The Adventures of Feisty Girl

And her trusty steed

I love riding my horse, Ty. There is a solidness about him, a stillness, that I find soothing. It’s odd that he is the only horse I’ve ever come off of and been injured – twice now – and yet he’s still my favorite horse to ride. I’ve been on Trudy since the accident and occasionally ride the ranch horse Skippy, but it’s still on Ty where I am happiest.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m aware of his potential to spook and the explosive nature of it. All our riding for now is in the smaller pen, in close quarters with my trainer close by. It’s a very controlled environment. But I’m doing it. Or rather we are doing it, Ty and I, together.

When I was younger, anything that scared me became a challenge to overcome. Bad dreams about drowning? Pardon me while I scuba dive the world. Heights a problem? Hold my beer for me while I jump out of this perfectly good airplane.

God, I miss that bravado. I miss that audacity to think I can muscle my way through anything that dares to stand in my way. I miss that inexhaustible drive to prove myself to…well, myself.

I’m older now, theoretically wiser, and considerably more mellow. But honestly sometimes it doesn’t feel like I’ve been mellowed. It feels like I’ve been cowed. Beaten down. And I don’t like it. I want to resurrect that Feisty Girl who took on the world. She was a pain in the neck sometimes but dang she kicked ass.

When I had my second riding accident, there were those who tried to suggest perhaps a woman my age should consider giving up riding horses. I felt some of that feistiness then. While the mature woman I am now found tactful ways to thank them for their concern, Feisty Girl wanted to tell them where they could stuff their suggestion.

That stubbornness is what drove me to push myself so hard physically to recover that I’m leaner and considerably stronger now than I was when I was injured.

I know that there are times that anger, that desire to punch a wall – or a face - can be useful when channeled. It’s not always destructive. But it can be complicated to manage and difficult to pinpoint. Sometimes the sheer depth of my anger scares me. And sometimes it’s unclear what triggered the anger, and even harder to find the root of it. And so, I tamp it down until it looks like something else.

Lately I’ve been feeling terribly low. So inconsequential. In my quest to keep the peace, I see that I’ve allowed myself to shrink. At times I’ve been so non-confrontational, so desperately trying to be diplomatic, that I’ve disappeared. The anger, the outrage, is still there, but it is turned inward, holding me down, making me smaller and insignificant. The weight presses down until I’m convinced that I don’t matter and if I were gone, the world would be fine without me. And that anger becomes depression.

A couple of weeks ago, I held a memorial for my brother where friends and I got together to scatter his ashes at sea. My brother was mentally ill and had been missing a long time before he was found, recently deceased. The story is hard and goes back decades. It is so much more complicated than just grief. Even though his death has brought some resolution, there has also been the release of decades of unspoken feelings, and a large amount of anger has bubbled up, demanding to be addressed.

Honestly, it's hard to find peace anywhere in the world right now, certainly the country I live in, where anyone with a conscience can’t help but be enraged. Every day people are being marginalized and damaged. Individuals are being violently dragged away from their lives and their families, with no due process. It’s almost impossible to breathe through the outrage I feel in my chest. I have felt so tiny and powerless.

I’ve been looking for my inner hero, Feisty Girl. She has proven time and again that anger can be useful. I know she is still in me. Somewhere.

I try to make my blog something useful, as a small way of service. I want to help those who are feeling as I do now, to show you how to channel your fury, to make something positive out of negative feelings.

I want to tell you how, but I’m still figuring it out. I guess the first step is honesty about what I’m feeling, what I’m going through, which is why I’m writing about it here. I need to allow myself to feel what I feel and not stuff it down.

I’m not going to lie, it’s freaking painful.

And as much as I loathe conflict, we’re past being neutral now. I’m reconciling myself to the fact that in taking a stand, in finding my voice, some relationships may suffer or even be lost forever.

The next step is to rise back up and get on that horse again, so to speak, as I slowly and steadily find my feet.

As my wounds heal and my broken heart mends, I climb on board my champion, my Ty. I let his strength, his stillness, hold me for a bit.

Because even Feisty Girl, superhero though she may be, needs a trusty sidekick.