fears – The Hermits' Rest

Yesterday, I achieved a milestone that was a long time coming. In fact, it was one of my “life goals” since I was a small child, and something I never thought I’d be able to do. On the surface, going over to the barn, saddling up my horse, and going for a nice ride doesn’t sound like a big deal. But it was. A huge deal. The amount of personal growth, courage, emotional maturity, and understanding of another living being required to get to this milestone was huge, and I’m just going to say it – I’m really proud of myself.

I’ve been riding Apache for a good number of years now, at least five. One of my life’s dreams came true when Sara generously gave me Apache (and his expenses, ha ha) when she realized that his health challenges meant he’d never be the hard-driving athlete she needed to fulfil her own dreams. It was obvious that I loved that generously rounded horse, regardless of his rideability, and I’d be just fine hanging out with him and doing things on the ground, if it came to that. It also helped that he seemed fond of me, too.

We took some Parelli lessons (a natural horsemanship style) back when I had money to do that kind of thing, and we got a pretty good foundation from it, though being in crowds with people barking orders at us made both of us nervous. That is an important insight.

I’m the happiest horse on the ranch. My human and I make a great team.

Since then, we have worked at our own pace, getting better at various horse/human activities, and understanding each other more and more. I am sort of glad I didn’t have the money for more lessons, because it was good to work things out on my own, with Sara providing guidance. The progress was slowed down by the fact that Apache has metabolic issues, so sometimes his feet hurt and I can’t ride him…like much of last year, right when we’d been making really good progress going out in the ranch with Sara and Spice, exploring. I learned that Apache is as curious as I am about seeing new things, as long as he can take his time.

You know how your childhood issues, fears, and old patterns haunt you no matter how hard you try to move past them? (If you don’t, wow, you’re one exceptional human.) That’s certainly a struggle I’ve dealt with my whole life, or at least since I’ve realized you actually might be able to move past such things.

Spiders aren’t my childhood fear, but they make a good representation for scary things

I’ve made great progress in recent years with a lot of my “issues” (thanks to my fine therapist and Brene Brown books). I no longer blame everything that goes wrong in my life on my own shortcomings. I no longer hesitate to speak up when someone in authority makes a proclamation or judges someone in a way I know is wrong. I care much, much less about whether my personal appearance pleases anyone but me…and so on.

I’ve talked about it before, how I’ve managed to get the negative voices in my head to shut the heck up and say nice stuff instead (“Great work, me,” says my internal voice).