11/04/2022
There is, on one of the horse groups I belong to, an extremely accomplished young rider. She does things with horses which would make the red mare and I fall over in awe and wonder, they are so beyond our scope. Whilst we pootle into the woods and sing songs, this horsewoman is doing flying changes. I use the flying changes as a kind of metaphor a lot of the time. This person is doing literal ones. Every day, I’d bet.
Today, I saw that she was having what she described as a self-doubt spiral. She said that she looked at all the other brilliant horse people doing their brilliant things, and felt ashamed.
Can we just have that one again?
She felt ashamed.
And then she wrote the sentence which broke my heart: ‘It’s getting really tiring being this down on myself.’
I felt a sudden starburst of fury. It’s great-aunt, old lady, mamma bear rage. I suspect that any of you who are, like me, in your fifties or older will have this anger. It is absolute fury at what the world is doing to the young women.
That’s my specific focus now, because I work with a lot of the young, and because I work with a lot of women, and I hear this story, over and over. I hear the shame. I hear the self-laceration. I hear the old, old scripts which run along the lines of not being good enough and never being good enough. I have some of them in my own head, even now, although I've got very good at heading them off at the pass.
But it’s not just the young and it’s not just the women. I think this happens to almost everyone, in one way or another. I can’t work out whether it is a specific cultural or historic thing, particular to this time and place, but someone - culture, family, teachers, wider society - is telling people like that kind, good-hearted, accomplished young woman that there is something wrong with her. That she needs to feel ashamed.
And I’ve bloody well had enough of it.
I want her to ride with the wind in her hair and a song in her heart. I want her to cherish her good mind and her strong body. I want her to delight in the marvellous horses who come through her hands. I want her to feel the energy and the savour of learning, every day. I want her to laugh at her mistakes and exult in her triumphs and skip through everything in between.
I want her to have a singing sense of self, to know that she is unique in the world; that there never was anyone quite like her and there never will be again. I want her to know that as she gives that self to her horses, they will connect with her and give her some of their own unique self - they will lend her their own power and their own wisdom and, together, she and they will be unstoppable.
I want her to grab every moment with both hands, because this moment - and this, and this, and this - is her life, and if old people like me know one thing, it is that life is short. Time shoots by your ears and before you know it you hear yourself saying things to the young people like, ‘Forty years ago…’ Forty years! Where did they run away to?
I want her to be happy. I want her to have the Place of Peace and the love and the joy. I want her to have all of it.
And it makes me spitting furious that the world comes along, in one way or another, and says, ‘No. No, you can’t have that. You’ve got to tell yourself stories about how you aren’t good enough, instead.’
I’m writing this because I’m angry, and I always throw fury at the page, so it can run its spleen off. I’m also writing it because, on the group, she asked for encouragement and advice. Lovely people, who have been through a bit more of life, gathered round and gave her such beautiful words. I wanted to add to them, but I could not find the right way in. I certainly couldn’t find anything short enough to fit into a pithy, helpful comment. And I wanted to work my anger off first, so that it wouldn’t leak out around the edges. Even though it is on her behalf, she might have felt it as an emotion too far in her state of vulnerability.
I think now, as I grow calmer, of what I would like to say - to her, to anyone who is in despair, to all of us who tell ourselves the sad stories about failing our horses.
Where would I start? It’s so complex that I’ve written whole books about it. But right now, in this moment (which is our life) I might say something about choice.
I might say: never forget the power of choice.
Nobody can force us to tell ourselves these stories. The hoary, creaking scripts get embedded, over the years, but we humans have the power to change them. You can, literally, figuratively, metaphorically, write yourself a new story. You really can. It’s not even very complicated. You are just building new mental habits. You lay down a few hopeful neuronal pathways and you’re good to go.
This might not be easy, and it might take time and effort. The brain loves the familiar. As you tell yourself the new stories, about how you don’t have to be ashamed and you don’t have to be down on yourself and you damn well can believe in your own brilliance, the brain will be yelling, ‘But I knew the old stories! They were more miserable than Dostoevsky, but I knew how they worked!’
The gremlins, who are also traditionalists, will be whispering in your ear about how you don’t deserve a new story.
And you? You get to choose. You are a grown-up. You have agency. You have the power (and almost certainly the glory too).
You can say f**k it. Because, actually, really, f**k it. Sod the horrible old shame stories and the stupid chattery gremlins and the endless, endless feeling of the other people always being better than you are. Bu**er it and damn it. (I do find that swearing is sometimes exceptionally helpful at driving the old stories away, and I use it freely as a therapeutic tool. The red mare is used to me going down to the field and hollering streams of cuss words at the sky. She gives me a duchessy look and then carries on eating.)
Here is how I do all this. Every time an old story comes up - the shame story, the you are useless story - I greet it, thank it for coming, and ask it two questions. Is it useful? And is it true?
The answer is almost always no. So I send it into the next room where it may have cake or gin.
If it’s a persistent story, I’ll write it down. The page will take anything.
If it’s one of the old as the hills ones which will never quite leave me, I’ll ring up my friend Kathy in Wales and tell her all about it. She is my Queen of Emotional Processing, and she never minds if I yell down the telephone, ‘Have you got five minutes to process an emotion?’ She’ll always say yes, as long as she’s not lambing.
What I mean by this is: you need a crew. Shame can’t survive empathy. I’ve got five people on whom I can utterly rely. I need five, so I can put them on relay. I’d love to tell you otherwise, but I can’t do this s**t on my own.
After all this, I’ll shake the story out of my body. I stomp and stamp and dance and stretch and jump up and down and sometimes yell my head off. If the red mare and I are both a bit scratchy, we’ll go for a stomp together, in the big meadow. ‘Dance it out!’ I yell at her, at myself, at the world. We both feel a whole lot better afterwards.
And when it’s all over and the crocodile grip of the stupid old tale has let me go, I’ll smile and feel better and remind myself that we are all human and we all have those moments when we are caught in shame and fear and that is all right. I have tools now, so I know what to do. And that means that I can come down to my mares with love and joy and laughter, instead of with misery and dread.
I’ll do anything to maximise the love and joy and laughter. Because that’s what I want to remember when I am very old, and looking back over my life. I want to say, ‘Damn, we did love each other, and oh, oh, we laughed.’
That’s what I want for this young woman. That’s what I want for all of you. That is something that is worth working for.
