Tuesday, February 6, 2018

Swimming Free

I'm home for a week. I've entered the home-for-a-week, gone-for-a-week phase of my year. I've got three weeks of school visits and an amazing trip to Israel on the schedule for later this spring, and next week I'll be back in Florida, where my horse Sarah and my other horse Gully and Gully's young rider Caroline all still are. We'll come home together.

I let myself off the hook. I'm proud of myself for that. My main coach Cathy was gone from Florida for a few days, so Caroline and I took lessons with our awesome friend Hannah Sue Burnett. On Sunday we went to a horse trial. Caroline was fantastic and wonderful Gully went around like a top, very happily; they got a ribbon in a class won by a member of the Canadian Olympic team (Selena O'Hanlon, a super nice woman and lovely rider).

Sarah and I had a credible dressage test--really just about our best in terms of her basic movement. I rode well in showjumping, and she jumped well--and then we decided not to run cross country. That's the short version but it'll suffice. Sarah was nervous; she worked herself into quite a temper tantrum at one point, and she's brilliant at temper tantrums. It wasn't directed at me or what I was asking of her, but it was reflective of her general discomfort with the whole situation. I've owned and ridden Sarah for six years; she hasn't competed at all for the last two, and, until we went to Florida, hadn't been off our home farm since my accident 14 months ago. We schooled in a couple of places last week, and that went well, but the truth is that we weren't ready to run cross country. Some days it's best to pat your horse and move on. Cathy's riding Sarah this week and will be able to expose her to a few more new things, and then I'll be back, and we'll go to a show, and maybe we'll attempt all the phases, and maybe we won't. Whichever, it will be okay.

Sunday, withdrawing from cross country in the rain, while my horse whinnied and jigged, was a terrific day. My lovely husband tried to console me afterward. I didn't need consoling. I had learned several things, all of them good.

One was that Sarah and I just weren't quite ready to compete. It wasn't a fear thing or a shame thing; we simply hadn't been able to prepare enough.
The second thing was that I could recognize that we weren't ready, and so withdrawing was the correct choice, easy to make.
The third thing--this took me awhile to understand, but it came as a sort of revelation--in some part of my brain I must have known we weren't prepared enough, and I think that it was that, not the head injury, not the accident, that was causing me to feel uneasy last week.

We hadn't competed in two years. We hadn't competed since just after The War That Saved My Life won the Newbery Honor. I went down to Florida in the immediate afterglow of that phone call, as planned (the trip, not the phone call!), and then my life started changing in ways I never anticipated. TWTSML was my sixteenth published book. It won awards in California, Nebraska, New York City. It hit #1 on the New York Times. I traveled a lot more; I spoke at conferences nationwide.

I love having this new platform. This year I wrote a proposal for NCTE about a topic very important to me, and marshalled some friends to join me, and not only was it accepted but it went really well--a whole lot of teachers and librarians listened hard to what we had to say. That was fantastic. I have something to say, and opportunity to say it. What a blessing; what a gift.

In other words, the head injury was part of my riding story, but not the whole of it. I don't think I'd truly grasped that until Sunday. I still entirely love riding. Sarah makes me laugh every day. Eventing brings me joy. I'll learn a lot next week but then I have a busy spring--I won't compete again until June at the very very earliest. Perhaps that won't be feasible. Perhaps I won't be able to compete again this year; perhaps my books will keep me busier and busier, and I won't compete again. Every option will be fine. That's what I learned on Sunday. That's a pretty good lesson right there.

No comments:

Post a Comment

The comments on this blog are now moderated. Yours will appear provided it's not hateful, crass, or annoying--and the definition of those terms is left solely to me.