Woman on a Mission!

Ever since I said I would name my next blog post, Woman on a Mission, as an update to the 10-year-old article I re-posted last Monday called Jumping off the Pendulum: In Search of a Balanced Life with Horses, I have regretted it! I knew immediately, that before I could tell you about my current mission … I would have to address what happened in the intervening years and address a few difficult truths.

If you know me, you will know that I DIDN’T find the balanced life with horses that I was looking for. Owning that with honesty could take a book (I’m working on it!) as well as a boatload of time and money for a shrink - and this is just a blog, after all!

Regardless, the importance of sharing honestly has been made more imperative to me, by the confluence of three things.

The first, is a feeling I got when I read that old blog post about why I chose to retire. Again, it is just a blog, not a book … but there is something noticeably absent in it that leaves me feeling like a counterfeit.

The second element in my confluence trifecta, is that I just finished Tik Maynard’s book, In the Middle Are The Horsemen. In it, he recounts a time in his life he spent searching out learning opportunities from the world’s top horse people. In doing so, he doesn’t just relate the parts that make him look good; he dares to question himself, his motives, and his ego, when it would be so much easier to tell us all about the difficult hard asses he worked for and how they just couldn’t be pleased. Tik’s book reset the bar for me in terms of honesty and self-reflection.

And finally, I have been watching the Land Rover Kentucky Three Day Event, twenty years after my last ride there on Speed Axcel, and I am haunted by a memory of a conversation with Jimmy Wofford that I never had the guts to share.

Turns out vulnerability is contagious, as well as essential to connection and growth. Now how can I glitz over a painful section of my past and let you think something less than my truth?

While this isn’t the place to unpack ALL of what went into my decision to retire from sport, or what lead to my retirement at fence 18 on the cross-country course at Kentucky and our long walk home, the