Lost in Translation

About twenty years ago, my sister took horse-riding lessons. She was At That Age, where every girl wants a horse*, and for a couple years she lived the dream. There was no horse that was particularly hers, at least as far as I remember, but she rode every weekend, and read up on horses and riding when she couldn’t actually be on the horses. In the fifth grade I checked a book out of the school library about a girl and her horse, and devoured it; and when I told my sister about a particularly vivid scene where the heroine had loped around on her horse, my sister told me in no uncertain terms that there was no such speed as a “lope” and the author clearly didn’t know what she was talking about.

One summer, my sister and I both went to the same camp that revolved around horses. (I think I was starting to feel left out.) She rode, while I did archery and crafts and such. We did all have the opportunity to get on a horse, though, and walk around a bit. They were very well-behaved horses, but when I got on mine, we walked around a bit like we were supposed to and then he reared up a little and I was so startled that I fell off. I figured that my turn was up, so I started walking away. The trainer shook her head. “When you fall off the horse, you get back on.” Then she led the next kid over to my horse and that was the end of my riding experience.

I thought about that day today, for the first time in about twenty years. Today was an exceptionally hard day, in Havi‘s parlance. Money stress, and family stress, and work stress – all the big problematic stressors showed up and made a big mess of my day, and every time I’ve tried to push through and get going again, something else comes up to slap me back down. It’s been, to coin a phrase, one of those days.

There’s a significant part of me that’s trying to retreat. One of the things I tend to do when I’m stressed is to go into a quiet room and listen to water falling. In this house, since the only quiet room tends to be the bathroom, I’ll go in and run the shower for a few minutes. Often I’ll turn the showerhead outward, so that it’s spraying against the curtain, and let the pressure and heat relax me. I can’t express how much I’ve wanted to do that, pretty much all day. But instead, for whatever reason, that horse trainer’s voice keeps coming into my head. I can still hear her – with perfect clarity, my memory tells me, although twenty years and the shame and dizziness from falling off a horse have probably introduced a few artifacts. “When you fall off the horse, you get back on.”

So instead of retreating and finding a safe spot, I’ve been getting back up. Every time I fall or am knocked off the horse, I dust myself off and get back on. That trainer keeps prodding me. “No more being the ten-year-old who fell off a horse and just walked away,” she says. “It’d be easy to walk away. You could wipe the slate clean and never have to worry about it again. But if you want to be stronger, and show the people around you what kind of person you are, then you look the horse in the eye and get right back up on its back.”

When you fall off the horse, you get back on.

It’s hard. These difficulties hit me in what’s charitably called the solar plexus. I get dizzy. My vision contracts and I feel my skin tightening and growing hot. My stomach hurts, and I spend a moment reeling. But then I breathe, and smile for ten seconds like my dad taught me to do, and start going again. In the face of so much difficulty I want to be strong. I want to show the people around me that I can come out the other side and be okay. I want to get back on the horse. And it’s strange, because even though today has sucked so hard that Hoover is filing for patent infringement, I’m feeling better about myself than I have in years.

* Yes, I know, you hated horses and wanted a machine gun.