Personal Narrative: Horse Riding

I started horse back riding when I was 10 years old, I always had a passion for being involved with animals and this was my first opportunity I had to pursue that passion. When I first started I was having the time of my life, I didnt think that anything could be this exciting, however that was only because I was a beginner, everything changed when I started getting better at riding. In the beginning it was as if I was learning to ride a bike, I had the training wheels on and I wasnt expecting for the transition to be as intense as it was. Before I had a stepping stool that made it easy to get on the horse and now I had to learn to mount a huge animal without any assistance. I was warned that if I did it incorrectly then I could get hurt. There were so
The next level was cantering and that required a lot of skill and patience and confidence, which I didnt have at the time. Another obstacle I faced was the fact that my teacher had no patience and no tolerance for mistakes, there would be about 5 students in a lesson and it would be humiliating to get yelled at. I quickly realized that a lot of the other students were riding because they wanted to ride competitivly, but I knew that I didnt want to go down that path. I really loved being in connection with the horses but I hated feeling like a failure and being under so much pressure to look perfect and ride perfectly and do everything like a professional rider. I didnt know of any teacher that would just let me ride around on a horse. All of the people I talked to said that there are just to many rules to follow because riding is sucha dangerous thing to do and I understoood. I figured out that I had a lot of different options about what to do. I could first, quit, stick with it an be miserable or find another way to have an interaction with horses without riding. When I started high school I found out that doing community