September 24, 2026 
There’s a meme of the bell curve that I think about constantly.
On the left side is a caveman saying, “I know nothing.” In the middle is an idiot saying, “I know something.” And on the far right is an enlightened guru saying, “I know nothing.”
To be very clear, I am not calling myself enlightened. But seven months into leasing Beau, I have somehow traveled the entire curve only to arrive back at: I know nothing.
When I half leased Beau, I didn’t know what kind of horse I wanted. I didn’t know what kind of rider I wanted to be. I didn’t know how serious I was about any of this. All I knew was that I had the chance to ride a beautiful horse more than once a week, and that was enough. I wanted time in the saddle. I wanted repetition. I wanted the chance to figure the rest out by doing it.
And Beau gave me that.
He is a 17.3hh Selle Français who is patient, kind, occasionally lazy, deeply unimpressed by drama, and willing to take a joke. He let me come back to riding without making every mistake feel consequential. He took me to my first rated horse show in roughly three decades. He gave me enough confidence to stop thinking only about whether I could still do this and start thinking about what, exactly, I wanted to do.
Which is unfortunate, because Beau is now the reason I have a problem.
The problem is not that Beau is a bad horse, he’s definitely not. The problem is that he has been so good to me that I am now good enough to have opinions. I have ridden a few other horses recently who are more naturally forward, more self-carrying, more inclined to take me somewhere without my seemingly having to manufacture every ounce of impulsion, and riding them produced the deeply inconvenient realization that riding can feel different. It can feel easier. It can feel like the horse is participating in the same idea.
That does not mean Beau is miserable doing his job. He is generous. He jumps because I ask him to jump. He gets me around a course. But I have started wondering what it might feel like to ride a horse who enjoys the job a little more, who is thinking toward the next fence instead of waiting for me to file a formal request.
Apparently my trainer has been wondering about that too. My half lease is coming up for renewal, and when we talked about what I might do next, he said something that immediately detonated my very reasonable adult brain. He thinks I could keep progressing, possibly a lot. He casually floated the idea that if I wanted to pursue jumpers, he could see me eventually jumping 1.25m.
I would like to emphasize that I am not currently jumping 1.25m. I am not even currently a jumper rider. But naturally, my brain handled this information with tremendous maturity and immediately remembered that Laura Kraut is 60 and still competing at the highest level in the world.
I am 44. That gives me approximately 16 years.
To be clear, Laura Kraut should not be worried.
Then he mentioned that he is going back to Europe in October to look at horses and, very casually, asked, “Would you want to come?”
Hell yes, I want to come. What kind of question is that?
I helped edit the sale videos from his last buying trip. Beau himself came from a literal French château. You are telling me my options are to stay home and behave responsibly or travel around Europe, hop on horses, visit beautiful barns and call the entire thing research, content and professional development? Obviously I want to go.
This is also when my brain begins building the YOLO case. Climate change is real. AI data centers are probably boiling the oceans. Democracy is fragile. Am I seriously supposed to wait until 2029 to buy a horse?
And, annoyingly, there is a part of me that believes this argument.
I left a career in private equity earlier this year because I realized that the old version of my life was not the life I wanted anymore. I wanted more control of my time. I wanted to build my own business. I wanted room for my family and my creative work and, yes, horses.
I did not quit my job to ride horses, but I also kind of quit my job to ride horses.
The problem with leaving a lucrative corporate job is that you also leave the lucrative corporate paycheck. My business is growing, but my income right now is a fraction of what I used to make. We are fine. This is not a story about financial hardship. My children are not losing their college funds because I bought a pair of breeches. But money buys options, and I have fewer options than I used to.
When I was earning a big, stable (haha) salary, a horse decision could be expensive without necessarily becoming existential. Now, if I spend substantially more on horses, that money and time have to come from somewhere, and increasingly I think that is the question underneath all of this.
Not: Can I afford a horse?
Not even: What kind of horse do I want?
The real question is how much of my life I am willing to reorganize around becoming the rider I want to be, and, maybe more importantly, how will I know when that reorganization is healthy and intentional versus when I am asking everyone around me to absorb the cost of my ambition.
Because horses are very good at expanding. A half lease becomes a full lease. Three riding days become five. A horse show turns into a whole weekend. A buying trip to Europe sounds fabulous until I start thinking about school pickup, sports, who is taking which child where, whether my mother-in-law needs to help, whether my husband is suddenly carrying all of the family logistics while I gallivant around Europe sitting on horses. He is fully capable of parenting his own children, obviously. Still, I would be gallivanting.
And if I go from riding three days a week to five, those extra days have to come from somewhere. Maybe they come from consulting. Maybe they come from content. Maybe they come from family time. Nothing is free just because nobody sends you an invoice for it.
Even my daughter has started orbiting the horse thing. She wants to ride, which I love, but I am also weirdly sensitive about it. I never want her to feel like she has to love horses because I love horses, or that riding is somehow the price of admission for getting more time with me.
Then again, is it actually so terrible to participate in something because it gives you more time with someone you love? I genuinely don’t know.
People inherit interests from their families all the time. Maybe some of our passions start because we want proximity to another person and become our own later. Maybe they don’t. All I know is that she looks extremely cute in riding clothes, and yes, she would absolutely get to spend more time with me if she were at the barn too.
Which is exactly the kind of sentence that makes me wonder whether horses are fitting into our family life or whether, very gradually, our family life is starting to fit around the horses.
The uncomfortable answer is that we have already started accommodating them. Again, I did not quit my job for horses. But I wanted a life where I had more room for them, and I still don’t think that is inherently selfish. In fact, I think women in particular are often handed a deeply deranged idea of what virtue is supposed to look like.
Consider The Giving Tree.
I used to think The Giving Tree was a sweet book. Now I think it is completely insane. The tree gives away its apples, then its branches, then its trunk, and eventually it is literally a stump and somehow this is presented as aspirational.
Absolutely not. I do not want to be the stump.
I spend a lot of my life being useful to other people. Someone needs a snack. Someone needs a ride. Someone needs an email answered. Someone needs a permission slip signed. Someone needs me to make a decision.
At the barn, I get to be the person who wants something.
I want to get better. I want to be competitive. I want to feel in sync with my horse. I want my horse to want the same things I want, or at least to seem reasonably enthusiastic about the arrangement. I do not think the answer is to want less. But I also do not want to make everyone around me supporting characters in my self-actualization project.
Which brings me back to Beau, because there is another part of this that is much less philosophical and much more emotional.
Beau is a little head shy, but after I ride, he will stand there and let me take a damp cloth and scrub the sweat and dirt off his face. He nickers a little when I show up. If he is eating hay and I walk up to his stall, he lifts his head and looks at me with this soft, derpy, relaxed expression that I have decided means he is happy to see me.
I also have a theory that Beau likes nice things. This theory is mostly supported by the fact that I buy him nice things: hair products, supplements, whatever might make him shinier or more comfortable or more pampered. And somewhere in the middle of all this thinking about what I might want next, I had the profoundly irrational thought: But if I stop leasing Beau, who is going to pamper him?
This is obviously ridiculous. Beau is a big, beautiful, bay warmblood living at a very nice barn. He is not going to be abandoned behind a gas station. Someone will take care of him.
But will they take care of him the way I do?
That is the harder part, because Beau is not something I am trying to escape. He is a horse I love. He has been patient with me. He has taught me a tremendous amount. He is the reason I am even in a position to wonder whether I want more.
Progress, inconveniently, is not always additive. Sometimes the next thing requires letting go of something that is already very good.
And maybe that is why I have been agonizing over a situation in which there is, objectively, no actual problem. My lease is ending. I can renew it. I can keep riding Beau. I can try jumpers in November. I can ride other horses. I can build my business. I can learn more. I don’t have to fly to Europe next month and buy a horse, and emotionally, financially and practically, I am not ready to buy one anyway.
The only emergency is the one created by the fact that I can suddenly see another version of my riding life.
I am extremely achievement-oriented, and I am very good at turning “I could do this” into “So why am I not already doing this?” But maybe urgency and impatience are not the same thing. Urgency says I only get one life, and I should take seriously the things that make me feel alive. Impatience says that if I can see the next destination, I need to arrive there immediately.
I am trying to learn the difference, I swear.
Maybe I will eventually reorganize more of my life around horses. Maybe I will ride five days a week. Maybe I will go horse shopping in Europe. Maybe I will become a jumper rider. Maybe I will buy a horse who takes me to the fences and loves the job as much as I do.
But I don’t have to know all of that yet.
For now, I think the answer is not to want less. It is to be more honest about what wanting more asks of everyone around me.
I can see where I might want to go. I just do not have to get there tomorrow.
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