Why Do We Keep Coming Back?

A letter on the losses we do not post, and the strange resilience this sport asks of us.

There is a version of this sport that lives on Instagram, and there is a version that lives in barn aisles late at night, and they have almost nothing to do with each other.

On Instagram you see the ribbons. The breakthrough in the half pass. The new horse, gleaming, on day one. The clinic moment that finally clicked. The reel set to soft piano music, the slow-motion canter pirouette, the caption that ends with three hashtags. That is the sport people who do not ride imagine when they imagine the sport.

There is another version. In the last year, three friends of mine have lived inside it. One is facing a career-ending injury with a horse she has built her riding life around. Another stood in a stall a month ago and made the decision no one wants to make, with a horse who was still in the prime of his career, who should have had years left. A third walked into the barn one ordinary morning last year, expecting to feed, and found her horse on the ground. There had been no warning. She had said goodnight to him the evening before, perfectly fine.

What this kind of loss actually is

I want to say plainly what these losses are, because the people who have not yet lived them sometimes misunderstand the size.

When a horse you have ridden for years is taken from you, by injury, by illness, by the slow accumulation of age, by the catastrophic suddenness that we all secretly fear, you are not only losing a horse. You are losing a future you have already started living in your head. The tests you had pictured riding. The level you were aiming at together. The decade of partnership you had assumed was in front of you. The version of yourself that horse was helping you become. All of that ends in the same moment, and almost none of it is visible to anyone who was not inside the partnership.

This is why the grief surprises people who watch it from outside. It is not the grief of losing a pet. It is closer to losing a project, a teacher, a daily presence, and a piece of your future identity, all at once, in one body. The body part is what people can see. The other four are what make it so hard to put down.

I will say the next part because we all think it and it sits awkwardly inside the grief. These are, in the larger frame, first-world losses. None of my friends would tell you otherwise. We know the world contains harder things, and we ride knowing it. But knowing your loss is smaller than someone else's loss has never, in the history of grief, made anyone's loss feel smaller. Both can be true. The world is full of greater pain, and your horse is still gone, and you are allowed to be undone by it.

And yet we come back

What is strange about the people in this sport, and what I find more interesting the longer I do it, is that we come back. Not all of us, not always, not always immediately. But mostly, and eventually, we come back.

You watch a friend bury a horse in October and by spring she is at the indoor again, on someone new, doing twenty-meter circles and crying about it but doing them. You sit with the woman who lost her horse overnight and a year later she is showing you the photo of a young one she has gone to look at. The bandage on the grief is still wet, and she is already booking the vetting.

I used to think this was denial, or maybe a kind of stubbornness, or the inability to admit how much was lost. I think now it is something else. I think it is that the thing that makes the loss so big is also the thing that makes the next investment worth making. To ride seriously is to love seriously, and to love seriously is to know in advance, in the part of yourself you do not consult often, that it will end in some form of being taken away. We do not ride in spite of this knowledge. We ride knowing it. And we come back, knowing it, because the part of us that needed the horse in the first place never went anywhere.

Lili and Rocket

I have my own version of this story, smaller than my friends' and still mine.

Many years before I would have wanted, I had to retire Lili. She was my homebred mare and you have met her before. She is the horse I learned the piaffe on, the horse who could show piaffe to anyone, the horse some friends in my barn would call, with affection and accuracy, a piaffe machine. We had a future together that did not get to happen, and I grieved it. There was a stretch where the grief and the practical reality of "what do I ride now" lived in the same room, glaring at each other.

And then there was Rocket. Rocket is not Lili. He is a completely different horse, with a completely different way of being, with completely different gifts. He has, in the years since, taught me things I could not have learned on Lili because she did not need them taught. I would not have him, and I would not be the rider I am becoming with him, if Lili had stayed sound.

I do not say that to wrap up the loss with a bow. There are still days I miss what Lili and I would have built. But I also know now, in the hard, lived, after-the-fact way, that when that door closed, another one did open. Not on my schedule. Not in the form I would have chosen. But it opened, and it was Rocket, and it has been its own gift.

The honest version of "another door opens"

We say this to each other in barns, and we mean it kindly, and I want to be honest about its limits.

Sometimes the next door is years away. Sometimes the next door is not another horse but a different relationship with the sport — a season of teaching, a season of grooming for a friend, a season of being in the barn without being in the saddle. Sometimes the door opens and it is not the horse you would have asked for, and you have to learn to want them anyway. And sometimes, for some people, the door does not open at all. The loss is the last chapter, and we have to honor that too.

"Another door opens" is partly a true thing and partly the comfort we offer each other while the first door is still being closed. Both are honest functions for a sentence to perform. I would not give it up. I just want to say plainly that the timing is never ours, and the form is never ours, and the people I admire most in this sport are the ones who stay in the practice of being open long enough for the door, in whatever shape, to find them.

What I think resilience actually is

Resilience in this sport is not toughness. It is not the absence of grief, or the speed of recovery from it, or the ability to ride hard the day after.

It is signing up for the next partnership, having buried the last one, because the part of you that needed the partnership in the first place is the same part that knows the next one is worth the risk.

Every adult amateur I know carries this. We are not a sport of the careless. We have been, most of us, around long enough to lose something, and we are still here, hand on the brush, listening for the soft snort, picking out a foot the same way we picked one out yesterday. That is the resilience. It is small and continuous and almost never photographed.

For the friends carrying it right now

If you are reading this in the middle of one of these losses, I have nothing useful to tell you. I know that. There is no clever paragraph that helps in the first weeks. The hooves get picked. The phone calls get made. The decisions get made. The grief takes the shape it will take and you do not get to hurry it.

But I will say this much, from the other side of my own version of it. The fact that you are sitting in this is the same fact that will, eventually, send you back to the barn. The two things are not separate. They are the same instinct doing two different jobs.

We will see you when you are ready. The horses do not mind waiting.