Fescue

It’s not the horses I hated, even though I thought it was.

I like the way my 26-year-old mares nose feels after it's been buried in grass when I walk up to her in the bottom pasture.

I like how her hairs prickle through my jeans and at the insides of my legs when I ride her bareback.

I like how she trots around with her tail up in the air just before bad weather comes and I like how she neighs at me every morning at 6:30 am when I go onto my porch.

It was a barn that wreaked of piss-soaked shaving when it was closed up in the winter that I actually hated.

It was a coach that thought the best kind of teaching was starting from scratch that I actually hated.

It was a coach that thought I needed to unlearn everything that had gotten me to this point to begin with to become the kind of rider she admired that I actually hated. It was how she encouraged me to arch my back and get up out of the saddle when I ran fast that I actually hated.

It was tear-soaked show shirts in makeup pens and myriads of insults picked like low-hanging fruit that I actually hated.

It was the words, why can’t you just get it right and that’s how they're are are supposed to look, as as I stood with my trainer looking at my brand new chaps on someone else’s body who was one foot taller and ten pounds lighter than me.

And I guess it wasn’t the people I hated either because if I continued in the shadow of self-hatred that the horse show industry breeds I would find myself, 20 years from now, screaming at teenage girls from the sidelines of riding arenas about how strange their bodies looked.

When I wake up in the morning after finding myself in the throws of a horse show nightmare, one where my reins are twisted into permanent knots or I just can’t get the right lead and I’m not allowed to stop riding until I do, I wonder what I would have been like if I would have let it stop with soft-nosed farmhouses in deep grass.

Would quitting have saved me from years of panic attacks and self-isolation. Would letting horses just be a happy thing in my life and stopping before they became the things of my nightmares made me a happier kinder person that did not need to unlearn hating every single unique aspect of myself.

Would I have never lived in South Dakota and wrote that note to my parents in the January cold of my rental house. Would I have never been ashamed of where I come from and would I have gotten around a little quicker to identifying the things in my life that actually make me feel alive, horses with absolutely no jobs being one of them.

Would I still have found my way to India and then back home to spend a portion of my life remember what love feels like on my family’s farm.

I don’t really know. Somedays I wish I could undo it all and have never set foot on a horse that did not spend all of its life in pastures deep with fescue and no indoor arena in sight and somedays I wonder if it needed to happen.

I wonder if I needed to learn to viciously hate myself so I could relearn what self-love feels like. I wonder if I needed to receive shoats and low jabs so I could see what learning styles I would actually thrive in.

And I wonder if I needed to throw away year after year of my life chasing goals that would only get me affirmation from people who did not matter so I could learn what I actually want to do with my time living.