Hello world… THIS IS ME!

If you’re anything like me, now that you’re stuck inside without ponies to entertain you all day, you’ve come up with some coping strategies. Did you binge watch all the videos on the John Madden Sales YouTube page? Did you break out into a canter while you were on a run? Did you count the strides from your room to the refrigerator? No? Ah, but did you download TikTok and spend countless hours learning the dance to “Savage”? See you’re just like me. (And no, I will not be posting those attempts – there’s a reason I quit dance after one year.)

Like many other professionals during the quarantine, I am furloughed. It makes sense, seeing as there are no students on campus to teach. Normally, I have the pleasure of teaching hunt seat equitation at a private boarding school, but at the moment, all of our students are off campus exploring the world of online learning due to COVID-19. If this had been a regular school year, we would have already won (I can dream, can’t I?) at IEA (Interscholastic Equestrian Association) Nationals in LA, and we would be in the midst of local spring showing. Instead, I’m at home doing yoga, baking cookies, and becoming obsessed with VEEP, while our superstar barn managers care for the horses. I can’t tell you how much I would rather be teaching, riding, or even just walking horses to and from the paddocks, but I’m incredibly grateful to be healthy and safe inside my home.

With all this extra time on my hands, I’ve been watching lots of riding videos and doing a lot of thinking about how I can be a better coach when this all passes and life returns to normal. As someone who struggles with the impostor phenomenon, I am always looking for visible ways to be better. Ways to show that I am improving. Ways to show that I’m useful. Ways to show that I belong. The silver lining of feeling like I am out of place or taking up too much space is that I have an insatiable drive to prove to myself and others that I belong, without a doubt.

For much of my riding career, my focus has been on the hunter world. Hunt seat equitation is my anthem and my heart sings when I see hunters with perfectly tucked knees and outstretched necks. To me, the hunter world is organic, flowy, and asks horses to be the best versions of themselves. The jumps are natural, resembling *safe* versions of what could be found in the field while out foxhunting. The striding is forward but relaxed, the courses encourage balance and precision. There is fantastic skill and finesse found in all disciplines of riding, but the hunters inspire me.

What’s ironic is that the hunter world is known for its wealth, and I am not. I have been privileged in a number of ways throughout my life, and I take full ownership of benefits I’ve reaped from those societal, familial, and financial resources. I am smart, I am creative, I am dedicated, I am strong, but I do not have cash falling from my pockets as I walk. And truthfully, I never have. But I have grit and I have will, and I bet you do, too.

I’m that girl who caught the horse bug at a young age and whose mother was too kind to say “no,” even though she was very aware of the road ahead. My mother grew up in a small town in central Iowa and was one of five children. She was also horse-obsessed as a child, and though my grandfather told me over and over that he would have loved to put her in riding lessons, it wasn’t an option financially. So she held onto her dream, and finally in her twenties, when she was working at an architectural firm in Boston, she started taking lessons and, soon after, bought her first horse, Blue. I’ve never really thought about it until now, but I don’t give her enough credit for the amount of courage it must have taken to start a new sport as an adult, especially one that can make you feel so vulnerable. Go Mom!

Well, as life got more complicated and expenses started to build, mom had to sell Blue and put a hold on her riding career. That is, until I saw a picture on her bureau of her show jumping Blue. My interest was piqued, and a science fair project on horses later, I had my first lesson on the schoolmaster Star. Star was a bay pony, probably a large, though she seemed much bigger at the time. It didn’t help that the rim of my borrowed, oversized helmet kept tipping down into my eyes as I cranked my neck back to see her muzzle. I don’t remember much about that first leadline lesson, other than I knew that I belonged in that barn on a horse. Once I was settled in my routine, my mother began riding again in the morning adult lessons. And so it began…

It’s easy to try and to learn when you’re a kid. Basically your whole job from the second you’re born is to figure out the rules of life: what gets you dessert, what makes you do the dishes, what’s the difference between “b” and “d”, and how to get an A on that math quiz. You’re used to making mistakes, learning from those mistakes, and trying again. The more we grow up and start to figure out those rules, we get cockier and start to think that we are either incapable of making mistakes, or that we shouldn’t try something different because we could make a mistake. The risk of making a mistake could show you aren’t qualified enough, a thought that already haunts minds riddled with the impostor phenomenon. So, we hide behind a façade of late-night Google searches to answer our questions and confide in trusted resources who we know won’t judge or exile us for not knowing all the answers.

I’m learning more and more that regardless of where you come from, what you have, or what you don’t, if you give yourself the chance to try, you’ll learn a great deal more than if you tell yourself you’re not good enough to try. Here’s the thing – no one is perfect when they start. And, fun fact, even the people you worship as experts in this horse world are not perfect and do not know all the answers! I’ve been riding for nearly 20 years and I still often feel like I’m just at the starting line.

Let’s cheer to giving ourselves a chance to try, to recognizing that mistakes make us better, to realizing that we belong, and to feeling secure in the journey we are on. Here I am, ready to share whatever useful information I’ve learned from my journey thus far with the intent that it will matter to someone out there and help you on your journey. Welcome to Riding with Emma!

P.S. Did you catch my Saddle Club reference? 😃

(Disclaimer: I wrote this post back in April, then I learned it takes time to build a website. I’m now back at work, but the overall message is still relevant. Enjoy!)