I met my younger self for a ride this week...

Me and Murphy in 2009

 ...she wasn't that impressed when I showed up on foot - I think she expected me to have about ten horses of my own by now. She must've been about 15, riding Murphy from the riding school. He was as odd looking and lazy as he always was, but I still felt rather loyal to him, and she clearly was too.

I had to explain that I'd become much more focused on other people in the saddle than myself. That my biggest passion since becoming an adult was volunteering for the Riding for the Disabled Association. That it was a bit of a trade off, because time and money weren't never-ending, but that I was confident that coaching and being involved so closely in an RDA group was something important for me to be doing. I explained that it was more than "teaching disabled kids to ride horses", and that it didn't close the door for other opportunities just for me in the future.

She was interested. She must've been, because she asked, predictably, about the thing that was most important to her: "are you good at it?" 

"Yeah, you're decent at it. But that's not really a yes/no question..." It's hard to explain the nuance of what "good" looks like in an RDA coach to someone who doesn't really know what it is yet. I told her that I'd also got much better at learning new things, and that I enjoyed (most of) the challenges that came my way. I also told her that I'd found good use for her stubbornness and it'd been really useful at times to be happy with relying on myself to get things done, but it was much more important that I'd become more open-minded and had found people who really shared my ambitions and values. That got a mixed response (fair enough).

In an RDA session recently with rider August and volunteer Tegan (and Larry)

There's actually a lot I didn't want to tell her too much about, because being 15 is its own kind of awful and there were a lot of things I'd dealt with since that would've stressed her out unnecessarily. Managing volunteers and keeping numbers stable on Saturdays, when everyone has better things to be doing than charity volunteering. What it means to navigate internal charity politics successfully - and what it doesn't. How to claim GiftAid from HMRC as a new charity (I think we at Aim RDA have got this now and will hopefully be able to laugh about it in 4-6 months or so). Working out a proper balance between RDA and everything else: you can have too much of a good thing if you don't have the right kind of boundaries. How to reassure a small child who's fallen off a pony - which she'd done enough of at the riding school - and more difficultly, how to reassure their parents - which she hadn't needed to bother with much.

Instead, I told her about some of the things that still excited me after thirteen years of involvement. How exciting it was to be part of a team at the RDA National Championships, and the buzz of watching a rider enter a dressage arena after I'd taught them how to get there. What it felt like to be trusted by a rider and their family - being the first person a young rider asked to see in their garden after lockdown was lifted, for example.("What's lockdown?" she asked me, I told her never mind and grimaced nervously when she looked away...). Realising you've worked someone out and them rewarding you with their best riding or clearest communication. The fact that people with limited or even no sight are willing to trust me as their spare eyes when they do something as mad as riding a half tonne live animal. 

I told her she would soon promise our mum that we'd never become a teacher, but that I really did love coaching. I loved helping other people to achieve things. It was a niche in the equestrian world that fitted me well, even among all the people for whom I was never quite "horsey enough". I knew she'd already had experiences good and bad of being coached, and all of them would be useful in the future. She wanted to be a journalist - I told her that I still loved words and enjoyed using them.

Teaching Emilia in an RDA session

I drew a line at telling her some of the more chaotic stories, including the circumstances of some of my most notorious RDA-founded fancy dress outfits: dalmatian puppy (with added twerking), Christmas tree, pirate (with beard), banana (singular) in pyjamas (plural). For reasons of decency, I've omitted some of the other chaos I omitted to tell her. Honestly, I didn't want her disdain. She did, however, like hearing little bits about the people she'd meet and how meaningful the work she did would be. I told her that she'd be ferrying a back seat full of young volunteers to the stables every weekend who were the same age she was now, and she'd be a lot kinder to them than she was herself - but sometimes her high standards and confidence with the word "no" might come in useful, especially (but not exclusively) when they were all desperately hungry for service station KFC.

I also gave her some advice:

It's always important to keep learning about horses, but it's actually your people skills that will be the most useful to refine for your future self.

You can't do everything, and learning where and when to stop doing something - even if it's a really good thing - is one of the most important things you can learn.

Being able to create opportunity for other people is an amazing feeling. It's worth making that part of your hobby.

I told her she'd end up setting up a new RDA group with and for some of her favourite people in the world. It'd be a weird and sometimes tricky road getting there, but so far, it was worth it. Work ethic would be important, so she shouldn't let go of that, but fun would be massively important too. It's only worth giving this much time to anything if it's actually fun.

Oh, and I told her that her old school jodhpurs would get massively more comfortable and fun about ten years down the line, and that some brands even made them in "short" lengths so there weren't massive turn-ups lurking in her boots. Imagine...

Orli, who is currently the age my "younger self" is in this post, in one of her recent lessons

I think I won her over, because she wanted to know what was next. I told her I was the oldest version available today so she'd just have to be patient, but I'd stick around if she wanted some advice on sorting out those grim teenage spots. She looked mortified and glowered at me, so I left her (and dear old Murph) to it. She'll work all of it out when she needs to - I'm doing the same. 

This blog post is based on the "I met my younger self" trend currently circulating on short-form social media. What would you say to your younger self if you met them?