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| A totally superfluous and unrelated photo of Itxa |
HorseNation informed me this morning that they'd like to pay me for the stories I write for them. I have little dreams, but getting paid to write about the thing I love most has always been one of them.
When I was teeny tiny, I would make "newspapers" about the horse shows my model horses were having on the braided rug of my bedroom; envisioning myself covering the equestrian events at the Olympic Games someday. HorseNation is far from the Olympics, but it's sure a long way from the braided rug.
As a little kid, you have so many dreams about what you're going to do. I think reading Great Expectations in high school was the first time I ever confronted the inevitable lesson of adulthood that all those dreams will probably be losses you will have to reconcile with your therapist someday. I have reconciled some of those losses, maybe never more than I did after working for Congress in Washington and then going to work as a glorified receptionist for some pretty difficult and jaded people. The glass ceiling was a heartbreaking discovery, and the politics of politics were too much for me. I knew I could fight for better, but it wasn't worth the fight to me.
But horses have always been worth the fight. Whether it's draining "mud" puddles up to my shins in February, taking a washed up racehorse from a field and turning her into a promising eventer, or begging a quirky upstart website to publish my stories on mustangs or crazy horse stuff on youtube, it has always, always been worth it.
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| What "the fight" looks like currently. |
That being said, I have to make some hard decisions. (That certainly comes with the territory of horses). I can't do it all. I have to follow the trails that make sense. The Utah Trotter, despite how much I love it, and how much good it's brought to my life since I started it, has never really truly made sense. I haven't really found my voice or my audience there, and I don't know that it's ever going to contribute to the Utah horse industry the way that I envisioned it. So, I'm going to publish the last couple of stories that I've been working on, and then shutter the digital doors. It's done some great good- it shared Robyn's wonderful story as a mustang trainer (and turned us from strangers to wonderful friends), it helped raise awareness and find homes for the starving horse herd in Spanish Fork, and maybe it's done some other good for groups here and there over the years as well. But you can't always continue to throw good hours after bad.
I'm a little under the weather, and today is a mixed day of emotions for me, but I'm content and confident and eager for tomorrow. There are many more stories to tell, and I'm humbled to be finding my place in it. most of all, I'm grateful that this dream didn't stop at the edge of that braided rug.
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