When you’re walking a course and the rails are above your boobs, you may start to question some life choices. But I finally did it—I competed in some big classes and I didn’t vomit or fall off.

In fact, I laid down respectable rounds. And I learned a few things. For starters: once the jumps get above 1.20-meter, they’re just big. The difference between 1.0-meter and 1.10-meter seems much vaster than the difference between 1.20-meter and 1.30-meter. And then you really start having crazy thoughts that the 1.40-meter doesn’t seem so huge after all.

I’m a nerd. I’m always trying in my geeky way to learn something from life. And in the last year I’ve learned a lot about myself and the kind of life I want to live. There are not words to comprehensively describe how losing my mom has changed me; but I notice little angles, facets of my personality that have been recut.

This was the summer that never happened. Just after Loudoun Benefit Horse Show in June, my mom began to suffer severe complications related to her cancer. And just like that, I was plucked out of horse show land and dropped into hospital land.

After spending four months in equine fantasyland I returned home to my quaint, rustic, little farmette in Purcellville, Va. We use words like “quaint” and “rustic” to invoke a sense of charm, some far off nostalgia for tin roofs and chickens pecking around. But words like “small” and “old” are more accurate.

So try as I might, my inner show jumper took over and a few weeks into my time at the Winter Equestrian Festival (Fla.), I crossed back over to the dark side. A big thanks goes out to the Barkers for understanding that my ambitions were in another ring and encouraging me to pursue them. Through a miracle of networking, (a friend of a friend of a friend and so on…) I found myself standing in Margie Engle’s ring one balmy January morning.