You are a wild prairie horse running free with the wind in your mane and your tail flowing freely behind you. The sky is blue above you and as vast as the eye can see. Before you there is endless grassy prairie stretching toward the horizon. You are free – free to run through the gently blowing grasses, surrounded by flowers wild enough to plant themselves wherever they so desire, just like you. You are free to crest the mountains and mesas that you encounter in your journey, to go whichever way the wind blows. There you are, a majestic untamed beast, with the future wide open at your feet.

One day, you are powerfully running the rolling plains when, out of the blue, someone comes along and throws a rope around your neck. The next thing you know, you are inside a tiny fenced-in pasture, surrounded by little ponies. You realize that this is where you’ll spend the rest of your life.

Most days you do your best to be positive and find fulfillment in your little pasture. You tell yourself that maybe this was some sort of divine plan, as you eat hay and drink out of a metal trough. Maybe this was part of your purpose and it was supposed to happen this way. But you can’t help standing at that fence, day after day, trying to convince yourself that you’re a little pony, all the while staring out at those green meadows beyond, stifling the yearning to be out there, where you were, where you belong, back before you were a prisoner. Back when you were…what were you? What are you now? How do you even know anymore? Some even say, “Maybe that rope was slung around your neck for a reason, and you would be happy if you could just change your attitude about it.” You try. You try to keep your attitude as positive as you can. This is still your life, after all. You’re alive – right here, right now. But you just want to be free again.

The worst part is that the vast majority of people look at you and say, “What fence?” Because that’s the thing… the fence is invisible. “What is your problem? You’re clearly a wild stallion and should be out running on the prairie with other stallions. If you would just do X, Y, and Z, you could get your life on track. The problem is that you clearly lack motivation. You are wasting your own potential.” Even doctors do this to you. They say, “There’s no such thing as a fence. A pretty stallion like you should be on the open prairie. You look fine to me, so you must have some sort of emotional problem.” Every once in awhile you feel so broken down, so alone in your pain, you begin to wonder if there’s some truth to what they said. Maybe they’re right and all you need is to think differently. You think, “I’m just going to take a wild leaping jump into the great beyond and continue racing toward my destiny!” So you do.

You hit that invisible fence so hard, the electrical charge that it contains courses through every cell of your body so painfully, reminding you of its presence and power; tossing you to the dirt where you lay among the little ponies, leaving you with the crushing reminder of who you used to be and who you might never be again.

Then, every once in awhile, something wonderful happens. There comes an occasional day where the sun is shining, the meadow is freshly green, the flowers are in full bloom, and you discover that the gate is wide open. Is it possible? Is it really over? You venture forward slowly, hesitantly, not daring to believe that this could really be happening. You step gently out into the pasture, and it hits you – the feeling of the prairie grasses around your ankles, the unhindered breeze in your mane.

You rear up in all your majesty. This is it! You’re still a stallion! Nothing can stop you now! You’re free, so you start to run at full power in the direction of that long ago horizon that you still dream about at night, whose memory you can’t seem to shake after all this time. You can feel it! Your mane is blowing in the wind. Your tail just starts its ascent toward the blue open sky as you gain momentum…and then BOOM! You are drawn backwards with a sudden jolt, wrenching you from midair. Then you see it, what you’d forgotten. That rope tied to your neck. You see them – the ponies quietly grazing in the meadow. Once in a while you get to venture out into the meadow and graze a little. You get to remember the feeling of the wind and the prairie grasses for a little while. But the rope is there – you’re tethered to that little enclosure in one way or another. That fence is still there, and the moment comes where you must go inside, crawl back into the life that is now yours, and find a way to carry on.

You’re grateful for that moment of remembrance – that feeling of momentary freedom. The tiny bit of confirmation that, in spite of it all, somewhere deep in there you haven’t stopped being a stallion. You feel a surge of hope that maybe you really could be free someday. After all, you felt it, inside of you, outside of you. It’s still there – you’re still here. It was only a brief moment back from where you’ve been, but it was so wonderful while it lasted. Is that how you felt when you were free? When you didn’t know you needed to feel grateful? When you didn’t know it could all end so abruptly? You thought you knew gratitude, but had you really ever understood like you do now? Is it possible that on some level, that quick moment of freedom, when the clouds parted briefly in the midst of your stormy night, was sweeter than all your summers put together, now that you’ve known the darkness of the storm? In some ways, there are parts of you that are better than they’ve ever been. 

Even so, it hits you like a tidal wave as the gate finally closes and locks until God knows when. You’d gotten so used to existing in your little enclosure that you learned to cope well enough. Now that you had your moment and the gate has closed behind you, the crushing sorrow hits again. The pasture. The ponies. The hay. The trough. The rope. The dirt. That invisible fence that sits there taunting you. You lay your not-so-majestic head down in the privacy of your stall and cry a little before drifting off to slumber and dream of beautiful stallions galloping along desert mesas in the setting sun. Hoping that one of those stallions is you…

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