Mental Health and Horses
I wrote this in February, but didn’t publish it. I suppose I didn’t want to jinx the early progress I had begun to make with my mental health. Now, I am ready to share this piece.
It’s a beautiful sunny and warm day here in Calgary. A chinook has blown in, changing our -20 temperatures to a balmy +13 degrees Celsius. My husband and son have gone skiing, I stayed home with our youngest. He’s having a play date with a neighbour and I can hear them having fun together in the basement.
I’m happy. I’ve been marveling about this lately, because until recently I hadn’t felt happy for a long time. It’s hard to go through periods of depression, where the sadness, the lethargy, the apathy, the general feeling bad-ness, doedn’t lift for months. In fact, I hadn’t felt this bad since my early-twenties. It took some time, but eventually, I did what I always do and looked inwards and really asked myself, why am I so unhappy? I didn’t have an answer, but I knew that I needed to do more things that made me feel good.
Until this past half year, I had taken a very long hiatus from riding. I think it may have been the longest break from riding I’ve taken in my entire life. (As I write this, I think to myself: and now you know why you were depressed.)
Like most horse girls, I sold my horse when I moved away to university. (Actually, I brought him with me for the first year, but that’s another story for another time). Still, I rode consistently throughout my adult years, taking lessons, finding leases. I took a short break from riding to have my first child, but was quickly back in the saddle until I was heavily pregnant with my second child.
Riding Buster into the second trimester, Fall 2016
After we had two small children, life became so hard. The children consumed my life, and every other bit of energy I had went to my job. There was nothing left over for me, especially not for a time-consuming habit like horses. It would take about 3 hours, start to finish, to drive to the barn, tack up, ride, return home. Who has that much free time?
Instead of fighting it, I decided that my children would only be this small for a relatively short number of years, and that I would put riding on a long hiatus until they were both in school, and then I would purchase a horse. It worked fairly well for those years - I still went to Spruce Meadows faithfully, kids in tow. They loved it. Again, Spruce Meadows was my connection to my truest self, and my promise that I would never stray too far from my passion: horses.
But then Covid happened, as well as a series of unfortunate personal events that happen, because, as Glennon Doyle wisely says, we can’t really control the plots of our lives, only our response to them. I started to feel worse and worse, the good days fewer and farther between. When my mom collapsed last September and we received the news that she has late-stage cancer, it was the last straw. I took a sabbatical from my workplace of the previous ten years, the one thing in my life I felt I had some element of control over, and I spent a lot of time doing…nothing. I wrote a bit, I listened to music, I exercised, I did yoga, I tried and failed to meditate, I read books, I went for walks, and I slept so much. My husband worried about me. My doctor told me to take meds. My psychologist listened while I talked.
Riding was the only thing that made me feel better but it was so hard and I had so little energy. I managed to make it out once a week. Sometimes I cancelled last minute and felt shitty about myself. Usually I showed up, and was happy for it. A horse friend I had met years earlier, a mom with young children who shared some of my time challenges, rode in the same lesson. She was invaluable in the early days of discomfort of going to a new barn and riding new horses - helping me find the right saddle, helping me turn off the electric fence to get my horse out of the paddock. Occasionally the lesson would be cancelled but we would hack together out in the field; cantering in huge sweeping circles under the dusky sky helped me reconnect to my love of riding and horses. The positive effects of riding would last a day, sometimes even more. It gave me a glimmer of hope I could feel better again.
In the new year, I committed to leasing a horse and riding regularly. The more my “dose” of horses has increased over the last two months, the more my mood has improved. Perhaps some of us need horses in our lives in order to truly feel happy and calm?
in some of my conversations with horse people, I’m beginning to notice some familiar themes - Victor Sobrevals sharing how horses “saved his life,” many a top show jumper stating they couldn’t live without horses. This is a topic I will continue to explore.