I must admit...I forgot I had a blog. So much so that it just took me 30 minutes to figure out how to log back into it! So, to catch up...
I don't know why I stopped writing blogs for my business. I will assume I got distracted, and eventually just forgot. But it came back into my mind after making some changes recently. Well, for years I have thought about writing a book. But then, conveniently, Jennifer Gaudiani has now written the book I would have written. It's called Sick Enough, and it is excellent.
But, a few weeks ago, I decided to get off social media. Now, I'm not off off it, as I swear you cannot actually know what is happening in the world if you are not on social media. So, I still have a profile, but I don't follow anyone, and just use it to keep up with companies and groups from whom I need information. And that step freed up some time, so I pretty quickly started to ponder the idea of writing a book again. I have a few topics I considered, but there's some barriers.
I could still write a book on eating disorders, and I think I know enough about them to pull it off. But, it seems 21 years of school burned me out on wanting to dive into the research and summarize some of it, etc. So, that kind of rules out the generally accepted book on an important topic.
In the intervening years since I last wrote consistently on this blog, I have become very involved in the sport of dressage. It is my absolute passion outside of work. And, oh, what a ride it has been. Through a series of events, I have ended up riding by myself the vast majority of the time, and that (is lovely and) gives me a lot of time to think. Over the winter, I started to think of the parallels between eating disorder treatment and dressage training/riding, and I thought, "I could totally write a book on this." But, let's be honest, who is gonna search for the topic "dressage and eating disorders."
Ok, so no book on EDs, no book on the parallels between the ED world and the dressage world. And then, lastly, this week, I decided I should write a book on "all the things your first trainer taught you that were wrong." Ah yes, another good one to do a Google search on, right? I suspect it would be an immensely helpful book, but perhaps not widely accepted, and it probably should be written by someone who knows way more about the sport than I do. Which cycles me back to really only knowing enough about EDs to do a book justice.
And so, painfully slowly, the dots finally connected in my mind, and I remembered this blog. I spend a lot of time on the road between work and the barn, and, as I said, I ride by myself, so I am fortunate to have a lot of quiet time to counterbalance my work life. I absolutely love my job and the real and genuine relationships I have with my clients, and I love my quiet time of riding, and, well, pondering life. I do think a lot about how training of horses overlaps with eating disorders, or treatment of eating disorders. (I really should probably just leave it at, "I think a lot." Because I do. For better or worse.)
I chose to get off social media after I accepted all it really did was increase my anxiety. I easily admit that I social anxiety, and I'm just not convinced social media can be good for that. But more so, I realized I didn't actually care about social media. What I care about is actual relationships. Actual communication. And that it was more important to me to have a couple people that I actually talk to, than 100 people who I didn't really talk with much at all (yes, even while on social media, I had very few "friends"...I tried to make social media as real as possible, only "friending" people I actually knew). So, that's how things are now. I have a couple people I talk with on the phone and go to meals with, and a few more I talk with through messaging. And, I have to tell you, my social anxiety is way less activated. But I miss using social media to express my humor; well, I guess that's really all I miss. In short, I recommend getting off of it. I think relationships between humans really could only be improved by the end of social media, which, I know, won't happen.
So, I'm not sure what topics I will be writing on moving forward. I can say, they mostly will be cooked up while driving on I-15, or while sitting on horseback. Yesterday, I had this whole half-baked idea about writing about fears because I have one horse that is usually unflappable, but girlfriend senses cold fronts and FREAKS OUT. My other horse spooks at....well....air. Literally, air, I promise you. She's a fun one. But this one (Daisy) is chill, except when a cold front is coming in. And so, my usually calm horse turned into a horse kite yesterday. What in the world do I mean by that, you ask? It's when your horse is so high-strung and freaking out about nothing that you swear she is no longer connected to the earth and instead is a 1000lb kite you are attempting to keep connected to the ground (you) by a measly lead rope. This used to be frightening to me. But now I know she's just having a moment, and she has zero intent to hurt me during her moment. And so I hold onto my kite string, and we walk calmly, and distract, and get her focused on work rather than....the wind, or barometric pressure, or whatever she was reacting to. And I guess that does parallel to ED treatment/recovery, because, so often, EDs lead you to "freak out about nothing." Or at least react to something that others do not understand, but it still scares the crap out of you. I couldn't remove the cold front for Daisy, just as we cannot remove facing food. Instead, she had to figure out how to be calm in spite of whatever was scaring her, and we did that through healthy distraction and focus on something else. And, in the end, that cold front came in, and she kept four feet on the ground while I hung out on her back. Whew.
Ah ha! Maybe you thought I couldn't do it (I wasn't even sure where I was going)...this tying of dressage training and eating disorder treatment. But looky there! It all came together in the end. ;) More to come. Because as I said, I think a lot. :)
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