Before the World Told You Otherwise • The Prairie Homestead

Once upon a time, we were close friends.

We haven’t spoken in nearly thirty years. In fact, I’d nearly forgotten she existed.

But one night I found myself scrolling through her social media, lingering longer than I meant to. And something in me paused.

We hadn’t hung out since I was eleven or twelve, but I recognized her instantly. Not her face, necessarily—but her essence.

Whimsical. Ethereal. Romantic.
An Anne-of-Green-Gables sort of soul.

And somehow—despite careers, kids, mortgages, and whatever else life has hurled at her—I couldn’t help but smile with recognition. There she was: older, seasoned, but still unmistakably herself.

Even though we were friends back then, we were never the same kind of girl. I always felt too sturdy… too gritty compared to people like her. It wasn’t her fault—we were just wired differently.

She drew delicate, penciled lines. My marks were bold and in pen. I was a little too sure of myself for the group we ran with. Girls in that fundamentalist Baptist world were supposed to be soft and whispery, content with prescribed futures of babies and cooking and housekeeping. I craved none of that.

I wanted horses, wheelbarrows, manure, and cowboy life, with spurs and dirt and cattle.

Even in the middle of my very suburban upbringing, those seeds were already taking root.

For a time, though, I thought (and was told in various ways) that my early urges weren’t sophisticated enough.

Sure, they were fine for a little girl, but I’d have to set them aside when I grew up.

“That’s not realistic,” they would say. “Figure out a real path. You can come back to horses later—once the rest of your life is figured out.”

And I almost believed them. Almost. I almost buried those pieces of myself deep enough that they could no longer come up for air… until a sequence of events found me driving my F-150 1200 miles away from home to attend a little community college to ride horses.

It was my grand escape from the rational dream-killing that so many people undergo as they enter adulthood.

But of course, one escape doesn’t mean you never drift again.

I still took detours. There were seasons I got distracted and one particular season, as a young mom with too many businesses, when I almost walked away from horses for good. My horse years almost turned into one of those lines you tell your kids: “I used to ride horses, a long time ago…”

But the little girl inside me wouldn’t let it go. She kept whispering, “This is you. Don’t let it slip away.”

So I turned the ship. I dusted off the saddle, bought a new mare, and dove back into a world that felt both familiar and completely foreign. 

I feel the rightness of that choice in my bones every time I swing my leg over a horse and settle into the saddle. I feel it walking across prairie grass of our homestead with the wind in my hair. I feel it when I show up to school functions wearing pearl snap shirts and a long braid instead of what moms are “supposed” to wear. This is me. This is home. And when I’m living from that place, I feel fully and completely myself. There’s nothing like it. 

My body has always been the first to tell me the truth, if I care to listen. And I won’t ignore it again.

The essence of who I was at eleven is still the woman I am at forty. It would appear the same is true for my long-ago friend. And I’m so glad for her.

Seeing her also made me wonder:

How long—how many detours—does it take for us to circle back to our true nature?

And perhaps the most tragic question of all… how many people never do?

When someone says they don’t know who they are or what they want, I always want to yell, “Look back!” Because truest answers are usually found in who we were before the world told us otherwise.

Before the polishing.
Before the dilution.
Before the boxes and expectations and commands of “be quiet” and “be smaller,” and “fit in here,” and “that’s not realistic.”

Our souls know the answer, if we can get quiet enough to hear them speak.

We’re all given gifts and passions, like little breadcrumbs scattered in front of us. Our work is to keep them from being brushed aside, buried, or smashed by the world. That work is costly; sometimes it takes years of drifting and circling back to recover that path. I certainly don’t have it all figured out.

But here’s what I do know:

Forty years in, I still love horses.

I’m still bold and obsessive about things.

I am not chill or demure. Nor do I care to be.

I’m sturdy and boisterous and increasingly unfiltered.

That’s me—the real, true me. It always has been.

And it turns out, we don’t grow out of who we really are.

We grow into it.