point, but that one simple Instagram DM changed everything. The reality is that I wouldn’t have Cooper if it wasn’t for her. I wouldn’t have Cooper if I hadn’t had that invitation to come ride in the fall of 2018, if she hadn’t been on board when I told her I found a horse that I was interested in four months later, if she hadn’t rearranged the barn to make it possible for me to bring him home (since I, you know, essentially impulse-bought him), if she hadn’t gone and picked him up for me when I was down in Kentucky because the timing just worked out that way.

I wouldn’t be in this situation if it wasn’t for the fact that we’ve become each other’s cheering squad when it comes to our goals, because as hard as it is for me to leave, it’s made so much easier by the fact that I have her support and her blessing to go out there and go after the things that I’ve wanted for so long. It was so, so difficult to walk out of the barn this morning, to lead him down the driveway to load him up at the bottom and know that he wasn’t going to live there anymore, that I wouldn’t be seeing her most nights when I go out to ride after work, that this chapter in my (and Cooper’s) story had come to an end. I was really only able to do that because she wanted me to, because she doesn’t begrudge me pursuing something that I’ve wanted for longer than I want to admit, because we love having each other around but we love seeing each other succeed even more.

(As we liked to joke, she needed to get rid of me so she could fill my stall with someone that she can actually make money off of. I wanted to be with my trainer and I want her to be able to fill that stall with the horse of a lesson kid or boarder who will be incredibly fortunate to learn from her and get a legitimately solid foundation that most people aren’t lucky enough to have in the horse world.)

I’d be lying if I said that this whole thing isn’t a little bit terrifying—it’s been almost five years since I’ve had consistent lessons, it’s been a hell of a lot longer than that since I’ve had consistent lessons where I’m actually challenged to work, and I am horrendously out of shape—but it’s also the realization of a dream that I don’t think teenage me ever really believed would come true. It felt like an impossibility, back when I was in high school and college, but despite that, I think I also always knew this would happen.

We started putting together the building blocks for it back in 2019, even if I didn’t realize it at the time. My trainer came out and gave me my first lesson in a year and a half, my first lesson with her in almost exactly a decade, Cooper’s first exposure to being a grownup. Life got in the way and we’ve only seen her here and there in the time since, but in 2022, our visits became more consistent. Over the course of those visits, she told me that he was a great horse, she told me to never sell him, she told me that I wasn’t insane for having the goals that I do—I’d like to be Training level Grand Champion of the World (as she puts it), though I won’t say no to going further than that if Cooper is physically capable and my brain doesn’t chicken out first—and for the first time in a long time, I started to feel like maybe I really could do it.

I haven’t actually truly believed in myself as a rider for a long time. I talk a big game, but there’s a lot of underlying confidence crises that I need to work through, things that I developed as a result of being in a training situation that just didn’t fit. My body knows what to do (or at least, it used to, I am way too crooked in the tack these days), but my brain hasn’t been on board for years now. I was never totally fearless as a kid, but I trusted myself a lot more back then than I do now, and it’s been a profoundly difficult experience trying to fight through that on my own, even with the support of my barn owner and my best friend and the other people around me. My trainer makes me trust myself.

She makes me trust myself because I trust her. When she tells me to do something, I know that it’s because she knows that I can do it. I’ve known her for so long—since I was ten years old, over half my life ago—that it’s ingrained in me to believe her, even with all of the other bullshit piled on top. I won’t say that I never ask questions, because I absolutely will if I don’t understand something, but I don’t ask questions when she raises a jump on me. I don’t ask questions when she sets an exercise and tells me to do it. I realize that might sound unsafe, but I don’t ask questions because I know that with her I don’t have to. She’s never set me up for failure, and that was something that I struggled with immensely as a teenager when I came back to riding a few years after my accident—really, beyond anything, I needed to be in a situation where I absolutely trusted what I was being asked to do, and I just… wasn’t.

Having her around again confirmed to me (as I’ve said before) that I was right to miss her for all those years. It confirmed to me that the rider that I used to be is still in there, somewhere, buried underneath layers of self-doubt, and that I’m not going to be alone in chipping away until I find that person—that athlete—again. I told her at the very beginning, back in 2019, that I needed to rebuild my confidence from the ground up, but I wasn’t ready then.

I wasn’t ready. I sometimes say that hers is the only horse person opinion that matters to me, and that’s not entirely true—I value my barn owner’s, and my best friend’s, and those of a few other trusted people in the horse world—but I didn’t want to disappoint her, or myself. I respect her too much for that. I knew I wasn’t ready. My brain hadn’t entirely bought in yet. I’d had a depressive patch that summer where I could barely muster the energy to go to the barn because that little voice in my head was telling me that it wasn’t worth it because I wouldn’t be good enough anyway. I wanted to train with her as much as I could, but the idea of being in a program was terrifying because it had ended so poorly for me the last time, and the stakes were a lot higher this time around.

I’m ready now, though. I’ve spent the last four years relearning how to love the sport and, more importantly, how to love horses. I’ve spent the last four years relearning how to have fun, how to exist without pressure (at least, without pressure from anyone but myself). I’ve spent the last (almost) four years getting to know my horse, building a partnership with him, realizing that he’s so much more than I ever thought I was going to get when he stepped off that trailer. I’ve spent the last four years figuring out what my goals really are, determining how many of those dreams that I had as a kid are real and how many of them were just the big imaginings of a preteen with no idea where I’d end up, realizing that I don’t just want to do this sport, I want to be good at it.

I know it’s going to be hard. I know there are still going to be days where I’m going to feel like I’m not good enough for Cooper (because he really is a saint, putting up with me). I know it’s going to be a lot of work and it’s all still feeling a bit surreal because of how long I’ve been waiting for it, but unlike this time five years ago, I want to do the work.

I want to wake up early in the morning and go for runs so that I don’t almost pass out after cross-country courses because I’m not in good enough shape (been there and done that one time and it was one time too many) (actually remembering to use my inhaler before I go out cross-country would probably also help… That exercise-induced asthma is no joke). I want to haul myself out to the barn five days a week and have lessons that leave me sore for three days afterward. I want to figure out how to canter my horse in a fucking straight line without accidentally asking him to swap his lead because, guess what, I apparently don’t know how to do that anymore (I meant it when I said I’m crooked, I truly don’t know how I ended up here). I want to go to events and jumper and dressage shows and, hell, maybe even roll up to the hunter ring every once in a while (just to prove a point, I will fully own that I’m petty as fuck), and feel like I’m ready to be there.

My trainer and I had a talk before I left the barn today (I hung around for a bit after I got my stuff put away just to make sure that Coops was settling in all right), and while I’m not going to go into the details because it’s between the two of us, I just… feel really lucky right now. I feel lucky that I’m in a place with someone who’s known me since I was a kid, who knows what I’ve gone through since I stopped riding with her back then, who’s always known exactly how to push me without scaring me in the process, who is continually learning and growing herself and always trying to help us do better by our horses.

I feel lucky that I got to spend the last four(ish) years in a barn that was safe on a physical and (more importantly) psychological level, and that I’m always welcome back there even though Cooper doesn’t live there anymore (and I’ll be back there next weekend anyway, my trainer is doing a clinic day for my former barn owner’s students and I’m going to be the jump crew. You can try to make me be a grownup with a “real” job but I’m always going to be a barn rat at heart). This sport and this industry are so difficult to navigate on so many levels and I am so unbelievably fortunate that I’ve finally managed to fill my corner with people who are just good.

I’ve said it what feels like a million times now, but this time, one barn move and an amount of money that I would not like to speak of in injections and chiro and a new saddle later, I really do mean it: onward and upward, my friends. Onward and upward. Catch us on a big bad Beginner Novice cross-country course this summer because we like to live dangerously (assuming, of course, that I can figure out how to canter on one lead in a straight line by then. We’re aiming high). Until then, I’ll be endeavoring to document our learning process on here, since things will actually be happening now and I might actually have something to talk about. We have our first lesson Thursday evening. Prayer circle that I survive.

(This is adapted and expanded upon from a Facebook post that I wrote earlier today. I cried writing that post after I got home. I also cried while writing this. They are happy tears. I am stupidly sentimental and so, so fucking lucky.)