02/06/2026
When I was about ten years old, a teacher kept me in at lunchtime.
She told me that if I didn’t start paying attention in class, I would never amount to anything.
Actually, what she really said was that I’d end up being a useless stay-at-home parent.
Pretty rough words for a kid. (And you know what, kudos to stay-at-home parents. That’s honestly a incredible job 😂)
What nobody knew at the time was that I had dyslexia, Irlen Syndrome, and eyesight that made seeing the whiteboard more of a lucky guess than a daily occurrence. (Okay we knew I was blind I just didn’t like wearing my glasses) This made school both hard and boring.
While everyone else was copying notes, I was often drawing my pets and counting down the minutes until home time.
The strange thing is, her words didn’t make me try harder… They just made me dislike school even more.
Nearly twenty years later, I still think about that conversation.
Not because she was right.
Because she was wrong.
I left school at sixteen.
No university degree. No long list of academic achievements. Just a kid who struggled to fit inside the box that school expected everyone to fit into.
Today I’m self-employed. I own my own home—small, but mine. I have my own vehicle, my own horse truck, and I get to spend my days doing a job I genuinely love.
The older I get, the more I realise that success isn’t one-size-fits-all.
Some kids will become doctors, lawyers, teachers and engineers.
Some will leave school at sixteen and build businesses.
Some will struggle through the classroom but thrive out in the real world.
After years of teaching riding, I’ve learned that the things that make a child extraordinary don’t always show up on a report.
There’s the rider who struggles to remember her times tables but can memorise an entire dressage test.
The kid who is always picked last in PE but can ride a beautiful winning showjumping round.
The quiet child who barely speaks at school but becomes confident and fearless the moment they swing a leg over their favourite pony.
The little girl who is being bullied and spends all week looking forward to Tuesday because she knows that when she hops on Jazz, everything feels okay again.
Marks and test scores are only one tiny measure of a person.
For me, success isn’t a university degree hanging on a wall.
Success is watching a nervous rider find confidence.
It’s seeing kids discover what they’re good at.
It’s watching parents cheer from the sidelines as their children find their people, their passion, and a place where they belong.
It’s watching a child who spends all week feeling like they’re not enough suddenly realise they are.
Horses don’t care if you can do advanced calculus.
They don’t care how fast you can read a book.
They care whether you show up, try again when things go wrong, and keep getting back on.
And sometimes, that’s the most important lesson of all.
Photo by chat GPT of little me, looking at recent me. I recon little me would be pretty proud of where we’ve ended up.
(I wrote the bones of the story and chat GPT polished it off)
