Hard Choices

"Daisy" an old pastel portrait

It’s been a very difficult year. Not battling cancer difficult or losing a loved one difficult but difficult in other and multiple ways which combined together have become a mountain. 

First, of course, was the surgery to correct a crooked leg back in March which laid me up and off my feet (or TWO feet anyway) for far longer than expected; months longer in fact. It was difficult to be dependent on my husband for almost everything for nearly four months when I tend to be an independent, do-my-own-thing type of person. 

Also difficult was leaving the complete care and riding of my horse to one of my fellow boarders and not being able to see him for weeks at a time. It was hard to hear that he was “thriving” and “never looked better” under someone else’s care. Did that mean that I haven’t been a good horse mom all these years? 

Now that I’m back to riding him, his back is sore again. The vet says that either his saddle doesn’t fit him right or “it’s a rider problem”, neither of which I wanted to hear. I am now actively looking for a new saddle, a road that we’ve been down before with great difficulty. He is “hard to fit” it seems.

I also have to face the possibility that maybe I’m just too heavy for him at his age (29). So, what to do? Do I retire him even though he’s still rideable? Do I continue to ride him while I try to lose weight on a crash diet? Or, do I just not ride him until I can lose weight and let him lose the conditioning he gained over the winter? 

By far the most difficult thing has been to figure out over months of time that my online friends, some of whom I’ve known for years, weren’t really friends at all but more like acquaintances, at least in their minds. That one really rocked me to the core. How could I have misjudged so badly? 

I was once admonished that “to HAVE a friend, you have to BE a friend”. It’s always been very hard for me to trust people enough to let them close.  Now I’m left wondering how I could have failed so badly at being a friend, and where do I go from here? 

On the art front, things haven’t been much better. During my lay up I managed to start two new paintings, but when I ran into a road block with one of them, I totally lost momentum and haven’t been able to get it back since. It’s difficult to see the artwork of artist friends (or acquaintances) online who have advanced over the years while I have stagnated. The truth is that there are hundreds of horse artists in the world who are far better than I, and I keep wondering why I should bother continuing to paint when the chances of catching up to them are so slim, especially at my age. 

The truth is that I don’t have the passion to paint or the drive to create that so many other artists seem to have. Some do artwork every single day. I can go for months without doing any and don’t really miss it. I wonder, if I shouldn’t just give up on being a professional artist and just create for myself when I feel like it. Or, should I pack up all the art materials and equipment and sell it all? 

But then, who would I be? What would I do? 

So, here I am struggling to recuperate from a surgery that may not have solved a problem and dealing with issues which need to be resolved one way or another. 

Hard questions. Hard Choices.