Opinion Editor Ari Shanahan had a puzzling goal growing up — to become a horse.
Opinion Editor Ari Shanahan had a puzzling goal growing up — to become a horse.
“Dear diary, when I grow up — I want to be a horse,” is scrawled sloppily in the margins of her sparkly unicorn diary. Next to the manifestation, she scribbles in a drawing of her future self.
First to appear on the page is glimmering wet eyes on a long face. After, a flowing mane is added. Then, a strong body on bounding legs follows. Finally, she creates a whole chromatic world to run free in, complete with a smiling sun wearing sunglasses.
This is her dream. And this was my dream: to be a horse.
Yes, oh yes, I’m a horse girl.
No, I wasn’t a run-of-the-mill equestrian sports enthusiast, nor was I a casual Breyer Horse enjoyer. I’m a bona-fide I-want-to-be-a-horse girl.
Nobody has to tell me — I know this is sort of strange. I’m certain I’m kin, or at least extended family, with the furry subcultures. Although I myself am not a furry or equine therian, our wild hearts roam the same field. I want the same things they want.
I, still, in my late-adolescent age, desired to be what a horse embodies.
In the Chinese zodiac, 2026 is the year of the horse. The horse is the seventh in the twelve-year sequence, it commonly seems to represent power, care, affection and beauty. In the spirit of the new year and my connection to the equine creature, I was inspired to delve into the many symbols of the horse.
Horses have symbolized a vast variety of concepts across history. The one-toed domesticated mammal has embodied both the paternal in Freudian psychology and the maternal in Jungian psychology. They’ve symbolized humankind’s triumph over nature while simultaneously embodying an essential freedom.
The horse can also be a symbol of the self, propelling one forward while containing multitudes.
Horses are like mirrors. Huge, rideable mirrors for humankind. In spite of the physical impossibility of transmogrifying into a horse, I’ve longed to reflect so in myself.
Like many other troubled, misunderstood and sometimes stinky children, I felt hopelessly othered in my early life. I was a girl who didn’t fit in at her small Missouri Catholic elementary school.
During recess, if I would stumble to join my female peers in playing house, I would typically earn the role of ‘house animal’ or worse, ‘furniture.’ I wanted to be one of the girls who could be a sister, a grandmother or a mother, yet I would end up crawling on all fours through the playground woodchips — often with another elementary school girl sitting on my back.
When I stopped trying to play house, I would run to the swings or the field. When I pushed myself on the swings I liked how it felt for my body to be swayed in motion. My hair would whip into my face and be sucked away as I plunged back into the force. I’d smile up into the sky as I pushed off and off again.
If the swings were full, I’d go to the field. I remember lying on my back in the open grass. On a perfect day, there would be both a cool wind and sun on my skin. If I closed my eyes, the light would glow orange through my eyelids.
Both this sweet freedom and the suffering among my peers is what it meant for me to be in the world. Somehow, this is what it meant for me to be a horse. A projection of all my experiences, positive, negative and in-between, culminated in my desire for horse-ness.
I’ve spent plenty of time as a modern woman longing to evade the social consequences of my body.
For women, bodily transfiguration has been a literary trope associated with freedom. In ancient Roman poet Ovid’s “Metamorphoses,” the nymph Daphne begs to be turned into a tree to evade being raped by Apollo. An inversion of this same trope can be seen in the 1982 animated film, “The Last Unicorn,” when the film’s protagonist, a unicorn, is transformed into a human female and falls into despair because she’s no longer free.
The same trope applies across world literary traditions to provide reprieve for suffering or othered social groups. This change can both be interpreted as achieving a kind of freedom through escape while stripping dignity from the transformed by stealing their humanness.
Like the symbolic horse, I’m many things all contained in one category.
I can’t truly go beyond the limits of my human mind, sex and body. But I can be a powerful prism of my experiences — like the symbolic horse. So in some ways, I did grow up to be a horse.
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