Afraid of Fear

There is one thing that I am almost guaranteed to hear whenever I mention my four-hooved beast to the non-horsey initiated.

"They're beautiful animals, but one time xyz happened to me while riding and now I'm terrified of them. They sense fear you know! They know I'm afraid and they will take advantage of it!"

I've spent a lot of time pondering this almost ubiquitous observation. Why is expressing fear such a bad thing anyway? Why is fear an emotion so closely linked to horses? And why does one bad experience turn us off to all other similar life experiences?

In all honesty, the maxim, "they can sense fear" can really be applied to almost anything. For instance, small children can sense my fear of all things sticky and snotty, and will often eschew entire gaggles of cooing, baby-feverish mothers to climb all over me like a sticky spider monkey, leaving a trail of boogers and peanut butter in their wake.

*Shudder*

Similarly, when we are out on a trail ride, every squirrel in the entire county can sense Big Mama's terror of small furry things with twitchy noses. You can almost hear their squeaky giggling in the trees when one jumps out at us and Sydney rediscovers her inner Derby winner.

So if we all feel fear, and can recognize it in one another regardless of species, why are we all so averse to it?

Even more importantly, why on earth do we think we can hide it?

For me personally, for a very long time I subscribed to the, "fake it 'till you make it" school. Pretend you aren't afraid and eventually you won't be! And so I wore my stoicism around proudly like a padded push-up bra: propping up and over-inflating my rather small, and jiggly sense of courage,  and misdirecting the eyes of those around me away from what was lying just underneath.

The biggest problem, though, was that it really wasn't working. My bottled up fears were finding new and exciting ways to make themselves known. They came out explosively, or shut me down entirely, or manifested physically as heart palpitations. I was so consumed with pretending not to be afraid that I was completely ignoring the fact that I could actually handle the situation just fine if I gave myself half a chance to do it.

In my riding, this meant that I spent so much time and effort focusing on not being afraid when Sydney spooked or bolted, that I was ignoring my chance to be a better rider and to learn more about my own inner workings. I assumed that if I just concentrated hard enough on not being afraid, that she would magically become this docile, husband-friendly horse that would plod happily anywhere I pointed her. And as long as that wasn't happening, I must therefore be a royal screw-up, right?

My opinion on this changed dramatically after a very enlightening riding lesson recently. My instructor took us out on a bunch of school horses for a trail ride. While this was pretty much a novelty for many of the younger riders in the class, I was disappointed that we weren't going to be doing something more challenging. As it turns out, though, I learned more in that one trail ride than I have in months of formal riding lessons.

What I learned that day, like so many other things in life, was so ridiculously simple that I was a little surprised I hadn't ever let it sink in before.

The instructor, a very experienced eventer, was riding a green OTTB out with us on the trails.

"Just remember," she called back to us calmly as her mount jigged and danced around with excitement at the prospect of getting a good gallop in, "our heels are down, our chests are up, and our knees are nice and loose. So that way when our horse does something silly, it's no problem! Just ride through it!"

Light bulb!

Holy crap! It was never about not being afraid, or forcing Sydney to not be scary. I'm not ruining my horse just because I haven't yet figured out how to help her get over her irrational fear of squirrels. Heels down, chest up, and you're ready for anything! How did I know this for so long, and yet not know it at all??

So, my homework for myself has been this: express how I'm feeling, and then have the confidence to know I have the knowledge and ability to deal with the situation. I tell Sydney, "I feel afraid that you will plunge us both into a ravine to our deaths when you see a squirrel, but I'm willing to work through this with you because I know how to keep my heels down and chest up. Also, you have tons of hair that I can cling to for dear life."

I still do occasionally feel afraid when we ride out together. Sometimes, very afraid in fact. But the very act of allowing myself to do this makes the feeling dissipate much more quickly, which also has the added benefit of allowing Sydney to switch gears from bat-out-of-hell back to plodding, lazy, fat horse again much more quickly. Win win!

We may never completely "get over" our fears, in that all scary things in this world will not suddenly cease to exist. But that doesn't mean we have to be paralyzed by them either, or pretend they're not there. Fear, just like any emotion, is one of the things that makes us living souls on this planet. Living life fully to me means taking it all in, even the irrational fears like small sticky fingers, or twitchy rodent noses.