I Was Completely Wrong About This

Here's the question I finally asked my trainer, after avoiding it for the better part of a year: "When you say 'give with your hand,' do you mean my whole arm, or just my fingers?" I was thirty-something years old, riding several times a week, and I genuinely did not know the answer. I'd been nodding along to that instruction since I started riding as an adult, guessing at what my body was supposed to do, and apparently guessing wrong.

My trainer didn't laugh. She said, "Fingers. Just the fingers. Your arm should barely move," and then she watched me try it and said, "See, you've been giving with your whole elbow this whole time." Ten seconds of clarification undid a habit I'd been unconsciously reinforcing for a year.

I felt a very specific kind of embarrassed — not because the answer was hard, but because I'd been too proud to ask it for so long. I'd rather have looked like I already knew than look like a beginner. Which is a ridiculous trade, when I actually think about it: I gave up a year of correct information to protect a feeling for about four seconds at a time, over and over.

Why I don't do that anymore

Somewhere in the last year — probably somewhere around the time Harvey arrived and I had to become the kind of owner who asks the vet follow-up questions instead of nodding — I gave myself permission to be a beginner out loud. Not because I stopped caring how I look. Because I started caring more about doing right by the horse than about looking competent in front of him.

That's the whole shift, actually. The horse doesn't care if the question is embarrassing. He only cares whether I actually understand what I'm doing. Every time I've swallowed a dumb question to protect my ego, the animal underneath me paid the tuition, not me.

The horse doesn't care if the question is embarrassing. He only cares whether you actually understand what you're doing.

The pattern, once I started looking for it

Once I started asking the embarrassing questions on purpose, I noticed how often the answer wasn't actually complicated — it was just something nobody had ever said to me directly, because everyone assumed somebody else already had. "Give with your fingers, not your arm." "The reason he's not tracking up isn't laziness, it's that saddle." "No, you're not supposed to be able to feel your seat bones through a correctly fitted saddle." Small, specific, correctable — the second someone actually says it.

I write these down now, the same way I write down Harvey's vet visits. Not because they're dramatic. Because "I was wrong about this" is exactly the kind of thing I'll forget I ever didn't know, and exactly the kind of thing a newer rider reading this might still be wondering about, alone, too proud to ask.

So: ask the question. The embarrassing one. The one you've been riding around for a year. I promise the answer is shorter and kinder than the guessing was.

— Morgan

---

Keep reading

The Horse Who Came With a Blank Page
Caring for a Senior Horse You've Loved Since Infancy