Fast Ponies

Growing up I was often told I was a brave kid. I would climb and jump off high things narrowly avoiding twisted ankles and would run my pony fast until his little body was covered with a sweaty lather.

Physical bravery has never been a hard thing for me. It is emotional bravery that has been an everlasting thorn poking in the soft space between my lower ribs.

These people who were sharing accolades of bravery with me did not know that in the days before a new school year started I would sit in my closet crying begging my mother not to send me back. They did not know that I was deeply relieved when I did not get invited to birthday parties and that recess was my living horror.

I think if they knew these things they would have not considered me brave at all, and they would have been completely wrong. It is the fear that bubbles up in almost every area of my life that makes me one of the bravest people you know.

I learned to identify bravery as a state of fearlessness. I believed those people when they told my child self that physical acts of determination set me apart from the fearful crowd. It wasn’t the small things that made me brave, like asking to sit with someone at lunch but all of those times I risked my neck.

I carried this understanding of brave with me to my young adult years. At college my friends did not know that I dreaded group discussion, I even withdrew from a class I was failing because it required you to earn points by making a comment each period. I hated going to bars and stranger’s house parties because I was worried my lack of bravery would be outed.

I made up for my wavering internal battle with fear in physical areas, at those parties I would drink jaeger straight from the bottle because I didn’t care that it made that space below my ears contract into a stinging ball. I would sacrifice the physical because it was easy and people mistake easy for bravery.

During my time as a college equestrian, I did not hesitate to run horses at their maximum hoping the word whoa would stop them because I had no fear. My fear when it came to horses was not their 1,500-pound bodies but the need to be good enough, the knowing that I would never be good enough.

What if I told you that I wasn’t scared because part of me hoped the worst would happen? I envied my teammate with chronic hip problems that spent most of her four years on the team on crutches. She did not have to worry about being good enough.

I would not admit it then, but part of me desired that that horse would not know whoa and I would be lawn darted out of the arena with the sound of snapping bones. If that happened I could be done. I would have gladly sacrificed the physical to no longer be exposed to the emotional fear that had its sweaty hand around my throat.

I think emptiness and chronic anxiety happens when we don’t acknowledge our own bravery. I was chasing physical acts in hopes to feel bravery well up inside of me but it never happened. I had no idea that to be an incredibly brave person I could make one comment a session in that class I was failing or I could have shared with my friends that house parties gave me a nervous vomiting feeling.

I knew my coach was watching me crumble during my freshman and sophomore years of college. After countless failed and tear-filled practices where I couldn’t quite ride that horse or get that lead change, we had a conversation about what was happening.

I sat across from her at her wooden desk in an office that smelt like dog and she told me I was emotionally weak.

Somedays I wonder what would have happened if she would have told me the fear I was experience was an excellent opportunity for bravery and that acknowledging where that fear was coming from was the extreme opposite of weakness.

I think if this would have happened I wouldn’t have transformed from a child who loved riding her pony fast to an adult who had to unlearn hating horses and hating herself.