Why The Wild Mare

And the older I've got, the more I've realised that this was never really about horses.

Because you can lose your nerve in life too.

Life can knock the trust clean out of you.

Relationships can.

Illness can.

Motherhood can.

Grief can.

Your body changing can.

Something you believed was safe suddenly isn't anymore.

Something you thought would last forever doesn't.

And you find yourself doing exactly what I did on a horse.

You hold on too tightly, trying to anticipate everything, trying to control the outcome because you think that if you can just stay one step ahead of life, perhaps it can't catch you out again.

But of course it can.

And I think one of the things I'm learning in this chapter of my life is that trusting life doesn't mean believing nothing bad will ever happen again.

It means trusting that when it does, you'll meet it.

You'll find your feet.

You'll work out what comes next.

And you'll rebuild.

And maybe you'll even become someone slightly different because of it, and I think that's where I am now.

I'm not the fearless girl I was at 20, and actually, I don't particularly want to be her again, because the woman I am now understands something she didn't.

Courage isn't the absence of fear.

Sometimes, courage is losing your nerve completely and choosing, very slowly, to trust again.

And maybe that's another meaning of life unbridled for me.

It isn't about galloping through life with no fear and no responsibilities.

It's not about throwing away everything you've built and disappearing off into the sunset.