What It Means To Love
It didn’t take long for me to realize that you have to love this. Not like you love hash browns, or spending time with friends, or making jewelry as a hobby. You have to love this like it is your third parent and your only child. You have to love this to the detriment of so many other things. You have to love this in a way that is masochistic. You have to love this more than you love sleep, food, warmth, or cleanliness. At times it means sacrificing other things you love for this one thing. At other times it means you must love this more than your own sanity and more than you thought possible.
Some days this love leaves you grinning, joyous, happy and fulfilled. But some days this kind of love leaves you drained and demoralized. That’s the funny thing about love, especially loving something as fragile and capricious as a horse. Love means you care. Love means you are emotionally invested in every moment of the life of a creature you have little control over. Every little win, whether that’s a clear jumper round, a baby that didn’t need to be sedated for his for body clip, or a first clean line of tempi-changes, you experience every moment of joy with and for that horse. Regardless of whether you are in saddle or on the sidelines, you feel every moment of that horse’s life.
Some days this love drives you to the brink, to the very edge of insanity. Don’t forget, you also live the lows with every horse. You spend the night sleeping outside of a colicing horse’s stall, terrified it won’t pull through the colic. You feel the frustration when something goes wrong in your young horse’s training, and you spend months trying to correct course and move forward again. It’s the pain, the almost physical pain of losing your favorite horse to another trainer, another barn, another groom. Because you must remember, it was never really yours. This breed of love causes you to spend more of your life in the company of horses than in the company of humans. It drives you to do the best for these creatures every day. It compels you to give all, to do what is right, regardless of the cost. And in return? What does this love give you in return? It gives you the only thing it can: purpose. It gives you a reason to get up, to move, to do, to try again, even when nothing else can.
Its not worth it for everyone, and that’s okay. It’s okay to get into this industry, realize its not for you, and back out to live a much more comfortable life. Being a working student or doing an internship is one of the best ways to test out the waters. For some, they can’t give enough of themselves to make it work. Some don’t get enough out of it, or they need different things. The problem is they get in too deep. It’s not until they are in over their head do they realize that they should have known how to swim before they jumped in the deep end. If you find you really do love this, that it’s not just something fun, and that even with the hardships this work inspires you. If you feel more alive, more yourself, and content in the company of horses, then there are plenty of good people to keep you company. Find them.