Guest Blog Post # 39: "Fear" by Shanyn Fiske

I’ve been thinking lately about fear – both the long-range, abstract kind (I am being a bad parent and therefore my child will grow up to become a social abomination) and the concrete, immediate kind (my horse will refuse to jump that giant brush and I will crash into it and die).  In my sport – and I can only assume in many others as well – fear is not necessarily a positive emotion.  It can paralyze you, impede your progress, and seriously get in the way of teaching your horse to do its job. 

A sports psychologist once suggested that I come up with a playlist of fight songs to listen to before a competition to ward off that nauseating feeling I get when I walk a cross-country course and every jump looks damn near impossible.  I did try blasting Sara Bareilles’s song “Brave” repeatedly while driving to an event once, and it didn’t really help, just FYI.  Maybe I should have tried something more aggressive.

But, at least biologically speaking, fear is an entirely necessary, life-preserving emotion.  All those chemicals responsible for nausea and paralysis are the same ones that prepare you for survival against an assortment of dangers.  In a sport like eventing, which I would argue is continually challenging a normal human being’s and horse’s sense of what constitutes safety, one of the biggest difficulties - at least for me - is not the hard work of training but the struggle against biology.

The other morning, I confessed to my partner that more days than not, I wake up with at least one or two fears taking up room in my head – fears about personal or professional confrontations that need to be dealt with; fears that I won’t be able to give my horses strong, positive rides; sometimes a general fear that I won’t have the energy to get through my day.  My partner – who is about the least fearful individual I have ever met – was mildly appalled and implied there was something disturbing and abnormal about my daily struggle with fear.  Rising to my own defense, I came up with an on-the-spot argument that I have since actually started to believe.

What I said to him was that fear is a gift, and I’m lucky to live the kind of life that challenges me every single day.  It’s a life I’ve chosen for myself, perhaps because I cannot imagine feeling alive any other way.  Every day, I walk out the door carrying my little case of fears, and every day, I come home having at least unpacked if not discarded them.  Sure, some of my fears end up coming true (I fall off or don’t do my best and let myself down), but I rarely let fear stop me from trying, and on the worst days, that’s at least a corner to hold onto.

One of my biggest fears for this past weekend’s event was the “beefy brush” jump on the cross-country course.  (You know when the event organizers call a jump “beefy,” it’s something you should be afraid of.)  Neither of my horses has jumped that kind of obstacle before (at least with me), and that jump just tortured my head all week.  Galloping down to it yesterday, I had the fleeting thought that I could just pull up, but instead, I put my leg on and both my horses jumped that freaking brush better than any other jump on course – in perfect rhythm and with a foot to spare over the top.   I think it’s safe to say that the two moments of landing from that jump were the highlights of my month, and I was just flooded with gratitude for my horses, whose bravery so many times exceeds my own.

So maybe that’s why I’ve chosen a life where fear is as much of a fixture as saddles and bridles.  Fear allows you to be brave and honestly, how do you even define bravery or strength in the absence of fear?  Fear creates those moments of partnership with your horse when you each contribute your share of adrenaline and go-get-em-ness to complete the course.  And that experience of creating bravery together adds up after a while and can carry you through for the next time.


Blog by Shanyn Fiske  @ http://eventwriter.tumblr.com