communities you have stepped away from
Apr. 16th, 2019 06:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dancing_crowa response that I can't post to Clever Manka here, because I have been meaning to think about it for a year or two now, and have been avoiding it.
What I don't say there is that part of what was piling up on me was lack of other exercise and weight. Shortly after I restarted riding, I lost a lot of weight via WW and developed muscles and balance and core strength I had not had in years. Riding was easier when I was that solid, and it fell away from me little by little. Exercise became really hard to fit into life - it had fit briefly because I could make it to the gym and back before getting the kids to school, but when they had to be in school at 730, the whole morning routine started way too early.
I returned to the barn of friends from grad school - people I ahd ridden with then - and as teachers they were slow and painstaking and I didn't click with them the way I did with other teachers, so I was leading a kind of strange double life where some horses were in one place and other horses were elsewhere - the geography of it got exponentially more difficult.
I actually went so far as to lease a horse, and he died. He was at least 26, I was feeding him all the things that had been requested, and working him steadily, gently, daily, and he just - tipped over in the pasture one late afternoon, and was likely dead when he hit the ground. that was doubly traumatic because I had never dealt with equine death before and had no idea what kinds of costs and issues had to be dealt with, at the same time that his owner flipped right the fuck out. I have independent witnesses on that. She blamed me, and I still get weepy thinking about losing him. So that was harder than necessary.
At that point I had no easy access to horses with the training to get me to first level in dressage, which was what I wanted to do. I wanted to ride that lengthening across the long diagonals on a horse that wasn't rushing but had the lift and swing that I'd felt on my old man, before he died and on a couple of other horses when I'd first come back to riding, before the farm owner declared bankruptcy and sold her horses. I needed a horse I either couldn't afford, or couldn't find. I did have the oversight from trainers to get another horse there, but even that didn't work out very well.
And I really did fall off once too often. And it was the same horse, each time, and it took me by surprise and hurt worse each time. It seemed like a bad path to be on.
And finally enough other things were happening that it became easier, and nicer, and kinder to myself, to just stop. So I did.
Really it still feels weird.
For a long time I was a horse girl. I was in Pony Club and 4H and took lessons and taught smaller children and had full care of my own and other people's horses (first checkbook, so I could buy grain at the coop). I was a 3-phase event organizer when I was 16, and I could have passed at the tests to be in charge by the time I was 18, having learned All The Rules. It was friendly and heady and much easier to be a part of when the class system was flatter (1970's New England) - also living in the exurbs meant more people had horses, children were feral, and there was room to ride and people to ride with. I must have ranged across most of my county along some combination of power lines and trails and the edges of farmland. When I started college the first time, I was involved in the barn a lot, and got a lot of community and positive reinforcement from it. When I changed colleges, there was no easy access to riding, and it started to fall away.
I rode again in grad school, but only until the regime changed, and I realized I was at the barn more than the lab.
The last major riding period was across my 40s and 50s, until things piled up on me - I fell off once too often, other things were increasingly complex, and I just ... stopped. Stopped collecting rides, stopped working with other people's horses, stopped visiting the barn. I kind of miss it, and mostly don't.
I rode again in grad school, but only until the regime changed, and I realized I was at the barn more than the lab.
The last major riding period was across my 40s and 50s, until things piled up on me - I fell off once too often, other things were increasingly complex, and I just ... stopped. Stopped collecting rides, stopped working with other people's horses, stopped visiting the barn. I kind of miss it, and mostly don't.
What I don't say there is that part of what was piling up on me was lack of other exercise and weight. Shortly after I restarted riding, I lost a lot of weight via WW and developed muscles and balance and core strength I had not had in years. Riding was easier when I was that solid, and it fell away from me little by little. Exercise became really hard to fit into life - it had fit briefly because I could make it to the gym and back before getting the kids to school, but when they had to be in school at 730, the whole morning routine started way too early.
I returned to the barn of friends from grad school - people I ahd ridden with then - and as teachers they were slow and painstaking and I didn't click with them the way I did with other teachers, so I was leading a kind of strange double life where some horses were in one place and other horses were elsewhere - the geography of it got exponentially more difficult.
I actually went so far as to lease a horse, and he died. He was at least 26, I was feeding him all the things that had been requested, and working him steadily, gently, daily, and he just - tipped over in the pasture one late afternoon, and was likely dead when he hit the ground. that was doubly traumatic because I had never dealt with equine death before and had no idea what kinds of costs and issues had to be dealt with, at the same time that his owner flipped right the fuck out. I have independent witnesses on that. She blamed me, and I still get weepy thinking about losing him. So that was harder than necessary.
At that point I had no easy access to horses with the training to get me to first level in dressage, which was what I wanted to do. I wanted to ride that lengthening across the long diagonals on a horse that wasn't rushing but had the lift and swing that I'd felt on my old man, before he died and on a couple of other horses when I'd first come back to riding, before the farm owner declared bankruptcy and sold her horses. I needed a horse I either couldn't afford, or couldn't find. I did have the oversight from trainers to get another horse there, but even that didn't work out very well.
And I really did fall off once too often. And it was the same horse, each time, and it took me by surprise and hurt worse each time. It seemed like a bad path to be on.
And finally enough other things were happening that it became easier, and nicer, and kinder to myself, to just stop. So I did.
Really it still feels weird.
no subject
Date: 2019-04-21 06:37 pm (UTC)