One horse. One man.

I haven't written in a long time. Not on my blog, not in my story. I miss that part of my life. But the reason I haven't been writing is a good one: I've been too busy living, and loving, life.

In my last post I discussed how terrible 2013 was and that I hoped 2014 would show me how good life can be, and how much I have to live for. I really had no idea how right I would be about that.

Shortly after the beginning of the year, I decided I was done with riding. I was ready to walk away from one of the only two passions I've had my entire life. I was done because it wasn't fun anymore, and I didn't realize how much that had to do with my state of mind. I never rode Patrick again, but I did give him to my trainer who is currently using him as a lesson horse. He's mostly ridden by a woman who adores him, and he seems happy.

Monty is gone. This was hard for me, as when I bought him, he'd had a rough life. I promised him a "Black Beauty" ending. But because I was no longer riding Patrick, Monty was all I had left to ride, and he became the main reason that riding became a chore instead of a hobby. When you're emotionally unstable and suffering from anxiety, you don't need a hard horse. You need something easy and fun. But Monty was hard, because it had been so long since he was ridden regularly, and he's always had a bit of an attitude. So after advertising him on the internet as a free (but hard to ride) horse, I found a great new home for him with someone who was familiar with difficult horses. We are facebook friends and she posts lots of updates about him and his training. He seems happy, which makes it all easier. I feel like I let him down, but maybe sometimes giving someone a happy ending means letting them move on to a better situation.

Enter Roanin.

In March, I told my trainer my plan to stop riding. She understood where I was coming from but encouraged me to take a couple lessons on a horse that belonged to one of her other boarders. She said that if I wasn't having fun on him, I could consider giving it up. I relunctantly agreed, thinking we were prolonging the inevitable, that I had fallen out of love with horses and that it was over.

Roanin completely proved me wrong. He's a really cool horse, very straightforward to ride, but not always easy. He's a Connemara (typically a pony breed), but a giant one, measuring 16.1hh. He's still very much a pony, though: grumpy old man personality, stubborn, but patient and tolerant with a heart of gold. I fell in love with him after the first ride, went to the barn every day for a week, and discovered that Roanin was actually for sale. A couple days later, I had him vetted and he was mine. I've been riding him nearly every day since the end of March.

Until then, any sort of pressure or responsibility made me crumble from stress, even 8 months after I had left my job in customer support. Because even though I had been released from the hospital, and even though I was "better," I still wasn't "me." Not yet.

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall
All the king's horses and all the king's men
Couldn't put Humpty together again

They really got it right with that nursery rhyme. It's impossible for all the horses and all the men to help when you've been spiraling out of control for the better part of a year. But I think it's possible that maybe with the help of the right man and the right horse, he would have been able to put himself together.

Because once I started riding Roanin, things really turned around for me. He became my horse, my therapist, my beloved friend. He showed me what other people had been telling me for months: that it gets better, that there are things worth living for, that life isn't always as bad as it has been. Suddenly I had responsibility that I wasn't shying away from. Days when I couldn't ride, I found myself at the barn just to see my horse and spend time with my friends. I started working for my trainer as a groom and started to feel whole again.

A couple weeks after we bought Roanin, Woody told me that he was so thankful for Roanin every day, because Roanin brought me back to him. And it's true: the horse saved my life, in more ways than one.

It was just a little over a year ago when everything fell apart in my life. Even though I didn't hit rock bottom until December, Patrick's surgery was toward the end of May. But now I am happier than I've ever been, thanks to Roanin, and thanks to Woody with his endless love and support.

Just one horse, just one man. And I'm finally back together again.

Lost along the way

It's funny, the things you take with you and the things you lose along the way. 

For instance, the food in the hospital was so terrible that the only thing I would eat was the yogurt parfait. I'd pick out the fruit and just eat the yogurt and granola. Since I've gotten out of the hospital, two of my three meals a day have been vanilla Greek yogurt with granola. It's all I've ever wanted to eat since I've been out. I won't make anything else for myself, and even if offered other food, I usually turn it down. I have no idea if this diet will make me gain or lose weight or drop dead from malnutrition, but I don't care at this point. It's all I'll eat.

On the other hand, my favorite memories of my childhood were playing Uno with my dad's family, packed around my grandmoother's kitchen table, it was so much fun. When she died mad they divided her possessions, my only request was a deck of uno cards.

In the psych ward, we had about 70% of a deck of Uno. One of the first nights there, I taught the other patients. It didn't quite work perfectly, we were missing some cards, but it was something to do. And at every opportunity - between meetings with the doctor and group therapy - someone was begging me to teach or play Uno. All I wanted to do was read and write, but I obliged, because there wasn't much to do anyway. We played again and again, me and the other patients, a revolving door of bipolar and scichzohrenics, recovering alcoholics and patients going through drug detox. Sometimes it was 2 of us and sometimes it was 10. But we played a lot.

I tought I would forever have fond memories of Uno with my family, of my cousins sitting next to my dad to hit him with all the Draw 4 Wildcards. But the game has completely changed for me. It's no longer what we did for fun on those Kentucky holidays. Now it's what I did when I was at my craziest, surrounded by other crazy people, barely hanging on. Gone are the happy memories.Well, not gone, but tucked away deep in my mind, locked away where no one else can harm them. In their place, a feeling of dread, of fear, of anxiety and hopelessness. Because that's what I felt every time I played with these people.

Somehow, I doubt I will ever play Uno again. And yet even now, I want a yogurt with granola.

The mind is a funny thing. 

It gets worse before it gets better

You've heard that saying before, haven't you? It gets worse before it gets better?

At what point does it stop getting worse and start getting better?

I had another breakdown on Christmas Eve after W and I exchanged gifts with my parents. I was in bad shape. I survived Christmas morning but by the evening, I was a mess again. Woody took me home to rest and take meds. The next morning I attacked myself with an x-acto knife again. Woody called the cops on me and even though they didn't take me in handcuffs to the hospital, W told me that if I didn't go back and get admitted, he would quit his job because I couldn't be trusted to be alone during the day. Ironic, actually, because most of my problems happen at night. But either way, he made it clear: I was voluntarily admitting myself to the psych ward... Against my will.

And so began the worst few weeks of my life. 2013 really, really wanted to go out with a bang, I guess. I haven't been very open about my experiences in there- partially because they were so traumatic. Partially because I don't want to make Woody feel worse for taking me in. I do understand that it was my own actions that landed me there - what with the cutting and the suicidal thoughts - but I never would have gone in if it weren't for him. I don't blame him - he was scared and didn't know what else to do. He did what he had to do. That doesn't change the fact that it was the worst time of my life to date, and I think more than anything, he blames himself for that.

It's definitely effected our relationship. We're having trust issues. He doesn't trust me not to off myself and I think every time I cry or have a bad day, he's going to take me back there and leave me for good. When they say the first year of marriage is the hardest, I don't think they're taking into account those of us who are truly crazy. I feel very bad for Woody because even now, weeks after my release, I'm struggling. He came to visit me every day, he brought me clean clothes and Harry Potter books. He's a better husband than I deserve. Things are already getting better between us, but anyone knows broken trust is hard to rebuild. I have to prove to him that I'm recovering every day. And every day I spend at home, the less scared I am that he's going to take me back there. I've never once worried about our compatibility or our resilience or our love. But I'm scared to death of losing him. I believe that we will be a stronger couple because of this.

I am usually an open book about my life - But I can't bring myself to open up about the things that I witnessed in the hospital. I kept a journal, and wrote in it obsessively, because all I could think about was that I could use this as material for a story. I've already got it outlined, and I'll probably try to write it when I finish the first draft of my current manuscript.

But I don't know how it'll go. I don't know how to put into words the absolute dispair that hung from the walls. They strip search you when you're admitted to the psych ward, did you know that? It's absolutely humiliating. I don't know if I'll ever forget my first night there - I was inconsolable, until they gave me atavan, which made me stop crying but didn't make me sleep. Someone down the hall was getting dialysis and the machine beeped 310 times before it shut off. I know, because I counted. Later that week, I was in the room when a doctor told that patient -who was probably 20 years old- that he would need dialysis for the rest of his life and needed to be put on a transplant list. There is zero privacy in the psych ward: your naked body, your diagnosis, it's all fair game.

I don't sleep anymore. I have nightmares when I do, of being back there. Of never getting out. I told my mother I felt like I was in prison and she scoffed at me like I was being dramatic. What she didn't see was that I was pressured to give my food to the other patients in a way that I felt I couldn't refuse, because many of them scared me and had a tendency to get violent. My roommate would get in my face and yell at me and I was constantly worried about my safety. Two of the men in there with me affirmed my suspicion - having done actual prison time - by saying it was pretty much the same, except here they just pump you full of drugs.

If you read my journal from my stay in the hospital, you can actually witness me start to lose it. My writing becomes less lucid and more paranoid. The drugs they gave me didn't help and they were going to make me stay until they figured out my meds. After speaking to a young man who had been there over two months, I realized I had signed myself into the Hotel California. There's no getting out.

But I had a psychiatrist appointment already set up, and I have been seeing a psychologist weekly since July, so I did the only thing I could think of to do: I lied. I told them I was better. I'm an excellent actress, I was surprised how easy it was to convince the nurse practioner (I never once saw a real doctor) that she had cured me. She was a bitch and I hated her, but I smiled and said I was better. They let me go.

I won't talk about my experience in the hospital, not the worst of it. I told Woody to forbid anyone from asking. But maybe one day I'll write about it. Until then, I'm taking every dose of the medication my psychiatrist prescribed, trying to keep writing the novel that I feel I will one day describe as having saved my life, and learning to believe that I won't be taken back to the hospital every time I have a bad day. Oh, and I'm still not riding Patrick, but that's a story for a different day.

2013 showed me how bad things can get, in every way. Injury, guilt, death, hospitalization, barely scraping by from tiny paycheck to tiny paycheck. On top of that, the gradual realization that my lifelong dream of having a 10-15 acre horse farm is probably unreachable. Ever.

I believe, with all my heart, that 2014 will show me all of the good things life has to offer. I have to believe that things get better than this. I believe that Woody and I will be stronger for having weathered this storm. I believe that my story is good enough to be published. I believe that we will find a home for Patrick and I can have a new horse that won't break his leg, or my heart.

Mostly, I believe that I can get through this in one piece. It's time for things to start getting better.

"Go backwards? No good at all. Go sideways? Impossible! Go forward? Only thing to do. On we go."

On we go.