June 14, 2023 
The first time I watched the 1987 film Amadeus I cried.
Not because of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s untimely death. I cried because I related to Antonio Salieri, the in-house composer of the Venetian court, whose jealousy of the child prodigy held the narrative arc of the film together.
“That’s me,” I wept to my parents, “I am also the Patron Saint of Mediocrity.”
That was 2004. I was 15 and I wanted to be the genius, the gifted one, the rare diamond in the rough—the one who could ride the unrideable horse and who would publish her first novel before graduating high school.
In reality, I was the chubby girl with untreated dyslexia and a flair for melancholy. I rode the horses I could con people into letting me get on and wrote short stories during music practice.
I have been thinking about my younger self a lot lately. Teenage-me would faint from delight if she knew how much time I spend in the saddle as an adult and that I write things for a living.
But at the same time, I wonder what she would think of the fact that, in the barn, I am a big chicken who gives a firm ‘no, thanks’ to any horse I don’t think I can handle, and that the book I’ve been working on, the one that keeps getting rewritten over and over, has yet to see the light of day.
I am not a genius. And while that thought brought me dread as a teenager, adult me is grateful for my lack of virtuosity.
For most, talent burns off. It’s a short-lived shortcut to success. What waits when that fire goes out is a gaping abyss lined with hard work, screw-ups, and rejection. So. Much. Rejection.
Yet when you’re already kind of “meh” that black hole isn’t something you stare into but something you’ve made it your mission to climb out of. When you start off crappy at something, doing the work and working through the failure are constant companions on your journey—you’re not just practices at dealing with them, they make your improvements all the more sweeter.
The truth I now know about horses and art and, heck, even life is that you have to suck most of the time. For every perfect bend or beautiful sentence, there are 1,000 previous attempts that are absolute garbage.
Being ok with “just ok” also helps us discern what we truly love and what is a passing fancy. There have been many exceptional riders and writers in my life who hung up their boots and put down their pens to move on to other things. It is, instead, the doggedly determined ones who keep plowing ahead—not because they’re great but because they love it enough to keep chasing good.
Of course, everyone has one thing they’re naturally adept at. For me, that was singing. When I was 16 and 17, I landed leading roles in musicals. My self-awareness was not existent then. But, I gave it up when singing got hard later in life because it lost its lustre and I wasn’t obsessed with singing the way I am with horses and stories. Now, I only sing in the car and occasionally on the back of a horse when I am trying to calm my nerves.
Horses and words, though, have been difficult since the start. Yet I couldn’t get enough of them, then or now.
I’m 34 now and I sometimes still feel inadequate when children outride me, but most of the time I’m simply in awe at how far I have come from where I started. It makes me think of that horse video going around that says, “When I was a kid, I wanted to ride really badly. Now after years and years of hard work and dedication, I can ride really badly.”
How lucky are we, the blessed mediocre riders who still lace up our boots?
