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