When I introduce myself, I say in this order, “I’m a writer, social media coordinator and a horse lover.”
The order of how I list these things is skewed. The horses came first. Then the writing, and then social media as my current day job.
Horses have been a huge part of my life. I can’t explain what it was that drew me to them in the first place. As Lady Ann Blunt says, it is an inborn love, instinctive and unreasoning. In the same family, my mother and I were the only horse lovers. My sister (same upbringing and same blood) had no real interest in them. Now, she detests them.
In a conversation the other day, I relayed how big horses have been in my life—from my rodeo queen days to my current fiction writing. A woman beside me shrugged and said, “I was raised with horses my whole life and I never cared for them the way you do. They didn’t affect me that way.”
That stung a bit. I know the woman didn’t mean to—it is a perfectly innocent statement. But I wondered suddenly if something was wrong with me. Why is it that my childhood and teen years showing and riding affected me so?
Am I just strange?
The more I thought about it, the more I wondered.
Why do some people react so differently?
I worked my whole life to earn the right to ride and own horses. I got my first job at age twelve scooping poop at a local stables to help pay for my own horse. I was held to expectations and chores that my siblings weren’t.
That is the difference between my devotion to horses and why they affected me differently, more deeply.
I love what my friend and fellow horse-junkie Melissa Bauer-Herzog said, “I also believe that like cat and dog people, some are horse people and some are not.”
That really nails the issue on the hand, I think. Some people click. Some people are as devoted to horses as prior generations. Some people don’t want anything to do with them. Some people have simply cleaned one too many stalls for their taste.
What are your theories?
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