On Privilege and Captivity…

I grew up in Florida, where rigid social expectations were set for us from very early on. I attended a private school where we took etiquette lessons in elementary school. In these lessons, we learned how to move through a variety of social situations, how to use the correct silverware, eat our spaghetti and where to place our pinkies as we drank tea. In second grade.

The next major preparation for how to move through and be in the world was cotillion, where we received formally printed invitations to join our fellow students from selected private schools across our small city to learn how to waltz and otherwise engage with each other appropriately and with discretion. In 6th grade. We learned the box step, how to interact with boys, where they should place their hands on our bodies while we danced (on the waist, but not too low), how to dress properly and present ourselves accordingly in semi-formal settings.

Cotillion was preparation for the ceremonious, annual debutante ball that would take place in our first year of college. While I was not a “deb,” my friends were. The ball for my year, which I attended as a guest, was a collection of every single person I had known from elementary school through college (not an exaggeration) plus all of my parents’ friends from the tennis club. There were prescriptive rules for dressing, particularly for the debs, mandating kit gloves above the elbows and wedding dresses with straps of a minimum width. The event included a dramatic descent by each girl down the stairs, a significant cursty to the crowd, then a parade around the dance floor by first their father and then an escort, typically a brother or a nice young man from within this circle. Guests wore formal attire; full length gowns and tuxedos. Our hair and makeup were done, but not too done. The debs had write ups in the society section of the local paper throughout the process. To date, it remains quite an annual affair.

And don’t even ask about the diversity of these events. Because, you know, there wasn’t any.

It continued as we matriculated into the large, public, southern universities where Greek life (sororities and fraternities) further refined us. As someone who had an instinctual, vehement opposition to joining a sorority, I was one of very few women in my freshman dorm who opted out. Another one of these GDIs (“god damn independents”) ended up becoming a life long friend. As literally the last of like five girls left behind in our dorm during rush week, we bonded over being blissfully non-participatory. I treated it like anthropologic field work - observing the crush of young women in our shared bathrooms getting their makeup and hair just right very early in the morning (it was August, time to be sleeping in) and all running out the door in lockstep at the same time. As I think about it now, I see the same archetype of a girl with bleached blonde hair and big boobs with perfect makeup, smelling like Clinque Happy, over and over and over. The sameness, the blending in, the perfect alignment to the ideal version of the woman you aspired to be or wanted to be known as. You could tell which sororities girls belong to based on their physicality, their personality and their geography (some sororities were for mainly girls from South Florida, for instance). During “rush,” there were requirements to wear certain clothes, speak certain ways and otherwise conform again to these unwritten rules. The fraternities would set up lawn chairs on the day the results were revealed. Girls’ names and the sororities which had selected them would be posted on paper on a board in the middle of a field and the girls would go running. I believe it was an event known as the “running of the heifers.” I just couldn’t bring myself to do any of it.

From age 8, I had been a horse girl. I was that girl that drew horses in my notebooks at school constantly, to the point where people would make fun of me. And I didn’t care. Deep in my soul, horses were my passion. At 13, my parents bought me a pony. I was obsessed. I went to the barn nearly every day. I cleaned stalls, hauled around heavy buckets of water, got dirty, mastered the art of equitation and eventually learned how to train difficult horses. By 14, I had outgrown my pony and my parents bought me a horse off the race track. He was wild. A thoroughbred who just didn’t have it in him to race, but had tremedous enthusiasm for everything else. Rumor was that he refused to leave the starting gate in races - as a fellow non-comformist, we were a particularly well-matched pair. He was beautiful - a chestnut gelding, no white marks, with a lot of spunk. He was very particular about how he liked to be ridden and would often buck when he was annoyed or excited or for no reason at all. Sometimes he spooked at nothing. He must have been able to see things I couldn’t. Not long after we bought him, one of these bucks landed me in the hospital with a concussion and a broken helmet, but, because I was crazy, I was back riding within a week.

We built an alliance as I learned to negotiate with his inherent wildness - he was committed to being a diligent mount, but his spirit and excitement often made for a difficult ride. Our intensity and passion for jumping led us to compete regularly. At one of our earliest shows, while I was warming him up on a lunge line (where you put a horse on a long rope, and essentially let them canter around you until they calm down), he took off, dragging me through the mud. I got up, spewing a profanity-ridden tirade, as I stomped through the showgrounds looking for him, shocking most of the people around me. Whispers of how a teenager was capable of speaking like that abounded.

After about a year of daily rides, trust building and lots and lots of treats, we found our rhythm and eventually made our way into the jumper ring. Jumpers are when you race quickly over a set of jumps, or fences as we call them, to see who can get the quickest time. Together we were quite a team. The freedom and pride felt of galloping around a course successfully, in front of an audience, is nearly unmatched. As we exited the ring after one of these rounds, I would notice the stares from spectators around the ring. I was always confused as to why, accultured into feeling like I’d done something wrong; that there was some reason to be concerned about the attention and it should feel like a negative experience. This was until one of the horse moms, who always struck me as possibly being a witch (and, as I later realized, a dead ringer for Anna Wintour), said people were staring because I was good.

My horse came to college with me, no doubt providing me with the freedom to continue escaping the expectations of what I was supposed to be doing or rather, what everyone else was doing. Getting up early for rush instead of a horse show. Dying my hair instead of letting it naturally blonde from days spent outside working at the barn. Spending my time concerned about what to say, how to act and what to wear, instead of wandering through the woods on my horse, ducking under banana spider webs and getting to know the deer that lived nearby.

Towards the end of college, I brought my parents’ dog to college with me as well. A grumpy Corgi named Bear, he was an excellent barn companion. The three of us would often head out onto the trails on our own. I trusted both of them implicitly and actually never questioned my safety out there. One time, I ventured upon a property that gave me “Deliverance” vibes (I heard the banjos in my head) and got a bad feeling about the place just from looking at it. On the back of my horse, I was always safe, able to literally gallop away at the slightest feeling of uncertainty. I turned and we cantered down the road back to the barn. I don’t know what was there, but I didn’t go back.

The time I spent on the back of my horse, independent and in the “wild” allowed me the opportunity to understand and know freedom from the social constraints that could have bound me and bound many of the other women around me. I built a trust within myself of my own intuition because that’s all you have when you are on your own, with just a horse and a dog in the woods. I developed the capacity to feel truly unconstrained and got to live outside of the bounds that society placed on me.

And, because of my time spent, being free, I soon realized that as I ended my time in college, I couldn’t survive in this state. The freedom I felt would not be allowed as I pursued the next stage of my life in Florida. These bounds that limited the way I could speak, how I could move and feel about myself, the dreams to which I aspired and my desire to do more, to expand and be free were going to continue to be placed on me so long as I lived here.

I needed to be bigger, more expansive, have a greater impact. Do something significant. I needed to be surrounded by more diverse versions of beauty, more pathways to success, more opportunities to positively impact the world, more innovative perspectives. I needed the freedom that I felt on the back of a horse for all parts of myself: my physical self, my intellectual self, my creative self, my spiritual self.

I couldn’t be what I needed to be there. What my soul was calling for me to be and for me to do.

And so, I left.