By Erin Obermeier
This article received first place in the 2025 GMO Newsletter Awards for first person experience articles for GMOs with 499+ members. It appeared in the Virginia Dressage Association newsletter, Piaffe & Passage, Spring 2025.
I didn’t wake up one day and decide to stop riding. Instead, it happened the way that life sometimes “just happens” — a seemingly gradual series of life changes that take you in a different direction. A new job after college, a move to a new city and, eventually, a new state. A new relationship, a marriage, and, eventually, a baby.
And then, somehow, while I felt like I had only just blinked, my life looked very different than years prior. Gone was the girl whose life-blood was horses, who lived and breathed horses, spending seven days a week working and riding at the barn, forgoing homecoming dances for horse shows and Friday and Saturday night parties for early mornings at the barn.
Except, as those that have experienced that deep, almost innate love of horses know, it doesn’t disappear — perhaps that love was just buried, for a time, under layers of other priorities. For me, as I approached my mid-30s, job, relationship, and parental responsibilities had layered on top of the embers of that horse passion. I still took the occasional just-for-fun trail ride with friends, but traveling over an hour each way to ride when I had a young child at home was not something I could do regularly. And these were borrowed horses and fun, casual rides — I enjoyed them, but they weren’t a long-term option.
And then 2020 came — what was a difficult, unprecedented year for everyone turned into an nightmare for me. In November 2020 I was diagnosed with breast cancer. I had surgery in December, just after Christmas, followed by three months of chemotherapy and a month of radiation.
It is difficult to put into words just how hard this experience was for me. As I learned in this process, there are many different types of chemotherapy and everyone reacts differently to treatment but, for me, chemo was horrendous. I struggled to explain my symptoms one day to an oncology nurse who was trying to ask me how chemo was going so she could offer solutions or medicines for my side effects. Then it finally hit me l, and I told her that chemo felt like exactly what it was — poison. It wasn’t just one symptom that could be treated. It wasn’t pain, it wasn’t nausea — it was a feeling that I had poisoned coursing through my entire body and everything inside of me was crying out for help. Add on top of that physical discomfort the difficulty of having to go to every one of my more than 50 medical appointments alone, because of the pandemic, and the intense, sometimes all-consuming mental battles that come with cancer diagnosis and treatment. The biggest one, the fear of my cancer metastasizing, of death, of leaving behind your new husband and your young child. This fear is intensified by having to watch people you’ve met during your cancer journey — young, vibrant, optimistic people — die from their cancer, with no answers as to why they were so unlucky. With all of that, it’s hard not to feel terrified, sad, and a little bit guilty that you’re still here when some amazing people are not.
By the summer of 2021, while society was slowly starting to open up, I was under my oncologist’s orders to remain isolated to limit my exposure to COVID-19, as the chemo had compromised my immune system. While trying to figure out what to do with a turning-seven-year-old child who had been cooped up for over a year now, it occurred to me to ask if she wanted to try horseback riding lessons. As an outdoor sport where, by nature of being on top of a large animal, you typically spend most of the lesson much more than six feet away from others, horseback riding lessons ended up being a great pandemic sport. My daughter loved her lessons and was a natural, progressing quickly in skill.
Something else was happening, though, while my daughter was in her weekly riding lessons — the small embers of my buried horse passions were starting to be ever-so-slightly fanned by visiting the barn every week. As a parent, you live vicariously through your children in all steps they take in life, and watching my daughter learning and enjoy being around horses, while I was also able to teach her some, was giving me a small taste of my former life. There was more to this turning point, though, than just watching my daughter get into the sport. After almost two years of living in a pandemic and living in a pandemic while undergoing and recovering from cancer treatment, I had fallen into an unfortunate daily routine of work and television — a routine that had started out as isolation for safety because of my compromised immune system, but that was no longer meeting my needs.
Having faced the fear of my own death head on, while also still living with the very real fear that my cancer could come back at any moment, was an unasked for reminder that there are no guarantees in life, no promises for how much time we have on this earth. This reminder was what I needed to relook at my priorities and stop making excuses for putting my joy and passions last in the priorities list.
So, before I knew it, I found myself one day sitting on the side of the ring during my daughter’s riding lesson reading partial-lease advertisements on Virginia Equestrian. I scheduled a trial ride that included a lesson, per the horse owners’ requirement. The instructor turned out to be an amazing dressage instructor (the one and only Ampara Visser), who immediately dialed into my skill level and past experience and had me learning and growing from that first trial lesson. I agreed to the lease that night and started weekly lessons shortly thereafter. As my lessons progressed I quickly regained skills (and muscles) that I had not used in a long time, and even worked on dressage movements I had never done before in my life. I also made a whole new group of barn friends and community.
This. This was what I needed so desperately. Being back at the barn and in the saddle — not just for a short, “just-for-fun” ride, but really learning, growing, and physically and mentally pushing myself again — this brought me an indescribable amount of joy and almost immediately and intensely reignited my passion for riding.
Now in my early 40s, when I again feel as if I’ve only just blinked, I own my own horse — a fancy and ridiculously goofy Dutch warmblood named Snoopy that I am officially obsessed with. I even own a trailer and a truck to pull the trailer so Snoopy and I can get to shows, since once the horse passion embers were fanned they have really progressed in full force!
Balancing this reignited horse passion with work, parenting, marriage, and life’s other responsibilities is a daily challenge — but a challenge that this cancer-surviving, horse-crazy girl is incredibly happy and grateful to be able to pursue.
