My broadband is down. My fancy new phone is on the fritz. I am cut off from the world and that isolation, which is so strange in the modern age, has made me angry and uncomfortable.
Realistically, no one needs to urgently get in touch with me, and the biggest problem this caused was a delay in the evening’s pizza order. It feels like the world has suddenly been ripped away from me, though – I am cut off from everything.
It wasn’t always this way. I remember a time when a landline was enough and none of my friends had access to the Internet in rural Michigan, which meant its biggest use in my house was looking up tarot card layouts and magick spells. Yes, “magick” with a “K” – 12 year-old me was very much into Wicca. Please note that 13 year-old me firmly settled into the role of town Athiest. 14 year old me loved to argue with the Baptists, Jehovah’s Witnesses and Mormons of her childhood. Religion was a wonderful rollercoaster ride in my adolescence, and afforded me the rare opportunity to argue with adults who should really have known better. It makes me a bit sad in retrospect that I could, and often did, prove them wrong in theological discussions about their own beliefs. At the time I thought I was just amazingly witty. Now I know they were just horribly out of touch. I digress.
It wouldn’t have mattered if my friends did have email or we had all had cell phones, I suppose. I wasn’t a very social person. I went to a grand total of 2 parties in high school where alcohol was present, and only drank 3 times before I went away to college. I didn’t get drunk until I met my friend Danielle in our terribly pretentious honors “Soviet and Post-Soviet Film Studies” course our first year. (We drank tequila and Sprite – combination that surely doesn’t exist in nature and has never been repeated.) Instead of teenage angst, I spent a lot of time alone either reading or with my horses.
Thankfully, I think my mother could tell at the start of puberty that I wasn’t going to be the social butterfly she had always hoped and dreamed. So, she got me a horse and some riding lessons. Of all of my mother’s grand ideas for my future – dance class so I wouldn’t get fat (you want a flat stomach, right?) music lessons because band was a good place to pick up a boy (what? Yeah, those marching uniforms sure got me hot under the collar. Literally, those things were made out of some sort of super synthetic craziness. No one looked good), bowling league so I was forced to spend time with my, *ahem*, working class cousins – none of them turned out quite so well. I’m an extremely sensitive person with an affected thick skin. Keeping me away from the strange stage play that was high school dramatics probably saved me from becoming a delinquent druggie slut. Or, remaining a socially awkward nerd forever. It really could have gone either way, looking back at my high school friends.
I spent hours every day with my horses, despite the season, weather, or illness on my part. I got up early to put turn them out to pasture, went out before dinner to feed them in blizzards – my parents were adamant that my pets ate before I did. Some sort of strange animal pecking order equity I guess. Gave them all sorts of shots, bandaged all manner of cuts, groomed them in some rather bizarre places for shows, and spent hundreds of hours teaching them incredibly mundane things like walking alongside me, and stopping IMMEDIATELY when I did. My feet were stepped on, my arm was bitten, I fell off of them for any number of reasons, and once I was run head first into a tree (it is possible, those bastards can turn really quickly when they want to). Of course, I did quite a lot of stupid things as well. I liked to stand on their backs to pick apples, for instance. I used to race through the forest with no saddle or bridle to rely on – just a rope around their neck and a false sense of invincibility. Once, I even rode through a field with some bears. Calm down, they were black bears. They eat berries and my horse could have stepped on them. (He’s run over a porcupine and a squirrel that I know of – who knows what else he’s managed to kill over the years).
My first horse was 20, technically the size of a pony, and cost a whopping $600 – saddle and bridle included! What a bargain, considering she lived until the summer of last year, when she turned 30. It was a strange, sad day – she just started shivering and wandered off alone. She died in the night on top of a hill and we had to hire a tractor to bury her there. I’ve seen a lot of dead animals in my life. I grew up with hunters and farmers; death of pets and cuddly forest creatures was just a part of life. I refused to look at my dead horse. I regret that I didn’t, it seems disrespectful now.
My second horse was actually my dad’s horse. I stole him. I rode him every day and taught him countless tricks. He remains one of my favorite things on this earth. At shows people tried to buy him from me. He liked to drink beer (but not Canadian beer. I agree. That shit is not good). He was the most steadfast thing in my life for a long time.
My brother went away to college when I was 12. It’s around then that my parents started fighting. They always put on a united front when he came home, though, as if nothing was wrong. Therefore, I didn’t really have an ally, and I was a bargaining tool/negotiator/battle ground for my parents. But I didn’t realize that it was weird. All I knew was that I had a seemingly uncontrollable rage, which was directed at adults. I had an urgent need to prove them wrong at every possible opportunity. I argued about politics, religion, anything and everything they held sacred for the sake of it. I didn’t like that they thought their lives were in order and good. No one’s life was good, and they were all blind to that fact. I had to show them. If they thought differently, they were just stupid.
At that time my mother thought I was spoiled, stubborn and incredibly rude. I was, I know I was. I cringe at some of the things I said and did. But I also remember that my mother tried to get me to ask my dad to start taking Prozac. (He also had the rage. But it miraculously disappeared when my parents got divorced. We used to fight all of the time – horrible fights. We haven’t since the day he moved out of our house.) And that after my one and only really rebellious period in my life, my mother blamed herself and started crying. A rather vain trend she’s carried on until the present. She’s convinced I only got a tattoo to spite her. 18 year-old me might have done that, but college grad 23 year-old me wasn’t really thinking about her much at the time. At 14, I started taking antidepressants myself. Years later, studies showed that children on antidepressants had a tendency to exhibit manic behaviors, such as shoplifting or promiscuousness, and to commit suicide. It explains rather a lot about my black moods during this period.
Adding to my teenage misery and confusion, my grandmother died when I was a freshman in high school. She was probably one of the strangest, craziest and most interesting people I’ve ever known. She was also incredibly petty and manipulative. We were very close. She told me if I didn’t come to visit her often, she’d haunt me after she died. I was bitterly disappointed when she didn’t. Since her death, my mother and I have come to the conclusion that my step-grandfather greatly contributed to her death. An ex-alcoholic, my mother claims that he was a wonderful person before he sobered up. He was a cruel man who once told 9 year-old me that I had no real friends and that I didn’t know what friendship was. I have no idea if it was born out of some strange “band of brothers” war nonsense (he fought in WWII like everyone else his age), or if he was just a bastard because I wasn’t his blood kin. Either way, it deeply affected me – he was the only grandfather I have ever known, and he made it very clear that I wasn’t actually related to him, and that I therefore didn’t matter. I never saw him again after my grandmother’s funeral. I’m not even sure if he’s still alive. I don’t really care, part of me hopes he’s fallen into a debilitating dementia and doesn’t even recognize his “real” grandchildren. He used to go golfing instead of taking care of my dying grandmother. I hate golf now.
So, the angry, rude teenager who had no “real” friends spent a lot of time outside with horses. I talked to them, wove elaborate stories about things that I wanted to happen, but knew never would. Things about boys I liked but was too painfully shy to talk to, girls who were savage to me, but who I never stood up to. I remember one winter night, I fed the horses and then laid down in a pile of hay while they munched all around my head. For some reason, I was never afraid of them. Other horses, yes – they were strangers, and like all strangers, they were unpredictable and not to be trusted. I stared up at the sky, which held particularly interesting dark grey clouds swirling all around. The world felt enormous; I was the only person who existed, and the sky was endless. It may be the most peaceful I’ve ever felt. I think I understood the world best in that moment, I’ve definitely never been that certain of myself, my actions and my beliefs since. I’m not saying that I was right and wholly perfect then, just that I understood better than I do now.
I was alone then, with few people who truthfully were my “actual” friends. I wasn’t around people much outside of school and the numerous clubs to which I belonged. Now I live in a city, surrounded by people all the time. I felt less lonely then. Now I have this constant need to be connected to text messaging, social networks, email, the “world”. I feel completely out of sorts otherwise. I think it’s a form of self-affirmation. If I put this thought out into the universe, will someone notice and acknowledge it? If they don’t, does it mean that I’m socially rejected? Even now, I’m writing this with the intention of putting it on my blog so that someone will read it, and hopefully tell me how wonderfully clever I am.
The Internet is full of people seeking validation, and I am one of them. I’d like to say I write these posts to reveal inalienable truths about humanity or to entertain for the sake of entertainment and craft, but I do it to say things that for whatever reason I can’t normally express without a joke or by seeming petty and bitchy. A thousand times a day I teeter between believing people I consider friends think I’m wonderful and think I’m insufferable. The good days are when I go to bed and the former outweighs the latter. The bad days don’t end quite so well. Maybe one day I can live in the happy medium between living in the world and having a firm knowledge of myself and my place in it. I seem to be able to do one or the other fully, but never at the same time. The other always seems unattainable and ethereal. These are hard times to be without a horse, when the tall buildings of the city make the sky seem so small and inconsequential. Especially when you can’t get Facebook to work on your smartphone.
