`Photograph taken by Kit O’Brien of Ivey Smith & AJ (2014)`

I cried during my first riding lesson and no, the tears I shed were not joyous ones. I was nine years old, I was terrified, and yet, I begged to be brought back the next Sunday to ride again.

My teacher’s name was Carol, she taught english-style riding in western saddles and I rode a pony named Midnight. I wanted to ride one of the big horses, but she told me I needed to stop crying every time my pony broke into a trot before that could happen. Always begging for bites bigger than I could chew.

I would leave the barn and dream of nothing but horses. I craved one of my own like I did air to breathe. Horses were in my blood. I wanted to wake up and burry my face in tangled, hay filled manes. I wanted to press my small nose against velvet-soft, giant ones. I wanted a barn full of stomping feet and coats of creamy palomino, buckskin-dun, copper chestnut, dapple gray, coal black, and bay. I wanted pricked ears and swishing tails, the smells of polished leather and saddle soap and green alfalfa hay. I wanted an isle that needed sweeping and stalls that needed picking. I wanted, I wanted, I wanted…

`AJ on a chilly winter morning, giving some sass`

My riding progressed when I managed to stop crying every time Midnight broke into a trot.

I steeled my self and gritted my teeth in the face of fear when we began bouncing over trot-poles laid flat in our path. I held my breath when we cantered for the first time and when we went over our first real jump. But my favorite part of lesson day was grooming that little pony. I wanted to spend hours raking her dirty coat with a shedding blade until it shone. I wanted to spend ages cleaning her feet and polishing her hoofs with a special oil I wasn’t allowed to use—one reserved for horses who actually competed. Whatever that meant. I wanted to shower her fuzzy nose with kisses and remove every poop-clumped tangle from her mane and tail. There was something so calming about it all, so therapeutic, but there never seemed to be enough time.

At a certain point, after switching barns and getting paired with a new pony named Spicy, I was encouraged to begin competing by my instructors. I showed talent and promise, they said. I enjoyed their approval and attention and I didn’t want it to stop. I began with local 4-H shows, competing as a hunter-jumper, and then graduated to eventing, a three-part competition made up of dressage, stadium jumping, and a cross-country course.

Competing was always stressful. Always. I would get into the ring and my heart would beat so hard I thought it might explode. I would forget my course and jump fences from the wrong direction, my horse would sense my fear and dump me at the base of an oxer or Trakehner. I would exit the field shaking, holding back tears. The pressure was too much for me to bear, and yet, I kept pushing myself to sign up for more shows and, as I got older, I sought tougher trainers and new ways to further myself as a rider. Mostly because I felt I “should”. If I didn’t compete, then what was the point of riding? I’d forgotten.

The day I graduated from high school, I moved to Virginia with my saint of a quarter horse, AJ. My family had purchased him for half of what he was worth (though after knowing him, it was clear he was priceless) in 2008. He was a perfect gentleman, everyone who met him immediately fell in love with his huge personality and bold dorsal stripe. He was my best friend, my teammate, and he probably would have preferred to be doing literally anything else besides accompanying me on my tiresome quest to become a professional rider—namely, eating hay.

We relocated to a barn near Upperville, VA, run by an Olympian and 4-star competitor (I will omit his name for the sake of privacy). I was taken on as a working student, along with several other riders, and our responsibilities included everything, not limited to tasks that made sense or tasks which kept to normal business hours.

I would get up at 2AM to braid manes before shows having already stayed up till 11PM the night before pulling tails and packing the trailer. I mucked twenty stalls a day when there were only two of us—one of us was a cartoon of a human—and I would still manage to exercise 6 horses plus my own, feed grain, clean wounds, turn horses out, go to sleep, wake up and do it all over again the next day. Without a day off. For weeks on end.

I slept in an apartment above the barn with a mouse colony of unknown size and proportions. They ran across my bedsheets at night and I peeled their tiny corpses out of forgotten corners in cabinets and drawers daily. Once I even found a dead mouse hanging out of the light fixture in the ceiling of the shower, its small body appeared deflated and brittle, as if it had been there for a long time, but surely, I would have noticed.

Often the shower head released only a sad trickle of water, making bathing a fruitless task, something better left for another day despite the salt-grime-shit veneer coating my body. And once, the refrigerator died completely and three of us plus someone’s dad had to hoist a new (aka slightly less old) fridge up into the hay loft from the stall bellow. By the time we got the machine up there, it was so badly dented and stained, it appeared as hideously decrepit as the last one and I can’t remember if it actually kept things any colder.

`AJ and I standing outside of one of the many barns where I boarded him after leaving Virginia`

AJ and my friend’s horse, T-Bird, took their stalls in the Machine Shed, a hellish structure with no windows that was a mile away from the actual barn. There was no space for them with the rest of the horses. Every morning my friend and I would make the trek down, feed them and fetch them all the way up to the main barn for turn-out, while under serious time constraints and with a mountain of other chores piling up all around us.

As the summer of 2011 came to an end, I was exhausted and stressed out. My boss was a terrifying and enigmatic creature. I never knew which version of him I would meet on any given day. Each morning I waited with my breath held, teeth clenched to see his forest-green Subaru turn up the tree-lined drive, at which point I’d choke on my heart—an organ that had taken up a permanent residence in my throat.

Supposedly my boss preferred me as a rider. Likely because I listened to his instruction and didn’t talk back when confronted with criticism. He demonstrated his approval by assigning me to ride his best horses, taking me with him to gallop his two favorites, and berating me for my apparent incompetence every chance he got. We rarely exchanged small talk, but on the off chance he asked me a personal question, I usually could not find my voice.

I was too anxious to love what I was doing, too fearful to relax with my horse. Often my boss, who doubled as my trainer, would grow impatient and scream at me—no exaggeration—“Are you fucking deaf?” “Do you need to turn your hearing aids up?” “Make him fucking listen!” “I said TROT, damnit. Make him trot!” or the like. I was desperate for his approval, but the harder I sought it the further away it seemed to slip. And after a while, every horse I got on seemed to pick up on my nervous desperation and respond in kind.

I began drinking while living at the farm—not tentative experimentation or a casual beer at the end of a long day—full-on boozing. I had tried beer once in high school, and sip of liquor outside of a basketball game with some seniors I wanted to impress, but I had never been drunk or even tipsy. I didn't know what alcohol could do for me until I started using it to medicate. I wanted to escape. My anxiety was suffocating me. The pressure to perform was crushing me and I no longer found any solace in horses. Now, as I marched through the barn each morning to dump grain, I felt their eyes passing judgement on me, all of them out to get me; they wanted to make me look bad in front of my boss. They were trying to sabotage me, I was sure.

I left Virginia six months after I arrived. I couldn’t take it anymore, my new coworkers who replaced the summer ones, gossiped about me behind my back loud enough for me to hear, their jealously palpable; they berated me for my work ethic and uptight attitude. Little did they know what it meant to be the favorite.

One of my coworkers even broke into my room and went through my underwear drawer to read my diary; he read the whole thing and was furious to find out that I had marked down my own highly critical opinion of him and his evident laziness. He also read about the loss of my virginity and promptly dictated the entire account to anyone who would listen. Over and over again.

My boss was furious when I told him I was leaving, so much so that he mandated I wasn’t allowed to leave, a ruling he could not enforce, of course.

When I returned to Maryland, I no longer knew what I wanted, worse still, I had lost faith in the one thing that I had been sure I loved. Riding never felt the same and I was ashamed by what I had put my sweet horse through. I felt my heart constrict every time I walked into a barn, a feeling which persisted for years, and I couldn’t commit to working at another farm even though a huge part of me missed the simple rhythm of mucking stalls, scrubbing water buckets, and dumping grain. Anytime a manager tried to talk to me about scheduling, I would break out in a cold sweat and have a sudden urge to run away.

I had put all of my eggs in one basket and the bottom burst.

Drinking seemed to be the only thing that quelled the panic, while vain and flippant forays with boys were all that distracted me from my fear and self-doubt. But strangely, after every heartbreak and blow to my spirit, I found myself back in my horse’s stall, my face buried in his mane, sobbing until my throat was raw and my heartache was satisfactorily numbed.

College was not part of my plan, but that is where I found myself after my dreams to become a professional equestrian imploded. I decided to study nutrition, and although my heart wasn’t truly in it, I graduated in 2015 with a 3.7GPA.

I spoke with someone very recently who had ridden horses her whole life, and when she asked me why I stopped riding there was no short answer to give, so I shrugged and said that it was because of modeling—at the end of college I wanted to move to New York and pursue a career in fashion full time. My answer was partially true, but my relationship with horses had begun to deteriorate long before that.

She looked at me and said, “Well then it wasn’t in your blood, otherwise you couldn’t just walk away like that.”

An ocean of words welled up inside of me but I said nothing.

I fell in love with horses before I was old enough to formulate words. My obsession was inexplicable, save the cowboy movies my dad and I watched together when I was a child. I suppose I wanted to be Clint Eastwood on his pale horse, riding off into the mist after saving a town and vanquishing a villain. He seemed unstoppable and his lifestyle, the epitome of freedom. Or maybe I wanted to be his horse, the very creature which bestowed freedom upon him.

No one in my family rode and still, I knew I wanted to—I begged to. I regularly made PowerPoint presentations about purchasing some horse or other, and I forced my parents to sit through them, I wrote pleading letters and hid them under their pillows before I went to bed at night, I sobbed and explained and argued and instigated, until finally I was allowed to take that faithful first riding lesson. But that wasn’t enough, I wanted to work at the barn like the other girls, I wanted to be there every day because no amount of time with those majestic animals would ever be enough.

My heart beat for them, I dreamed of them; they were my salvation, my wings, my freedom, and being around them made me feel like, well, me.

And then, before I knew it was really happening, somewhere off in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains in Virginia they began to slip away, leaving me standing in the dust, scared and alone, identity-less.

After horses began their creeping retreat from my life, the Universe was free to lead me far away to places I never imagined I would go—all of it necessary, though much of it heartbreaking.

And I missed horses. I missed them like there was a vein in my body that ran with blood redder and darker than all the others combined, a vein that connected me to the very creature that woke me up in the first place, which taught me how to love so fiercely I never wondered about why or how.

A love like that gets in your blood, weaves itself into your DNA, and persists, always.

Horses are never far away, they have found me from time to time, and perhaps one day, when I am ready, we will find each other like it was in the beginning.

“Can’t we just return to the bare bones? Can’t we just come back? That’s the beginning of the beginning. Bare bones, good old self” —Pema Chödrön, When Things Fall Apart