An Autistic Girl’s Guide to Horses

I am nine years old, and my best friend Bailey and I are galloping around my parents’ backyard. We are horses, blazing a trail between sweet-gum trees, leaping over azaleas, crushing impatiens, bright magenta and white, slipping on pine straw and regaining our footing, then galloping off again.

When a human child imitates a horse’s gallop, the gait has two beats, one short and one long: ba-Dum, ba-Dum, ba-Dum, ba-Dum. A real horse’s gallop has four beats. If you are lucky enough to hear a horse gallop up close, the four beats blur to the sound of a drumroll, brrrum, brrrum, brrrum.

A late-nineteenth-century debate over whether a horse fully took to the air while galloping was the impetus for the first motion picture, “The Horse In Motion,” filmed in 1878.⁠ One of the photo stills shows a racehorse with all four feet tucked underneath its body, a compressed spring of potential energy ready to explode into the kinetic.

At nine years old, I do not have a horse. I have never ridden a horse or even spent much time around horses. But Bailey’s family has horses; her mother is a rider and so is Bailey. I cannot imagine anything more wonderful than that. She knows everything about horses, and I want to know everything too.

To outsiders, Bailey and I are glasses-wearing, strange-hair-having, magnet-school-attending, horse-obsessed losers. Around Bailey, I feel happy and normal. And at nine years old, feeling normal is a rare thing for me.

*

In late 2020, I was diagnosed with autism at age forty-four. When I was diagnosed, I felt relieved. Like it does for many late-diagnosed autistic adults, my entire past shifted into focus. My friendships, and lack thereof. My social awkwardness. And my intense interest in things, like horses. “Hyperfixations,”⁠ as autistic writer Pete Wharmby calls the intense interests autistic people feel, “are much more than hobbies. More powerful, more potent, more intense, more important.”

In his book What I Want to Talk About: How Autistic Special Interests Shape a Life, Wharmby describes how his Special Interests (capital S, capital I) have been with him since childhood. He uses the example of his fascination with Legos, starting from early childhood. He let go of Legos through his teens and twenties, too worried about seeming “foolish or childish.” But at age thirty, two years before being diagnosed with autism, he purchased the Back to the Future DeLorean, and he has embraced his Lego hyperfixation ever since.

Like Wharmby’s Legos, horses have always been a Special Interest for me. Although I had to let them go during my twenties and thirties—first because of money and later because of spawning and parenting—they always lurked in my psyche, ready to gallop free.

When I was a kid, not much was known about girls and autism. Today, autistic girls are frequently overlooked in childhood. Recent research shows that eighty percent of autistic women “remain undiagnosed at the age of 18,”⁠ and never receive a diagnosis in childhood nor the help that might have come along with it. When I was young, my teachers told my mom I had behavioral issues. I got kicked out of a lot of activities, like sports and playgroups. As I got older, and my imaginary forest with Bailey faded away, I struggled with friendship and bullying. But no one, not even my beloved childhood psychologist, ever suggested autism.

When I was diagnosed at forty-four, here’s what came into focus: I memorized every breed of horse I could find, from Appaloosa (the one with the spots) to Zweibrücker (a sporthorse from Europe). I read every book in every book series that featured a horse, from Misty of Chincoteague to Black Beauty, plus every standalone novel and reference book. After lining up my horse book collection on the stark white bookshelves in my bedroom, I reread them, and reread them, and reread them. (Some, I still reread and reread.) I wrote my own horse stories in stacks of spiral notebooks. I wrote about a girl with a horse and the adventures they went on together. (There were no princes or any bullshit like that.)

I had one friend, Bailey. I had one intense interest. I was completely and totally autistic and it was, in retrospect, wonderful.

What I did not have, when I was a child, was support from those who understood what it meant to be autistic, that it was okay to not need a lot of friends and to have a singular interest and want to talk about it all the time. Instead, I was hassled by my parents for not playing with other kids. Thinking they were helping, they forced me to join Girl Scouts, which made me miserable. They made me attend sleepovers with large groups of girls, which made me nervous.

They were driven by typical parental fears. Would it not be better if I had more friends? If I had more than one interest? If I knew how to greet people in a more socially acceptable fashion?

Well, sure, probably for the last one. But as I have learned as a parent, there is a way to teach social behaviors that makes a kid feel good about themselves and a way that does not. A kid can learn how to answer the phone like they learn how to brush their teeth—by approaching it as a skill rather than a norm, a skill that says nothing about one’s value as a person. But when an autistic kid violates a social norm, too often she is told that she should have known the norm innately and she is broken because she did not.

I had one friend, Bailey. I had one intense interest. I was completely and totally autistic and it was, in retrospect, wonderful.

*

Like Wharmby, my childhood hyperfixation did not abate as I became an adult. Before I was diagnosed with autism, in January of 2020, I realized that all I ever wanted was a horse, and I now could fucking afford one. Of course, I could not have picked a better time to opt into an outdoor sport, as the Covid-19 pandemic hit only three months later.

I still have a really hard time making friends. But if I meet a person, and we share common knowledge, especially about something as arcane as horses, then we have an instant connection. There are not many people who understand what it means when someone says “I’m buying that chestnut mare, and you bitches can just shut up about it,” because we all know that chestnut mares are crazy.

(Chestnut mares are not, in fact, crazy. Chestnut is a red-brown color that has no correlation to behavior in male or female horses. But the belief that chestnut mares are hotheaded is so widespread that scientists did an actual study to disprove it.⁠)

The horse I bought was named Leroy. Leroy was a Danish Warmblood, which means “fancy” in horse words, much fancier a horse than I was shopping for. But you do not usually find a good horse; you stumble upon them, as I stumbled upon Leroy. He was at the barn where I was looking at a different horse that was not a good fit for me. As we were leaving the barn, I pointed in Leroy’s stall and said, “What about him?”

Leroy was his barn name, that is, the everyday name that people called him. Like T.S. Eliot’s cats, horses, too, have many names. His show name, and name on paper with the breed registry, was “A Royal Legacy.” Sometimes, when a horse is frustrating you, you just call them Glue.

In 2020, Leroy taught me to ride again. I thought it would be easy to relearn because I was on the equestrian team in college. I was wrong. My body had changed a lot in twenty years.

With Leroy, first I had to relearn how to trot. Trotting is the first gait above a walk, two beats of equal duration, and percussive: boom, boom, boom, boom. On an ordinary horse, two feet are in the air while two feet are on the ground, and when you watch the horse go, it looks like it is taking an easy jog. On an extraordinary horse, like the dressage horses in the Olympics, all four feet leave the ground at the trot. A “lofty” trot is special. In photographs, all four hooves are in the air, and below the hooves there’s nothing but arena dust and light.

Leroy could pull off a lofty trot occasionally, and when we did, we floated and floated.

While you ride a trot, you “post,” letting the horse’s energy lift you into the air so you do not bounce around like a sack of Idahos. Once you get better, you learn to do a sitting trot. If you have a poor sitting trot, you will fall off the horse and/or need new teeth.

Of course I remembered how to trot. I was not a complete dingbat. But my legs and core muscles were weak, and therefore my balance was poor. Because I got tired quickly, I struggled to maintain an even cadence for a long period of time. On a horse like Leroy, who was, as horse people say, a lot of horse, a rider needs a lot of strength and balance. So I trotted and trotted and trotted, and I got stronger.

My fixation was in hyperdrive. I rode every day, determined to progress. At first, I wanted to be good enough for my horse. Because Leroy was big and strong, he was scary to me at first. For weeks after I bought him, I thought I had made a terrible mistake. But after a year—what now seems like a blink—I was jumping him over courses with the hot-shot teenagers.

We flew around those jump courses, Leroy jumping each obstacle higher than the other horses, taking them “scopey” as we say, sometimes twice as high as the jump itself. Air Leroy we called him, and I was his and he was mine, and we were unstoppable.

As I rode, a light began to shine in a dark corner of my heart, into the place where I stored old pain. There, I found my nine-year-old self who loved horses, who grew into a twelve-year-old girl who was brutally teased and did not know how to make it stop. In her suffering, the girl dreamed about a horse who would be her friend and help her escape her misery. While I blazed around the arena on my big red horse, I whispered to that suffering girl, This will be you one day.

*

I use the past tense when I talk about Leroy because he died almost two years after I purchased him. A birth defect in his spine crushed his spinal cord. One day he was fine, the next he was ataxic and could barely lift his foot inside a horse trailer. He was humanely euthanized at the North Carolina State University Veterinary School, and they mailed me his tail in an oversized Ziplock bag.

The thing about horses is that they break your heart.

Air Leroy we called him, and I was his and he was mine, and we were unstoppable.

*

Leroy had a big, rolling canter. A horse’s canter is a three-beat gait, faster than a trot but slower than a gallop: ba-da-Bum. In a canter, one of the horse’s feet is always on the ground.

The first time I cantered Leroy, I bounced all over the place. His canter was the opposite of smooth. A smooth canter is like a rocking chair. A big canter, like Leroy’s, is a raft down a wild river: ba-da-Bum, ba-da-Bum! To ride it, you had to move with him properly. It took me a while to learn. He just was not an easy horse to ride.

Until, one day, he was.

I am not sure when the trust between me and Leroy fell into place. I just know that it did. One day we were a horse and a rider, and the next we were a team. I could predict (usually) what he would do. I could tell how he was feeling, physically, and how that would affect him under saddle. He, in turn, could read me as horses can—when I was sad, or stressed out, or feeling sick or tired.

For an autistic person, to be able to communicate, to touch, to care, all without fear, is a gift. Too often, our words, our very actualities, are rejected. With Leroy, I could share all of my secrets, spoken or unspoken, and he would listen with one fuzzy ear cocked in my direction. I could drape my body across his back and rest my head on his side, listening to the slow beat of his heart, steady as the dirt beneath our feet. Even when his coat was glossy, I could brush him, aligning each tiny red hair across his flank.

It was not until I started riding again that I learned the term “heart horse.” A heart horse is your horse soulmate, which sounds cringe, but is a real thing. I have friends who have had their horses for ten or fifteen years. They have heart horses. When Leroy died after less than two years of being mine, I was devastated. I could not breathe for days. But I did not believe I had lost my heart horse—how could I have? He had only been in my life for a short time.

Learning I was autistic, six months before Leroy died, gave me insight into my childhood fixations and my childhood hurts and how much those things have stayed with me over the decades. I also learned a lot about how my heart works. Leroy, my heart horse, taught me to ride again. More importantly, he taught me to trust myself again, giving me back the hope I’d lost when I lost Bailey and the world turned cruel. With Leroy, I remembered that although the world can be dangerous, anything is possible.

*

A horse’s walk, like the gallop, also has four beats. Thus the fastest, flying gait, and the most sedate, are the same in their rhythm, if not their cadence. After a workout on Leroy, I would take my feet from my stirrups and let my legs rest against his sides, trusting he would not bolt or spook.

My entire body would relax while he cooled us off, strolling around the arena, hoofbeats an even rhythm, ba-dum, ba-dum, ba-dum, ba-dum.

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