I have not bought a horse, but I am writing a book

On obsession, writing, riding, and a few other things

I’m trying to figure out where horses fit in my life lately.

I know this is a ridiculous statement to make. I am operating from extraordinary privilege. That said, we don’t have space to keep a horse, or anything that resembles one, which makes this prospect even more expensive. We live in the city. Our kitchen opens into the backyard, which I love, but it’s not like we have grazing space. I think we could keep chickens, if we got permission, though I worry Millie, our dog, would like them too much. Our apartment is about 850 square feet. I’d have to keep this imaginary horse somewhere else, which adds to the expense. The barn would probably be an hour away and cost anywhere between $350-$500 a month, or more. That’s not even counting lessons, or horseshoes, or special feed, or saddles, or vet visits.

I grew up riding at a barn 20 minutes from my parents’ house, outside Chicago. The woman who owned the barn would get horses from the Amish auction and make them into school horses or else sell them; the barn itself was held together with baling twine. I rode the bucks out of the smaller ponies, and then the bigger ones, because I started riding when I was four or five. I don’t have any pre-riding memories. For me, horses were always there. My parents had to pay extra for insurance because I started riding before age six. I didn’t have my own horse, but my parents would drive me to the barn once a week, then twice, then finally three days a week. I got good at this, the riding thing. I was placed into an older class of students for group lessons, won ribbons at the barn’s schooling shows. For a while there was a special session with the park district and the bus would pick you up at school and take you to the barn. It was the only place where I could make my brain shut off.

Lately I haven’t been riding much. It’s complicated—I can’t ride close to home, because there aren’t many school horses. So I take lessons many hours away, or else ride less experienced horses close to home, and then I think: why am I paying to ride a green horse? I want to get a project, cheap, something that probably fell off the back of a truck, or came from an Amish auction, but getting a horse will ramp up my anxiety, make me obsessed, and then everything else will come apart, including the writing. There’s something about that, obsession. I want everything to be perfect. It’s why takes me forever to do anything: write a book. Find the right horse. Throw a perfect cup. Make a substack post.

Last weekend, I went to a clinic to watch people ride their horses and be judged by a man who has trained a bunch of Olympians. I suggested to a riding friend that we go, that I had watched Conrad Schumacher give clinics when I was a junior rider. I was too young and inexperienced to participate in the Young Rider clinics when I was a student, though I trained at the same barn where the clinics were held, later. It was a place where people rode fancy horses and competed them. In middle school, I’d bought a horse out of someone’s backyard for $1800. He was a long yearling, which meant he was not yet two, a Percheron/Thoroughbred cross. I trained him to drive and ride, and do some tricks—to count, shake hands. He jumped, too. And after a while we moved to this fancy barn to learn how to do more dressage, which comes from the French, meaning training. I find it really funny that I do dressage, which is a French word, and also write essays, which is also French. At this fancy barn, my instructor always joked that we needed to go to Europe to find my Young Riders horse. This horse, the draft cross, was holding me back. It was true: he was not going to be able to do the fancy things. His back legs were a little crooked and his neck was a little short. There were things we could do and then things we couldn’t do. He also moved like a draft horse, which would be a rate-limiting step to any further activities we wanted to try. We did not go to Europe. A lot of horse friends from that time became professionals, and I became a writer instead.

At the clinic, it was all about tiny, imperceptible changes. The riders were to make their horse step in one direction, or another, to step backwards for five steps exactly, then trot forwards, or canter in a tiny circle in slow motion. Some people say watching dressage is like watching paint dry, and I get it. I love it. Dressage is about minutia, about tiny bits and pieces worked at short intervals for many years. Some of these horses were fifteen years old, and had been working at this since they were four. Some of the riders had ridden with Conrad when they were teenagers, and were now in their thirties or forties or beyond. That is something that’s nice about dressage: it is always there for you, somehow. You can compete in your forties or fifties or sixties or seventies. There’s something called the Century Ride, where you can compete in a special class, provided your age and your horse’s age total at least 100.

There are probably many reasons why OCD and perfectionism, depression, and even suicide are a problem for (many) dressage riders. You don’t have control over your horse. They get injured, or sick, or stick their foot in a hole or a fence. They lose shoes or go lame. If you’re me, mostly catch-riding on whatever you can find, or if you take lessons, you don’t have control over the horse’s care or training or tack. There’s only so much you can do. And then there are riding injuries. Knees that don’t work, or backs slip discs. If you go see a sports medicine physician for help with a crunchy hip, they’ll ask if you did ballet or gymnastics as a child. Riding horses is always the next guess. My body is permanently deformed: I have a crunchy hip and knee that don’t seem to get better, but I can’t give up riding.

At the clinic, a few riders were having good days and a few riders had not-so-good days. In one instance, the rider, an accomplished trainer, could no longer get the horse to canter. It was so hard to watch—and even harder for the rider, I’m sure, who knew this horse well, who had trained countless rides before without even thinking about the canter. Everyone in the audience, watching, knew what it was like to have a day like this, but most of us experienced these humiliations in private. They were days where we’d text a friend and complain about riding, joke about quitting. The following day, Conrad addressed the rider, telling them he knew they were good at their job, at the work, at the riding, to try not to worry. At the end of their ride the second day, Conrad clapped, and then the audience followed.

In the meantime, I keep looking for the “right” horse. My budget is somewhere between “free to a good home” and “almost free” and so all the horses I like are too expensive or not perfect in some way or other. And I don’t know what I want, if maybe I should adopt a wild mustang and have a midlife crisis about it, or find a horse off the track, or at a sketchy auction. I want to have the experience of the professional trainer, and get a quality horse that I can later resell, but I am not a professional trainer anymore; of course I never was. I know what it means to be good at something, and not make it the focus of my life, and yet, somehow, I try anyway. My husband, who is also a writer, says I just need to finish my book. He’s right, of course.

Today I was rejected by MacDowell. I’ve gone twice before, but the pages I sent this time were not really ready. I think I knew that when I turned in the application, but I hoped for a different result anyway. I think it’s important to tell people when this happens. That it’s okay, and that you can just keep working, and nobody can take that away from you. For me, working in our bedroom on my little IKEA table, I feel like I can dig into the obsessive nature of making a book. I’m not sure what I want to say, only that it’s okay to do the work in spite of everything else. Some days we are that rider, unable to string words together, and that’s okay, too. Most days the book is impossible, and I am just stumbling around in a dark room, attempting to identify the furniture. Trying to make the repetitive motions that make the work. I make coffee, sit at my desk, open the word document, close my internet browser windows with all of their tabs, only to reopen them. I don’t feel like I’m making any progress most days. But writing is long, and so is living, and so we keep working.

That said, because I get so obsessed, it can get harmful, impede progress. Here’s my attempt at countering that: I am sending out this newsletter now. I wrote 1500 book words today. I have not yet bought a horse.