This is not real life. Nowhere else in the universe can you rock a giant brim on your helmet that evokes everything from Donald Duck to Little House on the Prairie, wear multiple items of bedazzled clothing, and openly discuss the purchase price of your house in the Hamptons—all while riding your immaculately groomed horse that may or may not be a unicorn.

You might also be texting.

This is fantasyland.

Somewhere, in the dusty recesses of my brain, exists the equitation-obsessed, stirrup-less wonder of my youth. In my first week on the new job the rusty gears of my former hunter-self began creak and groan to life.

The other night, my husband and I sat on our kitchen floor and shouted obscenities. Not at each other, thankfully, but at life, at the latest wrench thrown in our feeble plans. Patricia had told me earlier that day that Tebogo would be ending the Thoroughbred training and sales part of the business by January 2015. So in other words, time to start looking for a new job.

When I was kid in elementary school, I used to draw horses. And trust me—I was not a gifted artist. But on the inside of every notebook, on the margins of math tests and the errant post-it note; horses were popping up everywhere. They weren’t the horses I knew, but the horses I hoped to know.

I was a scrappy short-stirrup rider who refused to count strides and had never been to a jumper show, but I would draw my fantasy grand prix horses, soaring over wide square oxers.

Sometimes the hardest voice to hear is your own.

Before I came to Tebogo, I was a big fish in a little pond. I had a false confidence in my riding because I didn’t grasp just how much I didn’t know. Within a few weeks, I was unceremoniously humbled. My dream horse got hurt. I was riding some very green beans that did not hesitate to highlight my shortcomings as a rider. And for once, I hardly knew anyone.