On Senior Sages.

Four years ago today, I stood up onstage in Rauh Theater in Hillman (not Hillman library, as my Pitt friends will probably assume, but the Hillman Center for Performing Arts, the presence on my high school campus of which was and is a blessing to the entire community) and I gave a speech—my Senior Sage.

I had a lot that I wanted to say back then, and I mean that seriously—I wrote thirty drafts of that speech and I still have all of them. I wrote them over the course of the year, so they’re all different, but it took me from September to April of my senior year of high school to decide what it was that I wanted to share with the community.

The text of that speech is on my Facebook, if you scroll back a long way, but the contents of it really aren’t important at this point. That speech was what I needed to share then, and as one might expect, I have some other things that I’d like to share now.

I went back to campus a little over a week ago. I had a motive—I needed moral character references for a form I have to submit to sit for the CPA exam in Pennsylvania and they needed to have known me for at least three years, so it was just easier to ask some old teachers of mine than to try to find people at Pitt to do it—but I also did it because I’ve made a bit of a habit out of going back. I don’t do it a ton, but I do it more than most of my classmates—a couple times a year, usually, not over breaks or homecoming, but on random days when I decide that I just want to go back to school.

I do this for a lot of reasons. Early on in college it was to remind myself that it was real, that I didn’t misremember it, that it was a part of me. Now it’s less a nostalgia trip (though it still is one) and more of a reminder of who I used to be and how far I’ve come. It’s also a thank-you, because there aren’t that many of my teachers left there anymore—it’s amazing how few people I recognize when I walk around campus—but there are still some incredibly important ones and I like to make sure that they know how I’m doing.

It’s less about the academics than it is about how I’m doing in my personal life. Academic excellence from me doesn’t surprise them—they expected it from me well before I ever learned to see it in myself—but who I am as I walk those halls now is a lot different from who I was four years ago when I was in my final months as a student there, and I want them to know that because they were the first people who I felt believed in me because they wanted to, not because they had a moral obligation due to being related to me.

There’s a lot that I don’t know how to forget—that I don’t want to forget—from my time there. Mr. Smith asked me if I remembered the Charlie Brown song, when the last time I heard it was (and then proceeded to explain the concept to half the history department, because it was something he started doing my junior year and it still doesn’t make sense to anyone else and I know it won’t make sense to any of you reading this except for Mr. Weiss, maybe), and I just laughed and said “Of course, I couldn’t forget that, I don’t think I’ve heard it since the last time I was here,” because it’s really not something that I can forget. I can’t forget something that let me laugh at how sad I was, that gave me a chance to step outside of myself for a moment, and I may not have those Charlie Brown moments often anymore, but it’s not something that I’m ever going to leave behind either.

There’s this idea that I’ve heard repeated a number of times recently, for some reason—you should never compare yourself to other people, because you can’t. The only person you can compare yourself to is who you were yesterday.

I go back to Shady Side not to reminisce over my glory days, because they weren’t my glory days by any stretch of the imagination. I go back to Shady Side because walking those halls again, wandering around campus, looking at all of those kids, is a way of helping myself remember just how far I’ve come since I was there every day and sitting in class with those teachers and trying to figure out who I was going to be. It makes me wish that I could go back and give my younger self some advice—not advice for my younger schoolmates, like my Senior Sage was, but advice for the person I was at the time.

I wish I could go back and tell my fourteen-year-old self that it’s going to be hard and it’s going to take a long time, but one day she’s going to learn how to untangle who she is from eight years of internalized self-hatred, that she’ll figure out that there’s no more wrong with her than there is with anyone else on this planet and she’s no less deserving of people who care about her than anyone else is. I wish I could go back and tell my fifteen-year-old self that it’s going to be painful while it’s happening but one day she’s going to relearn how to love some of the people who hurt her, because when someone is important you learn how to forgive them, even if it takes a while.

I wish I could go back and tell my sixteen-year-old self that she’s going to meet this girl at the barn one day and over the course of countless car rides and lessons and a year sharing an apartment, they’re going to become best friends for every reason other than horses and she’ll finally get what it means to have that friend to hang out with on Saturday nights and text about anything at all hours (and drag into her most recent obsessions—sorry, Allie). I wish I could go back and tell my seventeen-year-old self that Prize Day and Cum Laude designations in high school have no bearing on how smart she is or what she’ll do in the future and one day she’s going to have three honor societies, two degrees, one honors thesis, eight semesters of Dean’s List, and a Summa Cum Laude designation to prove it.

Landreth told me back in the fall that I’m one of the few people who seems to have reflected on my time there and actually learned something from it beyond what I was taught in the classroom (following his statement about my lack of tolerance for bullshit from anyone and everyone, which is also true). He’s not wrong. I’m uniquely positioned to reflect on it because I don’t come from that world, but also because, unlike most people I know, I’ve been chronicling my own mental state on a blog for the last seven years.

It’s a lot easier to reflect when you can look back and know exactly how you felt at any given time—this time four years ago (plus a day), I had the following thoughts: “i hate everything,” “it’s a beautiful day outside and i feel like shit this is fun ^.^,” “i just want to be half as decent of a person as my brother is. that’s all i’m asking for. he’s the best i know.” (don’t tell him seventeen-year-old me said that), and “okay i’m giving a speech tomorrow and i get terribly nervous when i speak in public but i really need to not psych myself out about this because it’s really important to me but sPEECH AND PUBLIC SPEAKING HELP.”

I can walk through my worst nights whenever I want. I can walk through good days, little things that my friends did that made me happy, the moments when I didn’t know why I was doing any of it but kept doing it anyway. I look back and I reflect not because it’s easy, not because I think owe it to anyone, but because it’s four years later and I still don’t know how I ever convinced myself that it was going to be okay. I stood up on that stage and I talked about the things that got me through, but looking back, I don’t know how I ever learned to open myself to those things in the first place.

I owe that school a lot, and I owe my parents a lot for the sacrifices they made and the choice that they made to send me there. My mom says it’s hard for her to think about my years there because she knows how miserable I was, but part of that reflecting process has involved me learning how to separate the parts of me that were miserable just because I was miserable from school and my experience there. It wasn’t easy for me—Mr. Smith wasn’t wrong that time he told me that he always knew that college would be better for me than high school ever was—but it gave me a chance to be someone different, to be someone new. Looking back, I’m not sure how much I like who that girl was, but it was the first time since I was six years old that I wasn’t surrounded by people with preconceived notions of who I was on the first day of school.

That school was where I learned all manner of useful skills. It’s where I learned how to talk to adults and communicate professionally—it was not my business communications class which taught me those things, I’m sorry—and how to shake hands and maintain eye contact. It’s where I learned how to write a four-page paper in forty-five minutes and still make it sound like I know what I’m talking about. It’s where I learned how to develop the façade of a pretentious, sarcastic asshole and wear it like armor, and also where I learned to smile and laugh and be charismatic even when I’m deeply uncomfortable (which is most of the time because I’m an introvert and incredibly shy even if I don’t come across that way).

I’ve learned a lot more since then, though. I’ve learned to stop being so cynical, to trust the process a little more, to believe in my own intelligence and my own abilities without needing anyone to force that knowledge on me like I did in high school. I’ve learned that I really am okay with never being part of a group, with having friends from all over the place, of all different ages, who all do different things, because I don’t need to be able to spend time with all of them at once for those relationships to be meaningful. I’ve learned that maybe, just maybe, all those promises that I made to myself during the worst days of my life may have been necessary to get me through them, but that doesn’t mean I have to hold myself to them anymore. I’ve learned that I may be an adult but sometimes I really just have to listen to my mother because she knows me and she knows when I’m miserable even when I don’t.

I’ve learned that I’m still just as grateful—and possibly even more—for some of my high school teachers as I was back then, that you never know who’s going to walk into your life on a rainy morning in a coffee shop and decide to stay there, that sometimes it’s the most unexpected people who stick around—I told Cam over the summer that I never expected us to stay friends after we graduated, to be those people who go and get dinner after work and catch up like actual adults, and he seemed surprised, but it was the honest truth. I didn’t expect that or my regular ten-minute rendezvous with Max between classes most Tuesdays and Thursdays, where he fills me on what he learned in international politics, I tell him what I didn’t learn in finance, and we reminisce over #JustShadySideThings that you can’t understand if you didn’t go through them, because being a student at that school is an experience unlike any other.

I’ve learned that sometimes you grow apart from people and it doesn’t have to mean anything other than that your lives went in different directions and you became different people, that the formation of distance doesn’t mean that those relationships weren’t important at one time, that it’s okay to change in opposite ways and not have the same things in common as you used to. I’ve learned that there’s something extra wonderful about sitting there and discussing music without someone else who knows exactly how a song makes you feel, whose default response to certain things is the same as yours because there are some songs that are just so fitting for certain moments and places that it’s impossible to separate them (I’m looking at you, 4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy)).

I’ve learned that while dealing with my shin splints is an ongoing challenge (guess who’s starting a round of prescribed physical therapy on Tuesday, folks), I actually do love running in a way that I never thought I would. I’ve learned that it’s okay to outgrow things that you used to love, that sometimes there comes a point where what you’re sacrificing isn’t worth the results you’re getting and it’s okay to let go because it’ll always be there if you decide you want to come back to it (long story short, I’m not riding right now and don’t know when I will again and strangely enough, I’m okay with that). I’ve learned that I get what Christian Borle meant when he spoke at my graduation and told us that Hillman taunts him, because I feel the exact same way about that new science building and probably always will—who knows, maybe I actually would’ve have gone through with becoming a chemist if it had existed when I was there.

I've learned that while Mr. Weiss was right about a lot of things all those times that we sat there and he talked me down from that cliff, he was right about one thing especially—there are people who care more about where they end up than they do about how they get there, and then there are people who care more about the journey that they go on than they do about where they end up. He told me that the first kind of people live sad lives and that I'm the second kind, and he's right. There's been a lot in my life that hasn't gone the way I'd hoped, that turned out to be something completely different than what I was expecting, but at the end of the day, I wouldn't change it, because I'm stronger for those things and better for them and I wouldn't be where I am now if they hadn't happened. I wouldn't be able to appreciate how content I am now if I didn't know how miserable I used to be.

I’ve also learned that there’s a lot more that I don’t know and I may have a lot of things that I wish I could tell my teenaged self, but twenty-five-year-old Anna is probably going to have a lot of things that she’ll wish she could tell me, and maybe that’s the point. When I was seventeen I felt like I knew everything, and now I feel like I don’t really know much at all—to quote a line from my favorite U2 song, “The more you see, the less you know, the less you find out as you go, I knew much more then than I do now.”

The last four years (really, three and a half) have gone by more quickly than I would have expected. It feels like I was just a freshman yesterday, even though I’ll be walking in my first graduation ceremony two weeks from today. On day one of college, I never could have predicted that I’d be where I am right now. I never could have predicted that I’d be getting an anthropology degree, that I’d be facing down a job at a public accounting firm with something that is more akin to excitement than it is to trepidation, that I’d belong to multiple honor societies or have written a thesis about communication patterns on Tumblr or be friends with that one kid that I met in honors Seminar in Composition on our very first day of classes and have somehow managed to stick with for pretty much the entirety of our college careers (shout out to Billy for putting up with me for this long, he deserves a medal at this point).

I don’t know where I’m going from here, honestly. This is the first time in my life where I haven’t had a serious plan. I don’t know if I’m going to be a public accountant for the rest of my life, if I’ll one day decide to go corporate, if I’ll go back to school and get a PhD or MBA or JD—that was another nice thing about my visit to campus last week, actually. Mr. Smith asked me how I felt about graduation and I told him that I’m excited but I’m also not because I don’t feel ready to be done with school, because there’s still so much I want to learn and I’m not done yet, and he just laughed and said “That’s why people become teachers.” I’m just trying to enjoy myself, to enjoy being in my early twenties at the beginnings of a reasonably lucrative career, to enjoy the fact that seventeen-year-old me never could’ve predicted that I’d wind up here, but I did.

A lot of things have changed since this day four years ago, and even more so since four years before that. I’ve changed a lot, to the point where my childhood best friend’s mother doesn’t recognize me when we cross paths on campus. I’m trying to get better about giving other people the space to be different, to not be who they’ve been in my mind for years, and it’s hard when there are no apologies for hurt feelings and isolation, but I’m working on it because I want them to do the same thing for me. I want to give myself room to grow, to come back four years from now and have a different outlook on life because we’re all changing all the time and the only way you can really realize that is by looking back on who you were (and thanking the people who have helped you to figure out who you are).

I ended my Senior Sage with a quote from Doctor Who—“Anybody remotely interesting is mad in some way or another.” I’m going to end this with one too, even though my mother is now more caught up with Doctor Who than I am, because I still love Eleven and Amy Pond and his final episode always gets to me—"We all change, when you think about it, we're all different people, all through our lives, and that's okay, that's good, you've gotta keep moving, so long as you remember all the people that you used to be. I will not forget one line of this, not one day, I swear.”

I really won’t. That much I do know. I write everything down now, because I’ve spent enough of my life regretting that I have no proof of how I felt or what I thought about things at a particular moment, so how could I forget?

Until next time x

On twenty-one.

This is somewhat of a tradition for me now, across all of my blogs, so I present to you...

twenty-one things learned by the age of twenty-one || a list:

1. Learning how to wait for things is a life skill. It can be the worst thing in the world when it's happening, but when you start getting close to getting something important that you want and know that it's almost within your grasp? It's the best feeling in the world, even if it brings restlessness with it too.
2. Making carefully curated playlists for specific moods when you have over 3400 songs on your phone takes a really, really long time.
3. Sometimes you're going to become uncomfortably aware of your own mortality, and that's all right. It's okay to be conscious of the fact that you aren't invincible. If anything, it can teach you to be more deliberate with your choices (or to stop worrying so much about what's coming and just let things happen. It takes all kinds of people).
4. There will be people in this world whose importance will not become clear immediately, but you'll figure it out eventually. It becomes really hard to ignore if you can live with them for a year and still actively seek out their company when that year is over.
5. Some songs are always going to remind you of specific people, but one day you'll be able to listen to them without it bringing more discomfort than it does peace. There's something oddly comforting about being able to put a song on a playlist without overthinking its significance.
6. Say you're sorry, even if it takes a while. Clearing the air with someone, whether it takes months or years, makes everything easier.
7. Don't set impossibly high standards for yourself, and if you absolutely insist on doing it anyway, don't wreck yourself trying to meet them. Sometimes you just need to finish the paper and shut off your computer and go to sleep rather than staying up all night worrying about it. As one of my professors told us this spring, "Complete is more important than perfect."
8. Long-distance friendships suck, but if you find someone who makes a five-hour round-trip negligible just for the pleasure of their company, they will quite possibly be the best person you know and you'll learn to deal with not seeing them every day (Social media can be a truly wonderful thing).
9. Let people change. Let them become something other than what they are in your mind, what they were when you knew them. Some people will come back to you and some people won't, but if you're going to expect people to let you grow, you have to do the same for them.
10. Learn to say no, even if you know that you're the most capable person for a particular job. There comes a point where you've got enough on your plate and picking up the slack is up to other people on your team. If they aren't willing to do it, let it go. It's not fair for them to expect you to work yourself to the point of physical illness just because they refuse to act on their responsibilities.
11. Conversely, if you like the people that you're working with, even the most mundane and tenuous tasks will become easier. There's something to be said for working in an office where people will spontaneously start singing songs from High School Musical on a Thursday morning just because someone asked "What time is it?"
12. It's okay to be afraid of things. It's okay if they're little things, and it's okay if they're big things. What matters is whether or not you allow your fear to stop you from moving forward and trying anyway.
13. Saying goodbye can be the worst, most impossible thing, but goodbye doesn't mean it's over. Goodbye isn't always the end. Sometimes it's just until we meet again.
14. You don't have to do things just because everyone else is doing them, and you don't have to justify it either. Make the choices that are right for you, and if people can't get past the fact that you aren't doing what they do, they aren't people that you need in your life.
15. Sometimes you just have to roll your windows down and blast your music and drive. It may not actually take you away from your problems, but that feeling of freedom can be enough to carry you through more than you might think.
16. If you have relentless enthusiasm for something, that's more than enough to carry you through the stages of not being terribly good at it. It takes time to be successful at things. Loving them makes the bad stuff at the beginning (and along the way) seem less terrible.
17. Hard work doesn't fix everything. It's not some cure-all. It doesn't guarantee you anything. What it does is arm you with the tools to change things if you're smart enough to take advantage of the opportunities that are presented to you, or to create those opportunities for yourself if they don't come your way.
18. It might seem like it's never going to happen, but one day you'll grow into yourself. It might take twenty years for it to happen, but it will, and it's going to be a beautiful thing when it does.
19. Old hurts come back. You can think that you're over something, that you're past it, but it will come back to haunt you every now and then. Being better isn't about never feeling those things again. It's about knowing that you'll get through it when you do.
20. You have to listen to yourself. You have to listen when you feel tired, when you feel weak, when something just feels wrong even though everything in life seems to be going perfectly. Gut feelings are there for a reason and you'll do yourself so many more favors if you pay attention to what your body and your mind are telling you, even if those messages aren't entirely understandable at first. You aren't any good to anyone, yourself included, if you're too tired and too overworked to get anything done.
21. Sometimes it's the unexpected people who stick around. Don't try to tell yourself who you will or won't be friends with after a period of your life is over, because you'll probably be wrong and there's a lot to be said for doing the adult thing and meeting up with an old friend for dinner after work. There's a lot to be said for people who knew you in the before as well as the after (and if you still like each other after you've grown out of your shared awkward years, they're definitely worth keeping around).

Until next time x

On Wonder Woman.

I got lucky as a kid.

I got lucky as a kid because when I was in preschool, one of my teachers told my parents that they should never think of me as bossy, because I wasn't bossy. I had leadership skills, and minimizing that by calling me bossy wasn't something that anyone should ever do.

I got lucky as a kid because when I was eight, my mother stumbled across a book in Barnes and Noble and bought it for me because it had a red-headed girl and a cat and a horse on the cover. I got lucky as a kid because when I read that book a few months later, I met Alanna of Trebond. I got lucky as a kid because I met Alanna of Trebond and she introduced me to Veralidaine Sarrasri and Keladry of Mindelan and I learned that the world couldn't stop me from the things I put my mind to just because I was a girl.

I got lucky as a kid because I met Sabriel and Lirael and Lyssa and Menolly and learned that the world should never underestimate the power of a teenage girl. I got lucky as a kid because I watched Eowyn over and over again, because I didn't know what it meant at the time but I learned that "I am no man" is a battle cry, not something to be ashamed of.

I got lucky as a kid because I had my female heroes, because even as I read books and watched movies with boys at their helm, I had Alanna and Daine and Kel there to remind me that I didn't have to be a boy to do great things. I had Sabriel and Lirael to remind me that teenage girls can face incredible evils and win against them. I had Eowyn to remind me that being a woman doesn't make me weak—it makes me dangerous.

I grew up with high expectations, most of which I've set for myself. That which I deem just "good enough" is many people's version of "better than expected." It gets me into a spot of trouble every now and then—it's hard to remain relaxed about what's going on in your life when your version of acceptable is bordering on unnecessary—but it's served me well so far, and it's never been based on being better than those around me.

It's never been based on proving I was good enough to anyone else. To be perfectly honest, the only thing I've really had trouble with is proving that I'm good enough to myself.

I went to training for work in Cleveland this past week, and spent the weekend and the first half of the week being unable to take a deep breath. My anxiety is such that I suffer from a very real case of impostor syndrome, which manifests itself through my breathing most of the time even if I feel like it isn't bothering me. My expectations for myself are so high that I frequently feel like I'll never be able to match them, and that makes me forget that I don't have to meet those expectations in order for other people to be perfectly satisfied by what I'm doing.

I've gotten into plenty of stressful situations because of this tendency, but there are things that I do when it puts in an appearance (typically around midterms or finals, or other big life events like my internship). As I've mentioned before, I watch The Lord of the Rings, but I also reach for some books on my bookshelf, books that have been taped back together because of how tattered they are, books that contain notes from their authors on the title pages to remind me that yes, girls do rule, and yes, I can do this.

I met Tamora Pierce at the library in September of 2012, almost five years ago, now. I was sixteen years old and I went to hear her speak and we were told that we could bring up to four books for her to sign afterward, so I did. I couldn't bring some of my favorites, though, because one of them literally has duct tape covering the spine to hold the book together after I split it in two from reading it so much, and another's cover is Scotch-taped from where I accidentally ripped it during one of the many times that I was carrying it around in my bag.

I confessed that to her when I met her, that I hadn't brought the books that I really wanted to bring, and I won't forget what she told me—she loves seeing books that are like that, because that's how she knows that their readers really, truly love them. That's how she knows that they mean something.

I've all but destroyed those books because they've always been there to remind me that I can get through anything, that I should never be discouraged just because I'm a girl, that I may have to fight harder or work longer or have a hundred times more belief in myself, but no one can stop me from doing things just because I'm not a man.

Today I saw Wonder Woman, and while I cried at the end for story-related reasons (no spoilers!!), there were several moments during the movie where I either did cry or almost cried simply because of what I was watching. I cried when I saw Robin Wright on screen as a badass general and not the princess of my childhood, because I adore The Princess Bride but it meant so much more to see a leader and a fighter instead of a tied-up blonde.

I cried multiple times watching Diana fight, and even just when I was watching her make decisions and refuse to take no for an answer, because I had my female heroes as a kid, but not like that. Not on such a large scale. Not headlining their own blockbuster Hollywood movie. There are a lot of people in the world who love Tamora Pierce's books, and plenty who love Sabriel and Lirael and the Old Kingdom series, but those things have never been on a scale like this (much as I wish they were).

I was crying because I didn't get to see my heroes like that, but there are eight-year-old girls now who will. There are little girls who have walked and are going to walk into that movie theater and come out having watched a movie with the female protagonist that they deserve, one who isn't the butt of jokes or made out to be some jerk's fantasy, but instead one who kicks ass and takes charge and stands on her own without having to let go of being in love and being a person in the process.

There are little girls who get to see their hero on an international stage, and the movie industry can no longer pretend to nobody wants to watch movies with female heroes. The movie industry can no longer pretend that it's enough to push us to the background, to make us side characters, to not give us full narratives because "it won't sell."

Well, guess what?

We just got a movie with a female lead and a female director. We just got a movie that has made over $400 million dollars worldwide (and counting), a movie certified 93% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes, a movie that was humor and inspiration and sadness and brilliance all rolled into one, a movie that girls will be watching over and over again in the way that I've reread my books and repeatedly watched Eowyn slay the Witch King of Angmar, because it's a reminder that girls really are unstoppable.

Wonder Woman was the hero we needed, but more than that, she was hands down, 100%, absolutely, truly the hero that so many girls have deserved.

I'm glad that we aren't waiting for her anymore.

On teachers.

I'm at an odd point in my life right now.

It doesn't feel like it's been all that long since I graduated from high school, but on June 6th, it will have been three years. On June 6th, I'll be in an office in Cleveland going through my second day of training for my internship. On June 6th, I will be even closer to finishing my final year of college. I'll be less than a year away from sitting for at least one section of the CPA exam. I'm a lot closer to being a real adult now than I am to being a child.

Being less than a year away from my college graduation feels weird. It's not weird because it's the end of my education—I really do want to pursue a PhD in anthropology in the future (for my own amusement if nothing else) so things are really only just beginning—but it's weird to look back on it. It's weird to look back on everything that has happened and how much things have changed. I've been doing a lot of reflecting recently, I suppose, and that's brought a lot with it.

I've had some truly excellent professors in college (mostly in the anthropology department). My professor for my first-ever anthro class is an old friend of my parents, and it's because of him (and my T.A.) that I kept taking classes in the field and eventually made the decision to switch my A&S major from fiction writing to anthro. I had that T.A. for a summer class, which was equal parts hilarious and intellectually stimulating, because, for some reason, I keep winding up in anthro classes that culminate in a collection of really weird inside jokes, and you can learn a lot (of both awesome and really, really weird stuff) from someone who was a coroner before they started graduate school (I'm still very sad that he finished his PhD and went elsewhere for his post-doc because the department just isn't the same).

My intro to physical anthropology professor is a generally chill person and I had him for a different seminar class in the fall which pretty much consisted of us having round-table discussions in the physical lab once a week until we ran out of things to talk about. My thesis advisor is someone that I've had for two seminars over the last year, and she is hands-down one of the single greatest people I've met in college—she's a fantastic teacher, her classes are structured really well (at least for me), she actively encourages people to pursue topics they're interested in for their assignments (and puts up with me showing up to her office hours all the time to ask questions about said topics), and she also brought snacks to almost every single one of our classes this spring, which I'd like to think speaks for itself.

As wonderful as they all are, though—as sad as I am that my time with them is coming to an end (though who's to say, because I don't know where I'll wind up for graduate school)—it's not really them that I'm reflecting on. They've done a lot for me, but it's my high school teachers that I keep going back to, which probably isn't surprising given that my high school OChem teacher told me that I seem to be one of the only people who has been genuinely reflective on my time there since I've graduated.

It's hard to not be, honestly. My academic career has been a rocky one on a lot of fronts (though not the academics themselves, fortunately) and even as high school was difficult for me in many ways, it was also the first place where I really had moments of feeling safe. It was the first place where I knew that there was someone I could go to, where I knew that I had someone I could trust to be there when things weren't going so well, where I learned how to ask for help without needing parental backing in the process.

It didn't really feel that way at the time, and that's probably why I'm still so stuck on it—I'm not stuck on it because I want to go back (as I've discussed before), but I'm stuck on it because I have distance now. I can look back on what it was and understand what it did and be genuinely appreciative of how much it taught me and how far I've come since then. When I think about high school, I don't really think about social things. I don't think about dances, or hanging out with friends (with a few notable exceptions—I don't think I'll ever forget that lost day from sophomore year).

Instead, I think about that song from Charlie Brown and the bench down the hall from the history office and the "Swarts! How's it going?" that I got pretty much every day the last two years of high school (and still get, when I go back). I think about utterly terrible chemistry jokes and how almost every meeting that I had with some people somehow wound up taking up an entire free period or hour after school. I think about the emails that I got because something reminded a teacher of me and they wanted to pass it on, that philosophy class that I sat in on senior year just because I stopped by to say hi and wound up staying the entire time, my entrance interview and the subsequent discussions about the awesomeness that is anything written by Tamora Pierce.

I was a mess in high school. I'm not going to sugarcoat it. I was a mess. I was borderline losing it most of the time. Junior year was a hell that I medicated my way through with caffeine and ibuprofen because I was only getting four or five hours of sleep a night during the week and then crashing on Friday as soon as I got home and sleeping until Saturday morning. Hell Week during musical literally was hell week for me half the time. My emotional control was tenuous at best and sleep deprivation didn't make it any better.

What made it better was being able to walk into the history office during a free period with the knowledge that even if we couldn't talk that day, Mr. Weiss would find some time that week (usually a full free period) to sit down with me on that bench down the hall and help me through whatever was dragging me down at that particular time (or talk me down from the cliff that I was in danger of jumping off of, even if neither of us realized it at the time).

What made it better was that day after school junior year when Mr. Smith sat down with me and let me say whatever it was that I said (even though it ended in me crying) and told me things that he really didn't have to so that I would know that he got it. What made it better was knowing that he was going to push me to produce the best work that I could, but that if I needed to, I could go up to him after class and say "I haven't been sleeping and I can't think straight and can I please have a couple of extra days on that paper so that it's not completely awful" and get an extension without having to justify it further than that.

What made it better was telling stupid terrible chemistry jokes to Landreth in class pretty much every day for the second half of junior year, and having discussions about books with Ms. Williams (they weren't always about Tamora Pierce, but you really can't go wrong with her), and Mr. Miller's belief in my insanity due to how much I wrote. What made it better were those advising meetings with Dr. Ashworth that always began with me intending to say "Everything's good" but wound up turning into discussions of faith and religion or something interesting in the news, and his (and Dr. Sutula's) unrelenting belief in how intelligent I was even when I didn't believe it myself.

What made it better was Bob Ross and Mr. Rogers on random mornings in history, skiing videos and Christmas carols in OChem, flight simulators or weekly news quizzes or a map of the U.K. in calculus so that Dr. Ashworth could get us to try pronouncing various place names and laugh at our inability to say anything correctly (I will never mispronounce Worchestershire or Leicester or Edinburgh ever again), that one day in Advanced Bio where everyone fell silent just in time for all of us to hear Ms. Zheng say "So I don't know how to make meth, but—", and the little notebook that I kept in my backpack which contains a further selection of stupid quotes from classes because I couldn't pass up the opportunity to write that stuff down.

(A favorite exchange of mine is the following from our alcohols unit in OChem: "Ethanol can be used for several purposes, such as..." "Getting drunk!" "Drinking to excess twice or three times a month is worse for you than having one or two drinks every night, but that ruins the effect of alcohol, doesn't it?" "That's what ecstasy is for!")

I learned a lot of academic things from all of these people in high school. I learned how to ask good questions, how to take notes, how to cite things in Chicago style (the merits of which I had an in-depth discussion about with my best friend last week because we are literally that weird and that into writing research papers), how to structure an argument and write a decent essay (in a short span of time, no less, because my procrastination skills are legendary). I learned how to research in a library and how to draw chemical structures and how to work my way through mathematics concepts that I don't understand.

I learned all of that, and it matters because it set me up for success in college, but really... The most important thing that I learned was how to look after myself. I learned how to ask for help. I learned what it means to really have people in your corner who want you to succeed for no reason other than because they want it for you. I learned what it means to feel accepted for who and what I am, no matter how much of a mess I can be sometimes. I learned what it means to have people believe in me (people who aren't my family and contractually obligated to do so), and I learned how to internalize that knowledge so that it would be there even when the people aren't.

I learned that no matter how far you go, no matter how much you change, no matter how well you do, no matter how much you've done for yourself since, you will still cry when one of those people tells you how proud they are of you, and you will definitely cry if more than one of them tells you that (I have no shame).

So as I look at the internship that will hopefully lead to my first full-time job, at my twenty-first birthday, at my impending graduation and whatever lies after it, I just have to say this:

To Mr. Weiss, Mr. Smith, Dr. Ashworth, Dr. Sutula, Landreth, Ms. Williams, and everyone else from high school who gave me a push in the right direction even if they weren't aware of it... Thank you. Thank you a million times, and even more than that.

I know that not everyone says it, that not everyone comes back, that it can be an afterthought, but it isn't for me. It never will be, because I don't know where I would be right now without all of the help that you gave me. Either way, this is something that I have to and will continue to say, because I know how lucky I've been and there aren't enough thanks in the world to cover it.

I should've been asleep two hours ago. Oh well. My sleep-deprivation is self-inflicted and its current cause is much preferable to what was there in high school.

Until next time x

On The Lord of the Rings.

I'd say that anyone who knows me knows that Howard Shore is my favorite composer, but that's not true. That isn't something that I discuss regularly. It comes up in the context of midterms and finals, of periods of my life where I have a lot to do and not enough time to get it done, because I've felt for a long time that accomplishing difficult tasks is a lot easier when your soundtrack makes you feel like you're storming the gates of Mordor.

My love of the soundtracks of The Lord of the Rings films—my incessant need to have all of the Complete Recordings in my possession—comes from more than one place. It's not purely about the music, and it's not purely about the movies. It's about something in the middle of those things, about my appreciation for exactly what Howard Shore managed to create in his compositions combined with what those soundtracks mean to me in the broader context of Middle Earth, about this thing that takes me back to something else.

What's much less of a secret than my love of Howard Shore is my love of The Princess Bride. I've seen that movie so many times that I know it by heart and can recite most of the lines along with the characters. If you ask me what my favorite movie is, The Princess Bride will probably be my answer. I saw it for the first time when I was about five years old, my father bought me the DVD for my eighth birthday, and the rest is history. 

I don't know if it's entirely honest to say that it's really my favorite movie, though. It's a wonderful film and it never fails to make me happy, but at the end of the day—at the end of every stressful period in my life, mixed in there once or twice or six times a year—I wind up watching The Lord of the Rings (the extended editions, no less, because once you've seen them it's impossible to go back to the theatrical versions without feeling like you're missing something). 

I'm not always good at restraining myself from watching those films. Sometimes I wind up doing it when I should be doing other things (oops), but this time I did manage to keep myself from doing that. I've been pretty sick for the last week with what was the worst cold I've had in a long time, and I spent a good bit of it laid up in bed. Obviously, I had to find something to do with myself, and after the mess that was this past semester, there was an easy answer to my problem: The Lord of the Rings.

I don't remember when I saw the first two movies, but I'm pretty sure it was actually after we saw The Return of the King. We saw it in theaters, and I don't actually remember all that much of it other than how terrified I was of Shelob (I'm terrified of spiders) because I was only seven at the time, but somewhere along the way, I fell in love with the movies. It's not surprising, because I have a deep love for good fantasy, and Tolkien sort of founded modern fantasy, so it's really quite logical, but the fact remains: The Lord of the Rings have become my comfort movies.

In April of my senior year of high school—three years ago, now, which is an utterly terrifying thought—I gave a speech at assembly. Giving a Senior Sage was an opportunity that was awarded to all the seniors, should they choose to pursue it, and I felt like I had to. I felt like there was something that I needed to say (and there still is, hence the blog), and I didn't know what that something was, but I knew it was present. I started writing my senior sage in August, before I'd even officially started classes that year, but that wasn't the speech I gave. I wrote thirty drafts before I was happy, before I'd settled on what felt right, but that final draft didn't include everything.

No, that final draft left out a lot of things, including this: "There's this thing about instrumental music that just calls to you, this feeling that you get when you're listening to the soundtrack of Return of the King at night on a Thursday, this strange emotion that just slips into your heart and gives you chills and leaves you breathless and sometimes on the verge of tears, because when you listen to this music you feel like you're capable of doing anything. You sit there and stare at nothing and remember what it felt like to watch those movies when you were five and six and seven and think about how nobody really believed in Eowyn, but I am no man and you can slay a dragon (or a Nazgûl) if you believe in it enough. You can survive this if you believe in something, anything."

I wrote that on December 26th, 2013, because I'd asked for the Complete Recordings for Christmas and my mother gifted me the soundtrack of The Return of the King. It's something that I've listened to countless times since then, something that I've put on when I was stressed out or upset, or even just as the soundtrack for a nap (or several). I think I sort of knew that I was never going to wind up sharing that specific draft in its entirety—it was one of those things that I'd written just because I needed to write it, not because I wanted someone else to read it—but that doesn't make it any less true. 

So why, then? Why did I reach for these movies this past week? I'm not at the same mental point as I was then, almost three and a half years ago, so what is it about my life right now that made me feel the need to watch all of them in their entirety, and then follow them up with the appendices as well? Why did I do that, knowing that Return of the King makes me cry every single time? Why?

This semester was not an easy one. Between the amount of work that I had to do, for both my honor society and my classes, and my other commitments, and the things that happened which completely blindsided me emotionally, I've spent most of the last four months with constant stress. It wasn't massive amounts of stress—at least, not most of the time—but I actually cope better with short-term, high-pressure environments than I do with long-term, low- to medium-pressure environments. I find it much easier to push through things when I know they'll be over soon.

As a result, I've been feeling very, very drained. It wasn't like it was in high school, where I was falling apart emotionally left and right, but I've just been tired. I've been tired all the time, no matter how much sleep I've gotten, and even the last few days haven't been enough to get that back on track (which probably has something to do with how sick I've been, since my body is pretty exhausted right now). The time off before my internship starts is primarily going to be a period for me to get back to a place where I'm not constantly exhausted even when I'm getting eight hours of sleep in a night.

To top it off, I'm feeling restless. Part of it's about riding, as I wrote about in my last post, and there's not much I can do about that other than hold on to my dream and wait it out, but the other part of it is about the fact that my junior year of college is over and I don't really know how I got here or how it went so fast. I don't know how it's been three years since I stood up on that stage my senior year of high school and gave that speech, how I went from that to facing down my last year of school before I have to go be a real adult. I don't know when I grew up.

I'm scared, but I'm also ready. I'm ready to move on and do something with myself. I've been older than my years for a long time—trauma will do that to you—but it's manifesting itself again in something other than the age of most of my friends. It's manifesting itself in this need to go forward, in this need to be better, in this need to try to make a change in my own small way, no matter how scared I am of the process. 

I keep this whiteboard propped up underneath the hutch of my desk where I can see it when I'm working on things, and usually it's got a song lyric or some quote that I saw on Tumblr that I really liked on it, but right now it's got something else—"All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us." It's a reminder for me, something that I need to see on a daily basis, something to remind me that even when we're thrust into situations that we don't want to be a part of—situations like the current state of the world—we aren't stuck. We can't control those things specifically, but we can control ourselves. We can control the choices we make. We can control what we make of our lives. 

Three years ago, I stood up on that stage, and I made a choice. I made a choice to get up in front of my classmates, in front of all of these people who probably wouldn't remember most or any of what I said, and admit that I have PTSD. I made a choice to stop hiding it from everyone, to stand up there and own up to it and acknowledge that it had changed me. It was about me, not everyone else. It was about me owning who I was, even if I wasn't always especially thrilled with her. It was about saying "I know I can be prickly, I know I can be standoffish, I know I've been cynical and all of these other things, but I'm still here. I'm still going forward. I'm not by myself. I still have things that matter."

I'm so far past who I was then. I'm so far past being afraid of myself. I'm so far past not being satisfied with who I am as a person. There are always things I'm working on, and I'm always going to do things that I'm not completely happy with, but I'm no longer trying to remind myself daily that "even darkness must pass"—at least, I'm not trying to remind myself of that on a personal level. In the context of the wider world, sure, but not for me. I slayed my own Witch King of Angmar, but I didn't do it by myself. I had my Merry there, stabbing him in the back to help me along.

A lot of people stepped into those shoes and filled that role, but at this point in my life, as I look at my (small) circle of friends, at the people I talk to on a regular basis and feel comfortable with, there's really only one who's been there for it all. I usually call her my best friend when I'm talking to other people, but that's not the right label for her. She and I talked about that this past week, about the fact that we've been through so much together that we're past the point of "best friend" being an adequate description for our relationship to one another. The label we seem to have settled on is each other's "person." 

I can't give you a description for what that means, exactly, because we don't really have a definition for it. It's more about the fact that we've known each other since we were in middle school, thanks to our forays into online horse forums, about how we reconnected in high school and became close along the way, about how we met each other in person for the first time last year and have seen each other several times since and can talk until we lose our voices without ever running out of things to say, about the fact that no matter what's happening, no matter how bad things are, we've always got each other. 

We've always got someone in our corner. We always know that it might take a second and it might take a day, but there will always be a response to that message. There will always been a sympathetic ear. There will always be honest advice, and there will never be useless platitudes expressed in difficult situations. We tell each other what the other person needs to hear, and sometimes that means acknowledging that the pain and the heartbreak and the sadness and the anger don't just magically go away, that you might have to live with them for a while.

You might have to live with them, but you won't be doing it alone, and I'm not. I haven't. 

We aren't separated by more than about a year in age, but there's a couple of years between us at school. I'll be walking out into adulthood when she's just reaching the halfway point of college, but that doesn't mean that we aren't going to be there for one another. To quote Samwise Gamgee, "I can't carry it for you, but I can carry you." We can't go through life for each other, but we can pick one another up when it gets a little too hard. There's always someone there willing to do the heavy lifting for a while when we can't quite manage it on our own.

That's what The Lord of the Rings is to me, I guess. That's why I settled on it all those years ago, why it's the thing that I choose to lose myself in more than anything else when I need an escape from everything in my life. It's my reminder that no matter how dark things seem, we can always fight to make them brighter. It's my reminder that no matter how alone we may feel, there's always someone there to help carry us along for a while.

It's my reminder of where I was, of where I've come from, of where I'm going, because I've been reaching for those movies and those soundtracks for so long that they've intertwined themselves into so many different aspects of my life. They're part of those periods of stress, of the relief when they're over, of the days that I spent shut up in my friend's home theater watching the films the summer after senior year because she'd never seen them and myself and two of our friends felt that we had to rectify that situation immediately (complete with a handy "who's who" guide made by yours truly), and they're tied up in all of the emotions associated with those things, even as those moments are long gone.

Really, The Lord of the Rings is my reminder that sometimes we say goodbye, but that doesn't mean that it's the end. That doesn't mean that it's over. There's always room for another story, even if it's not ours to tell.

My story isn't over, but it's separating. I'm getting ready to get on that ship and leave, and I don't know where I'm going to wind up. I don't know what will happen to me in the end, what I'll do, who I'll be, but we're getting there. Things are changing. Nothing is ever going to be the same.

Well, nothing except for my incessant love of the motifs associated with Rohan and Edoras. I don't think that's going anywhere anytime soon. It's Howard Shore, after all. He is my favorite composer for a reason.

Until next time x

On Rolex.

I'm getting restless again.

I'm not surprised, really. I've been restless on and off for the last seven and a half years. It's been better lately, but the feeling is never really gone. I never really lose it. The restlessness is always there, no matter how settled or good I feel.

I know what brought it back this time. This isn't my first time watching Rolex—it isn't even close to being the most invested that I've been in the competition either—but that doesn't make it any less of an experience. I've seen it four times, really—once when I went in 2010, and on the USEF Network live stream for the last three years. It's the event for me, the thing that glues me to the television or my computer for four days in the way that some people watch the Super Bowl or the Stanley Cup. I enjoy watching the other things that are live-streamed over the course of the year—the 5* Grand Prixs are always fun to watch, and whatever other events, but Rolex is it.

In 2010, it was more about just being there. I didn't know the event that well—I just knew it was Rolex. I didn't know the riders well at all, because it was pre-my social media days, which have let me learn about and follow all of these riders and develop an immense respect for their skills and their horsemanship. All that mattered was that I was there. All that mattered was that I was standing on that cross-country course, watching the rounds, watching these people and these horses sail over fences that were wider than I was tall like they were nothing.

Rolex 2015, I was glued to my computer even as I was studying for finals because Mandy was there, because she'd made it with that horse that I watched her train and I hadn't seen her in a while but I knew what that meant. I knew what finishing meant. I knew how far Cody had come because I was there for a lot of the early days and to see that horse—the one whose mane I pulled one day, the one I watched her school in the arena on those days when I would stay at the barn for hours—make it to the highest level of competition in the United States? That was everything. I cried watching her dressage test because they were there and part of me was too.

The last couple years I've watched just because, because eventing is everything to me, because I've been out of touch with it for longer than I would like and watching Rolex reminds me of how much it means to me. I've watched because of the respect that I have for these riders, for the spiritual experience that it is to watch Michael Jung ride around a 4* like it's something that he just wakes up and does every morning after he has his coffee (does Michael Jung even drink coffee? I don't know), for the poetry in motion that is a horse at this level.

When I was a kid I used to dream about riding at Rolex. It was what I wanted. It was that thing out there, that far-off dream, the light at the end of the tunnel, that my middle school self was convinced I would get to one day. Now, it's not that way so much anymore. It's not that I don't think I could ever ride at Rolex—there are people who do their first 4* at fifty, so it's not like I don't have time—but it's that I don't know if I want to anymore. I don't know if I want to ride a 4* cross-country course. I don't know if I want that kind of pressure.

That doesn't mean that I don't want eventing, though.

I've been a lot more settled for the last six months or so, ever since I started to finally feel like I was getting my muscle back and able to once again do those things that I could remember but didn't have the strength for, ever since I started feeling stable in the saddle again and connected to the horse I've been riding, but it's not real. It's not permanent. It gets knocked out of place more easily than I'd like, and no matter how much I try to remind myself that things are so much better than they were, that restlessness is still there at the end of the night.

That restlessness is there because no matter how much better things are than they were a few years ago, no matter how much I finally feel on again, no matter how good things are for a few days or weeks or months, there's still this thing hanging out there, this discipline that I want and love and need because there is nowhere that I feel more at home than out on a cross-country course. My appreciation for the work I do in the sandbox comes from that same place, as does my love for horses who have "the look of the eagles" (as Denny Emerson would say).

In December 2014, I made this post on Twitter:

That's not a goal that has gone away. If anything, it's intensified, because no matter how much I connect with a horse, no matter how much I like it, no matter how well we work together, I'm not going to get that sense of permanence until I don't have to worry about a horse being pulled out from under me. I should be used to it by now, because that's life when all you can afford to do is lesson, but no matter how many times it happens, it's still horrible. It's still something that I want to avoid. It's still something that I can't guarantee won't happen—yet.

I finished my junior year of college on Tuesday. Grades aren't out yet, but I know I haven't failed this semester (by most people's standards, anyway), so I'm on my way to my last year of school. I've got an internship this summer in a good place, and assuming I don't do anything incredibly stupid, I'll probably have a job there after I graduate. I don't want to buy a horse until I have most (or all) of my loans paid off, but it's there. It's not that far-off thing that it used to be. I've got a year of school left, and I'll have to do a bit of saving before I'll have the money to make a purchase, but two years from now I could very well be sitting on that horse I tweeted about almost two and a half years ago.

I'm not planning to buy a made horse. I'm not planning to buy a packer. I'm planning to buy an OTTB who will probably need plenty of time and patience before I'll even be able to think about going anywhere near a cross-country course again, but that's okay. That's fine. That's honestly something that I want, because taking that time was how I found my last partner and built my relationship with him. That's how I build trust. That's how I learn to not be afraid of what's in front of me. That's how I know that we're going to do it together, and I look forward to it.

I look forward to it because while my dreams have changed, while I don't think I'll ever be riding at Rolex (though I won't say never), while my biggest horse dream at the moment is having the land and the facilities to keep my horses in my backyard, I know that one of these days, I'm going to go back to that discipline that made me. Going back to eventing has never been a question of if—it's always been a question of when, and it's so close I can almost touch it again. That restlessness that I'm feeling isn't about feeling lost now—it's about knowing how close I am and how little distance I have left to go. 

So sure, I probably won't ever ride a 4*. I don't know if I'll even be making it to a 1*. What I do know is that whatever level I'm at when I make it out at an event again, whether it's beginner novice or novice or whatever else, wherever it is, that first completion is going to be my Rolex. It was the first time that I finished that cross-country course with the knowledge that we'd made it through the whole way even after people told me that we would be eliminated, and I've been waiting for it for so long that I don't know how it could be anything else.

(I just watched Maxime Livio fuck up his first trot diagonal and somehow still wind up in first place by more than a full penalty point because the rest of his test was so good and just??? What are they feeding these Europeans??? We haven't even hit Michael Jung yet and we're already getting sub-45 scores??? I may or may not have screamed and punched my couch because these people should not be possible.) 

On moving forward.

I'm not going to say that things are back to normal because, as much as I'd like to, they aren't. There's still an empty stall in the barn, still things hanging up in the tack room, still those moments where it feels like I'm going to walk down the aisle and everything is going to be the way it was a month ago, and I know the only thing that will change that is time, and that's okay.

I've been doing a lot of thinking recently (I know that's shocking coming from me) about why I've done all of this, about why I keep coming back every time I step away, whether the distance was my choice or due to something that I have no control over, about why horses and riding are something that are just a part of me no matter what I do, and I don't really know if I have an answer.

I had last weekend off from the barn because we had the regional meeting for my honor society on Friday and Saturday, and my trainer and best friend were at a show anyway, and this past week wasn't great. I've been sleep-deprived and school has been crushing me, but this past week was just a whole different type of weird. Things just felt off all week (and were exacerbated by a bad test grade, which I will survive because 150 credits leaves a bit of wiggle room on the grades thing) and I couldn't really figure out why until this weekend.

I'm bad enough at getting my work done when I'm at normal levels of stressed out. I have to sit down and make a to-do list and work very strategically so that I can get my work to a manageable level, and it takes a lot of willpower for me to do that. It gets worse when I'm so stressed out that I don't want to (or can't) do the things that I normally do. If I can't ride, play music, write, draw, whatever, whether it's because I don't have the time or I just can't find the inspiration in myself to do them, then I get worse. The stress becomes even more of a challenge because I don't feel like myself without those things. In middle school I was always the piano player and the weird horse girl, and while a lot of things have changed since then, those two pieces are very important parts of who I am.

I went out to the barn last night for my lesson because we had our end-of-year honor society brunch this morning, which wrecked the usual Saturday morning lesson thing, and I was half an hour early for when I needed to tack up, so I spent some time saying hi to Mina, who was very affectionate (unsurprising because she is a) on stall rest right now and b) I hadn't seen her in two weeks). A little while later, I told my trainer that I'd be able to attend the schooling show the first weekend in June, which will be my first off-property show in eight years (almost exactly. Rolling Rock was June 7th, and this show is June 3rd).

Now, I'm not normally one for showing unless there's a cross-country course involved, but I'm starting to get Mina. I'm starting to figure out her buttons and when to help her or leave her alone, and we've come to a sort of peace on the ground in which I'm as gentle as possible while I'm grooming and tacking her up, and in exchange, she neither bites nor kicks me (even if she threatens to). I'm comfortable with her, and while we still have plenty to work on, she's doing a lot for my confidence and I'd like to join in on the show fun in the saddle for once instead of running around on the ground helping everyone else out.

My statement that I could go to the show was met with enthusiasm and we agreed that I could take Mina to it, and that was that, so off I went to tack up.

Flash and I had dressage boot camp yesterday. There was a lot of focus on proper collection, which required that I have control over every muscle in my body as much as I have control over my horse's. It required that I remember all those things that I learned a really long time ago, like how to sit and how to engage my core without getting stiff, and it required finding that balance between just enough contact to gather the energy encouraged by my legs and so much contact that we stopped anytime I touched his mouth (or so little that I had no contact as soon as he collected).

I was sore by the end of my ride. I was sore today. I helped hay and sweep last night after my lesson and wound up with my entire body being itchy even though everything was covered except for my hands because I am just that allergic to grass. I have helped water in single digit temperatures and trekked out through six inches of mud to catch horses and run all over the barn closing stall doors at feeding time. I've fallen off and pulled muscles and gotten concussed and been terrified and elated and I still keep going back.

I've been doing this for so long that I don't know how to separate myself from it. Sure, it's taken a spot on the back burner here and there, but I've been riding since I was eight years old. I've loved horses since a long time before that. The prospect of owning a horse has been one of those things that's been there motivating me for most of my life. For me, the idea of not riding, of not having horses in my life, is... I can't even think of a good metaphor for it.

I make a lot of mistakes, and I mean a lot. I have days where I just can't quite seem to figure out how to cue that dressage movement correctly, or where I miss distance after distance because my eye just isn't there (or my eye is there, but my nerves are getting in the way). I have days where I can't get out of my own head and everything just feels wrong. I have days where my ride doesn't really make me feel better, even when I want it to, and I know that there are people out there who judge me on nothing but those mistakes, rather than on all of the good things I've done.

That's not the important thing, though.

The important thing is that I keep going back. I keep picking up and trying again even when it's hard. Sometimes that's in the same ride, sometimes it's three rides later, and sometimes I need months off to feel comfortable enough to come back and try again, but I do it. With riding, there has never been a question of "Will I or won't I?" The question is "When will I?" Since the beginning, stopping has never been a question. Quitting has never been in the picture. Every time I've taken a break it was with the understanding that it was a break, not the end, because I'm never done.

After what happened a few weeks ago, I found myself repeating something that I used to say to myself back in high school, back when things were bad and I missed my horse and I didn't know what to do—the best way to honor the memory of what's been lost is to keep working, to keep trying, to keep getting better and pushing for more and taking all of those lessons that I've learned from those horses that aren't around anymore and applying them to the ones that are. The best way to honor my past is to keep moving forward.

That hasn't always been easy. My riding career hasn't been a smooth one. There have been a lot of dreams that I've had which have gone through revision because I either don't want them anymore or they just aren't realistic. There have been a lot of bumps in the road and a lot of times where I was so discombobulated that stopping seemed like the solution, but it was never permanent. It never stuck.

It never stuck because while I've been playing piano for longer that I've been riding, it's riding that has taught me how to stand back up. It's riding that has taught me that when you fall, you get up and you dust off your breeches and you might swear a little bit (or a lot) and it might take a little while (or a long time), but you get back in that saddle and you try again. Sometimes you have to take a few steps back and work your way up to where you were, but you do it and it'll happen if you just keep trying.

I'm not a perfect rider. I will be the first to admit that I'm not a perfect rider. I screw up on a regular basis. I'm not going to deny that. It doesn't make me any less, though, because I don't ignore my screw-ups. I fix them. Sometimes it takes me two minutes and sometimes it takes me two months (or two years), but I fix them. I have been fortunate enough to have a lot of horses in my life who have been willing to take it when I mess up, and enough who will let their displeasure be known, to figure it out along the way.

I have been fortunate enough to have a series of trainers who have been patient with me and let me set my own goals and move at my own pace, who have dealt with my anxiety and my mistakes and helped me to figure out how to handle those things so that at the end of the day, this is more fun than anything else. I have been fortunate enough to find a best friend that I can communicate with through facial expressions and bond with over our mutual nostalgia for *NSYNC and other various 90s kid favorite artists (and also our incessant need for sugar), who supports my ridiculousness and encourages my horse-related interests (however different from hers they are) and makes me laugh (and also enables me, but we don't need to talk about that).

Picking up and carrying on isn't easy. It's never easy. It wasn't easy the first time, and it's not easy now, but if there was anything in this world that was going to teach me how to keep going after my first big fall (and all of the ones that have come after it), it's riding. Horses are a part of me, and even though it hurts like hell sometimes, I wouldn't change that. My trajectory in this sport has not been linear, but the best-fit line would show it going up. I'm stronger for riding, both physically and mentally, and for all the mistakes and tears and pain, I know I'm better than I was a week or a month or a year ago. My trainer knows I'm better. That's all that matters.

There's this quote that says "Horses give us the wings we lack," and it's not wrong. Riding taught me how to fly, and I would never give up my mistakes because they're worth every perfect distance and flawless jump. Those things are rare and they're what I'm always striving for, and every time they happen, I know that the horses from my past are with me, because I wouldn't be able to do this without them.

So yeah, things aren't back to normal, but they also aren't over either, and that's good enough for me.

Until next time x