"How can you tell if you're depressed or just kind of hate your life?"
I asked this question of my oldest sister towards the end of my second semester in graduate school. Though our relationship has not always been on the most even of keels, JR became one of my strongest life-lines in grad school. Having completed her PhD in English about eight years before I started my MA in Art History, she provided remarkably canny insight regarding the trials, tribulations, and general batshit politics of getting an advanced degree in the humanities. To her, my misery was truly unfortunate but not surprising.
"How long until the end of your semester?" she asked.
"Two weeks."
"I think you'll know in three weeks or so."
She was right of course: after the semester ended, I caught up on the missed sleep, reined in abundant stomach acid, and managed to more or less pull myself together.
My plan at that time was to research my thesis for the summer, avoiding my department and my cohort like the plague. There are worse things than burying yourself in books for a summer, but it also occurred to me that it might not be the worst idea to try to incorporate something into my life that had nothing—zip, zilch, nada—to do with graduate school.
The solution I came upon was almost comically straight forward:
I found myself a barn.
It was no coincidence that this was where my mind (and later, my Subaru) took me: the intense loneliness and rigid stress I experienced in grad school felt very similar to my emotional symptomology in high school. Back then, I had found an equine therapy barn by pure coincidence just down the street from my house in California. Patience, my fiery little mustang counterpart, held me together through general misery and acute loss. And she did it simply by being a horse.
It is difficult to describe the effect a barn has on me—the bone-deep, shoulder-releasing peace I experience when I come within smelling distance of a stable. Scent is supposedly the sense most strongly linked to memory, and I can attest to this: when my anxiety is at its worst, I will occasionally pull out my old riding gloves and nestle my face in them. Sweat, hay, and manure: the combination of these smells will calm me down faster and more reliably than anything else I have found.
In retrospect, I wonder why it took me as long as it did to find a barn in Colorado.
I fell into volunteering as though the intervening eight years, between high school in California and grad school in Colorado, had never happened. That summer, when I wasn't up to my eyeballs in modernist theory, I was up to my knees in manure—and I loved it. I had forgotten that a barn is full of comforting rhythms: the arc of a lesson, the patterns of grooming, the beat of each horse's gait, even the satisfying rasp and heft of a shovel in a dirty paddock. That rhythm brought me back to myself that summer, and I held onto it through the next year, scheduling my volunteering in next to my classes.
It was marvelous to be quietly good at something. My graduate program was stridently and passive-aggressively competitive, and I struggled between my inherent desire to enter the fray and verbally whup the crap out of my more obnoxious peers in class, and the coinciding awareness that such a whupping would only mean I was playing the game I hated. At the barn, competition was the furthest thing from my mind, which for me is saying something.
I ended up being paired most frequently with the two alpha mares of the herd, a dappled gray named Lou and chestnut quarter horse named Lady. Working with alphas, in my experience, requires simultaneous assertion and respect—a complementary balance of stunning chutzpah and the knowledge that if she wanted to, this mare could walk all over you (literally) and not even chip a hoof.
For whatever reason, I happen to carry that balance in my bones, so the alphas and I got along swimmingly.
In my year at the barn, I became close with one of the instructors, who knew about my difficulties in grad school. One afternoon, when I came in particularly exasperated and before the horses could work their magic on me, Chris looked at me curiously over another horse’s back as we were grooming and said, “Why are you putting up this this crap? You’re a boss mare.”
I don’t think I’ve ever received a better compliment, and I carry it with me still. I thought about it a lot in my last few months of school, and in moments of stress, I would try to channel my inner alpha. The thing about boss mares is that, for the most part, they don’t stomp around shrieking their dominance (leave that to the boys). Instead, they play it cool and just ooze authority. The underlying threat of a whupping—by hoof, teeth, or 20th century art theory—is there, but it’s beneath them to resort to such things unless absolutely necessary. I learned the deadpan and the cool blink from a horse, but it has worked stunningly well on humans.
As cool as they are, though, there are moments when an alpha’s warmth can really save you too.
One afternoon, while I was leading Lady back to her stall after a lesson, she paused on the path. I figured she had an itch, so I let her stand for a minute. Instead of scratching like I thought she would, she leaned her head over to me and rested it against my chest, just for a few heartbeats. Until that moment, I hadn’t realized how long it had been since someone had hugged me, and I was barely able to keep from breaking down in tears. I don’t know why she did it, but I can tell you that in my experience, horses have an amazing ability to discern when someone is injured, disabled, or in my case, just a little bit broken.
I am a pack animal, no two ways about it, and in Colorado, I was isolated from my pack. I know that email and phone access make distance a bit more surmountable, but there is nothing that can replace the actual presence of your own herd of people in a room with you: the warmth, the comfort, the safety. It was no wonder I was miserable—but it is small wonder that I managed to find a herd for myself in that last year. My western herd just happened to be made up of horses.
There’s not a lot I miss about Colorado, but that barn, and my darling Lou and Lady, make the top of a very short list.
I saw a news story the other day about veterans benefiting from equine therapy. While I would never, ever compare my own angst to the actual trauma suffered by vets, I thought I recognized the expression one of their faces as he stood in a stall with a tall, gray horse. It was relief: the lifting, even if only temporarily, of crippling expectations and uncertainty. In the accompanying interview, he stated simply: “The horse made it all right.”
I knew the feeling, because for the last two years, it was only in the company of horses that I felt human again.
