Mouthy Monday (yeah, yeah)

I know I'm late.
I was fixing fence all day yesterday.
Sounds all Colorado cowboy doesn't it?
Except the reality is, our Colorado 65 + mph winds tore down our very suburban privacy fence. It snapped fence posts, sent slats flying all over the neighbors yard, that kind of thing.
If I'm going to keep being honest, my brother spent the day fixing fence, but I had to go to Home Depot.

So,we'll start the day pretending I'm not a day late and a story short, OK?

This piece is going to hit so many of us straight in the gut. I know it did me. I want to thank the young woman who sent it in, because we are going to have some incredible conversations come out of this.

Fear

Today I want to talk about fear. Fear to me is something that the horse world is ashamed of. There is a constant talk of how it takes bravery and courage to do what we do, how when we fall off we get back on, and when we fail at something, we try even harder to get it right. I think this is true; we are brave to do what we do. But I also think we are scared.

Without fear, there cannot be bravery or courage, because bravery and courage means doing something even though you’re scared. I’m not talking about nervous, or tense, I’m talking about honest to god, debilitating fear. I’m scared of riding and I admit it. But I still do it. When I was a kid, I wasn’t scared; I was nervous, but not scared. But now I’m older, and more mature, and I am terrified.

 Each, And. Every. Time. I. Ride.

I think the worst part of getting older and maturing is the fear. I love my horses, and I love riding, but I hate the fear I get that prevents me from achieving what I know my horse is capable of.

When I first bought Candle, I was 16. We did everything together and I wasn’t afraid. But now I am. Don’t get me wrong, it’s nothing that Candle did, it’s me. It was like I had suddenly woken up one day and realised, holy shit how have I managed to survive all these years?! Now every time I ride, there  is this tense niggling little thought that reminds me, ‘hey we’re in an open field, she’ll probably bolt, or that jump is way too high, she’s going to hit it or refuse and you’ll hit the dirt. Don’t go on that trail ride, who knows what will happen.’

 This aggravating fear is always there, it’s caused me to back off the things I’d had been working on for years to perfect and had nearly reached. This fear of mine has created a monster out of me and my horse.

I bought Candle when she was 7, she had gone through quite a few previous homes on leases, and all of them seemed to have some sort of problem with her. Sometimes it would be that the people who had her realised that she wasn’t the right fit and with others problems would start up and she’d be sent back to her owner. The day I went to try her, it was directly after my retired pony’s last show. I was too old to ride medium ponies, and he was hitting his 20’s. Dad had been talking with Candle’s owner, who was a family friend and we figured we go try her. We had Candle on a free lease for about a year before we decided to finalize the deal.

Candle proved to be an excellent jumper and with her high energy and eagerness to learn I decided to give a crack at Eventing with the local pony club. While we never did get the best dressage scores; plowing through it in 1 minute flat, the jumping and cross country challenged her enough that she never got bored and managed to put her excessive energy to good use. We started lessons with a local coach because I was a backyard rider and knew I wasn’t going to win an equitation class anytime soon. For the next few years everything was great, I didn’t hesitate to take Candle on gallop training in the hay fields, go on trail rides, or goof off with friends and test how high our horses could jump.

 Then the fear started.

I’m too scared to take Candle in the fields anymore, trail rides send me into a paranoid mess of what-ifs, and jumping? I went from jumping 3ft to cross rails within a year.

My fear has ruined my riding, my position which was getting so much better has regressed. I constantly hunch over, waiting for an explosion. I hold my reins in a white knuckle grip, and I look down, always watching Candle, waiting and trying to figure out what she’s going to do next. I’ve confined my riding to a small 20X40 ring, I thought I’d feel safe in there, but every time I ride there’s a new fear. Now it’s the fact it’s  grass footing , in the summer it’s not so bad, but in the fall and in the spring, I tense up when we go around corners or circle, thinking that she’ll slip.

I rationalise my fear all the time.  I say I can’t go out of the ring because if I fall off no one will be able to see me. I say I can’t jump that high anymore because Candle isn’t back up to form after having a layoff after an injury from running through the fence. I say I can’t do half the things I used to do because I’m not a kid any more.

 I can’t ride anymore.

I make excuses why I can’t, my university workload is too heavy, and it’s too late when I get home, not enough time, weathers too bad. It goes on and on and on. But what I don’t say is that I’m too scared.

I once tried to use the excuse that Candle was the reason I didn’t want to ride. But then I hated myself for being an idiot. It’s not her fault, it’s mine and I hate myself for how I’m ruining her. Candle is turning into a neurotic mess; she spends most of her day bolting around her pasture, trying to burn off all her energy that had once been used up being ridden hard every day. She’s spookier, and throws a fit in her stall at the slightest noise, where once I could have left her there all day and find her flat out asleep when I came back. 

She’s tense when I ride, because I’m tense, we spend most of our rides trotting, because she’s too strong at the canter and I chicken out. She’s frustrated and angry, because she’s bored and can see our cross country course right beside our ring, the beautiful 7 acres spread that me and my dad had hand built in the days Before Fear, or BF as I started to label everything. I’ve thought about selling her, and trying to find her a home where she’d be happy, but I knew that even if I put her up for sale, no one would buy her because of the market and her reputation.

I found that my fear got a bit better when I realised what it was and what it was doing to me.  I give myself a pep talk with every ride, and found that if I ride when there is plenty of activity going on around me, it distracts me for a while and I can forget about my fear. I remembered that Mugs had written a story about a lady whose fear was just as bad as mine. Peg and her alter ego Maggie Z.

 Finding out about others who are scared is one of the best things that anyone can learn. The shame that riders have for being unable to admit that they’re scared and need help is the biggest barriers to getting over this. Once I’d realised others had this problem too, it opened the flood gates. Instead of keeping my mouth shut when others started talking about how far they were progressing in their training, I started asking about how they got over being scared of going to the next level. Most of them looked at me like I was crazy, not understanding what I was feeling, but the few who did know helped tremendously.

I learned about singing along to the radio loudly, and having someone quiz me about schoolwork while riding. I Learned about focusing on one single goal for a ride, and then analyzing it later to figure out if achieving that goal was linked to other goals. I learned about taking breaks for doing something good, not bad, and establishing a sense of achievement after doing something good.

I decided that I would reward myself and Candle for every time something good happened, from either me or her. I didn’t matter if her form was terrible after flailing through a line of trot poles, the fact that I tried it was the goal. You would think that rewarding her for doing something incorrectly would cause problems, but it doesn’t, at least not for us. When she knows that she can get a reward for trying something, even though I’m sitting on her back preventing her from doing it correctly because I’m a ball of nerves, she still understands that trying is good. And it’s what I’m trying to instill within myself.

Eventually we will get past the trying stage because I’ll be comfortable, and will reach the perfecting stage. I may have created a habit of her stopping and nosing my boot for a treat every time we do something different, but I think that will be easier to stop than fighting fear.  

Yesterday we went out into the pasture, it wasn’t the open field, but we’re taking baby-steps. It was tense and stressful, but by the end we could walk around and sniff the trees and her jolly ball (which apparently was very scary to her?) quietly.  Candle got a reward because she went near her scary thing, and I got my reward for doing my scary thing.  So for now this process works, Candle gets chunks of apple, I get a sense of accomplishment … and sometimes chocolate.