I understand why a lot of people are scared of horses. They're big and strong and if you don't know what you're doing, you could get hurt. There were two separate times in my life that I was scared of horses. The first was when I was a little kid. I was taking riding lessons with my sister and the horse I always rode was afraid of dogs. One day a dog approached and the horse I was walking to the arena reared up and I fell underneath his belly. I wasn’t hurt other than a scraped knee, but I avoided them for about a decade after that. Looking back on it, the horse was really good about it. My mom always says he stayed perfectly still until he could see that I was up and I was okay.

The second time I feared horses was when I was eighteen. Freshmen year of college my mother told me that one of her students had told her about his aunt’s horse rescue. I wanted another chance with horses so when my mother said she was going to a horse farm, I said, “Not without me!” The first couple of times there were great and I was proud of myself for working with horses, but then the third time resulted in a horse biting me. Rascal had put his head over the gate and I was standing in front of him. This was a horse that had been abused by a past owner and I didn't know enough about horse body language yet to know he saw me as a threat. He bit my chest, pulling me in and turning me around, causing me to fall and hit my head on the iron bars of the gate. My head hurt, but most of the pain was in my chest. Rascal had bitten me so hard he'd broken the skin slightly and I had a hematoma.

I was pretty rattled after Rascal bit me. Every time a horse came near me I was tense and I jumped at every sudden movement, afraid to be bitten again. But I never stopped going. I didn’t want to be scared off from horses like I was as a kid. My mom had her camera with her every time we went, so I picked it up and used it as a buffer between me and the horses. This meant going into the pastures with the horses, but still keeping a safe distance. For awhile I was the photographer for the barn. I was always around the horses but I didn’t actually work with them a whole lot. But, over time, I interacted with them more and more.

There were a handful of horses that started helping me gain back my confidence. Boo was a sweet therapy horse that was being boarded at the barn. He was probably the first horse that I could stand alone with and not feel completely terrified. Buddy was a wonderful boy and he was the first horse whose cheek I kissed. Getting that close to a horse's mouth was a big step for me. Cleo was my girl for a while, the first horse I'd ever fed a treat to. I even briefly took riding lessons.

During the summer, the horse rescue got two new horses that were emaciated and had lived a life with little to no human interaction. One of these horses was named Phoenix.

Phoenix and I bonded pretty much immediately. She was my soul horse. She had never been around humans, but after multiple meals in which I held the bucket she ate out of, she started letting me hug her. She even became pretty playful during mealtimes and would put her head into the bowl and throw her head back out to cover herself and me in her wet food.

I spent my whole summer with her, setting my alarm to get up every morning and see her. I worked with her every day, gaining her trust. She allowed me to clean a terrible gash on her leg until it no longer needed cleaning. She let me touch her when her sister was still wary of humans. She let me put a lead line on her and walk her around the pasture, even following me after I'd unhooked it from her harness. I was with her when she took her first steps inside a building and the first time she was cross-tied.

Phoenix and I had a great bond and I never felt fear with her. She would do everything she could not to hurt me. A lot of times when horses move their heads over a person's head, they don't care if they bonk the human. Phoenix was very aware of where I was and made sure not hit my head. If I was with her in the pasture and something startled her, even if I was right in front of her, when she went running she made sure to go around me. The most she'd ever hurt me is if she stepped on my boots because she wanted to stand so close to me. Any fear I'd ever felt around horses dissipated when I was with her.

Unfortunately, I had to make the difficult choice to leave the horse rescue. The more I learned about horses, the more I disagreed with their practices. It was a tough decision, but I had to leave Phoenix because I could no longer support that rescue. My last day there was a day spent with Phoenix. I haven't seen her since October 2013 and I miss her all the time. I haven't had much chance to be around horses lately, but now when I do I certainly don't fear them like I used to. Phoenix taught me not to fear horses.