I Fear An Irrational Horse

by Taylor Monet Welch

I played my violin at a funeral once, while I was still living in Tehachapi. It was for a lady I was in an orchestra with. I can’t remember her name. But the entire time, I was like, I do not want to be here. I do not want to be playing sad songs on my violin for a lady I hardly knew. Especially when I’m going to have to talk to all of her sad relatives afterward. I was eight. Eight. But by that time, I had become an eight year-old body with a forty-eight year old mind. Because, you know. Trauma. 

Trauma’s kind of funny. Because you don’t realize it’s traumatic until you’re in therapy at the ripe old age of twenty-three, trying to explain to your therapist that stability feels irregular. Which is kind of beside the point. Because I had a point. I definitely had a point. 

Oh, yeah. Trauma. 

Trauma’s kind of funny. Because trauma is a formed thing. It doesn’t just manifest out of nowhere. It’s not biological. It’s a strictly environmental substance. Created along the spine of blunt force. Something that lingers until you learn to deal with it. That’s the problem, though. Most people don’t ever learn to deal with it. They shove it down and down and down until it all erupts one day, like what happens after you drink a soda. The carbonation bubbles up and sooner or later, you’re going to burp. 

Not that I would know. I wasn’t ever allowed to drink soda. 

A shame, really.

I still dream of the sweet, sticky substance. 

Before I get into the thick of it, I should preface this by saying that my hometown was not what brought me trauma. It simply acted as a petri dish for my trauma to fester inside of. It’s what really got me to look at nature versus nurture. 

Because oh, yeah, my nurture was shit. I was put through the emotional ringer for most of my life, which can really fuck with someone later on in their twenties. I say my twenties like I’m so much older. I’m only twenty-three. Which is, I guess, in my twenties. But nurture was bad, which left nature as my only redeeming source. 

Alas. 

Shit was fucked externally as well as internally. 

And here’s why.

Tehachapi’s like if South Park had less stylish sweaters. Tehachapi’s where rednecks go to have children. Tehachapi’s called “The Land of Four Seasons” but it should be called “The Land of Racist Assholes”. My parents moved there when they were both pretty young, and decided it was a good enough place to have three kids. RED FLAG. This story is going to be chock full of red flags. But yeah, RED FLAG. Tehachapi’s a great place to raise kids, if you want them to be influenced by bigots, bullies, and six feet of snow. Not if you want them to turn out like upstanding, inclusive citizens, who don’t threaten to beat the shit out of other people for wearing a shirt that says, “Love is Love”. 

I lived there for the first thirteen and a half years of my life. We only moved because my parents got divorced, and my mom got a job in Simi Valley. That’s how you know Tehachapi is bad. Because when I moved to Simi Valley, I thought it was the most liberal, open-minded city I had ever been to. Yep. Simi Valley. Liberal in comparison. 

The thing was, my dad chose to stay in Tehachapi, causing me to have to visit Tehachapi every other weekend until I was eighteen. Which is some bullshit. Because if you’re lucky enough to escape the clutches of Tehachapi, California, you better run like hell. 

It’s insane. People I went to middle-school with now have like, two or three kids and a husband or wife. I specify husband or wife here, because there’s no such thing as non-binary, gender-fluid, gender-non-conforming, etcetera, in Tehachapi. If you’re not strictly a man or a woman, you will be chased out of town. It’s why I’m lucky I’m just now figuring out my identity. Because if I were to say, in middle school, “Hey guys. I’m an non-binary pansexual who uses every and all pronouns,” I would have gotten the shit beat out of me on a daily basis. 

But we’ll build up to having the shit beat out of me. Let’s start with something a little more mundane. 

God. 

I was raised with no mention of a god. Not one. So, it came as a surprise to me when I reached kindergarten, and several students spoke of a so-called “God” with complete and utter certainty. Of course, I thought this was strange. If I hadn’t even heard of “God”, how could it exist? But that’s not the problem here. The problem, is that news spreads fast in Tehachapi. If someone says something to anyone, the entire town will know about it in a matter of days. And soon enough, my entire kindergarten class was aware that I was not religious, nor did I go to church, nor did I even slightly believe in the mere notion of a god.

One child took it upon herself to ask me, every single day, if I went to church. Of course, I would say, “No, I don’t.” To which she would reply, “Well then you’re going to hell.” But seeing as I wasn’t religious and didn’t believe in hell, this wasn’t a really good threat. 

Another kid once asked me, “If you’re not Christian, what’s your religion?” And I, I shit you not, replied, “My religion is kindness.” Because I had been told that religion was a way of life, and something you deeply believed in. So I figured kindness was my best bet. Needless to say, this didn’t fly so well with my classmates. They explained to me that kindness was not a religion, and seeing as I didn’t have one, I was yet again going to hell.

Do you remember the first time you were called a bad word? Like, bitch, or asshole, or something like that.

In third grade, I was called-- please excuse my French-- a fag. I had never heard this word before, so it didn’t register as a real word in my brain. I thought the kid had a speech impediment, and was trying to say the word “frog”. I was like, pshh. Stupid kid. That’s not how you say frog. But now I know how terrible this was, and that I should have said something to the teacher. 

The name-calling was because I did well on a presentation, and so when I sat back down, the kid sitting across from me went, “You’re a fag”. And, again, thought he was saying frog, so I just got confused and went quiet. 

The kid probably heard the word on the bus.

Oh, the wonders of a public school bus. Like dinner and a movie without the dinner or the option to turn off the movie. 

Elementary school was nothing, though. Not in comparison to middle school. And yeah, everyone has a middle-school horror story. In that sense, we’re all the same, yeah? We’re all the same.

Which brings me back to getting the shit beat out of me. It only happened to me once, and I was lucky in that sense, but it was more than enough. 

It was seventh grade, during history. I asked to use the bathroom-- not because I needed to use the bathroom, but because I was feeling like a depressed seventh-grader who was in desperate need of a break. So I mosied on down to the bathroom, where I was unpleasantly surprised by three of the most popular girls in seventh grade. I’m not going to use their actual names, in fear of getting the shit beat out of me again, so we’ll call them… Larry, Moe, and Curly. 

Larry, Moe, and Curly were shit-talking about some girl I happened to be acquaintances with. Something along the lines of, “That stupid ho-bag bitch-ass bitch”. (Maybe I elaborated. But I guarantee it was just as bad.) So Larry, Moe, and Curly are talking about this acquaintance of mine, and for some god-forsaken reason, I decided to say something. So I went, in a very timid manner, “Um, she’s actually really nice. So maybe you shouldn’t talk about her like that.” 

Larry turned on me, and went, “Maybe you should shut the fuck up, cunt.” And this was alarming, because I had never been called a cunt before. It was all very new to me. So I desperately tried to back-track, because I realized what I had done, but the next thing I knew, I was on the ground. Being kicked. In the ribs. By Larry, Moe, and Curly. And they kicked me, and they spit on me, until I was gasping for breath and one of them got tired. And then, eventually, they all got tired and stopped, leaving me alone on the bathroom floor. 

Do you know what’s hilarious, though? I couldn’t give two shits that I had just gotten beat up. What I cared about was being on the floor of the bathroom. Middle-school bathrooms rarely get cleaned. And I was on the floor. Of a middle-school bathroom. Sure my nose was bleeding, but I was touching sticky gross tile with my bruised body. 

Disgusting. 

I guess laying on the bathroom floor after having the shit beat out of you isn’t quite as bad as being pinned down on the blacktop, and having two guys write the word “GAY” on your forehead in permanent marker. Didn’t happen to me. Happened to this guy I knew. And the worst part was, no one did anything. I remember that, going to school in Tehachapi. All through kindergarten, up until I left, after eighth grade, no one ever did anything about bullying. The school’s office always said they’d take care of things, but nothing ever got better. Weirder, maybe. But never better. I’d tell the office about things that would happen to me, or my friends, and they’d always be like, “We can’t prove that these events happened, so we can’t do anything about it.” And this was what? Bullshit. 

Tehachapi was known among the younger crowd for its bullying problem. That was the thing though. If you weren’t bullying someone else, you were the one being bullied. I realized a little too late in the game that being on your own was not only smart, but safe. Flying under the radar meant no one was paying enough attention to you to bully you. 

I didn’t have a lot of friends, but I knew a lot of people. It was like that for most of my life. I treated people like horses-- keeping them at arm’s length, talking in hushed tones, and never making eye-contact. 

I used to ride horses when I was little-- probably two or three. There was an Equestrian Center in Tehachapi that offered lessons. And honestly, I don’t know how I wasn’t petrified of them sooner. 

Horses are irrational. They have the capability of stomping out your ribcage at the drop of a hat. 

Majestic? 

More like moody. 

(I can relate.) 

I guess I wasn’t aware of this information at the ripe old age of two or three. I would imagine that if you were to share that with a two or three year old, they’d never ride horses again. 

Kids are pretty influenceable. 

Take this for example.

I used to smoke. Okay, not smoke. Vape. I used to vape. A lot. And god damn do I miss it. You’re taught a lot in school about the dangers of smoking, but no one ever tells you the most dangerous part. No one ever says, “Smoking is incredible. Makes you feel good. Like, really good. Gets your brain to focus. Causes you to calm down. And that’s why you shouldn’t start, because you’re never gonna want to stop.” No one ever says that. And why the hell not? 

Because then kids would start smoking. 

Because kids are what? Influenceable. 

That’s why Tehachapi is such a toxic place. Parents teach their kids to hate, to believe these wacky conspiracy theories, to be narrow-minded and unaccepting. It’s terrible, because they believe it. They perpetuate it. They teach their kids to shun people that are different, because ultimately, they’re scared of being seen as such. 

Which is where I came along. 

Since I was alone the vast majority of the time, I took it upon myself to befriend all the lonely, different outsiders who also had no friends. They were primarily boys, because the boys at my school always got bullied a lot worse than the girls. At least on a physical level. Girls made fun of girls physically as well as psychologically. 

But yeah. I would always befriend these weirdos and make them feel not so alone. The problem was, they all, every single one of them, started to like-like me. And then I’d have to be an asshole, and tell them the feelings weren’t reciprocated. 

I always felt so bad, like I had ruined their lives even further. It took me years to realize that no, no. I did not owe them anything. It was kind of me to be nice to them and treat them like a friend, and I did not have an obligation past that. 

It’s like when you’re on a dating app and someone messages you a really creepy string of phrases. Half of you doesn’t want to be rude, and the other half of you is like, “Ew. No.” So you waffle back and forth between messaging back and not messaging back, until you ultimately get a message something along the lines of, “Fine then. Don’t respond. You’re a bitch anyway.” 

All because you thought you were obligated to give these people attention. 

I hadn’t really been taught to pay attention to outsiders-- I only felt drawn to them because I knew what it felt like to be ignored. 

For most of my childhood, my mom was depressed and on bad meds and didn’t get out of bed most days. Because of this, my older sister and I kind of became sort of feral children, taking care of ourselves the best we knew how. Most nights we would improvise dinner, and ended up eating a lot of peanut butter. It was not ideal. Even if we would sit with our mom, she wouldn’t talk to us. She’d mostly sleep. We never had a parental figure to pay attention to us-- to take care of us-- to make sure we were okay. 

But you must be thinking, “Taylor! You’re forgetting about your dad!” 

I’m not. 

He was forgetting about us. 

My dad worked for most of the day, but found every excuse not to come home. He was, and is, an alcoholic, so the days he did come home, he was usually drunk. He constantly got into fights with my mom, and I remember a lot of things being thrown.

It was shitty. 

Knowing you had two parents, but both were so wrapped up in their own problems that they couldn’t take care of their children. We were neglected physically, sure, but also mentally and emotionally. 

I’m not as upset as I was, but looking back on it, it just makes me sad. Sad that things were so hard, my parents just couldn’t find a way to help themselves. 

I remember the day I found out our house was being foreclosed. I knew money had always been an issue, but I didn’t realize how big of an issue it was until my mom said, “The bank is taking our house away, and there’s nothing I can do about it.” It was after my parents had separated, so my dad wasn’t living with us. But even if he was, the bills still wouldn’t have gotten paid. There was no money. Like my mom said, there was nothing we could do. 

Going back to Tehachapi drudges up a lot of trauma for me. It’s where my childhood got fucked up. It’s where I lost my house. It’s where I was berated on a daily basis for being different. It’s just not worth going back. 

But if there’s anything I can take away from my time in Tehachapi, it’s that I should be grateful for the bombardment of hate-- for the lack of attention. It showed me the importance of love and acceptance, and all that other floofy shit that helps people actually have good lives. 

Because life has a way of really roughing you up. Problems-- they get heavy.

And here’s the thing:

I turned out to be an open-minded, accepting human being, with a love for life and people and the way of the universe. And again, I hate to say it, but my shitty upbringing had a large part in making me this way. 

I’d thank Tehachapi, but it’s a gross backwoods town that brought me a lot of strife. 

So I’ll just thank the universe that I can learn from the past, and continue to put one foot in front of the other. Life and I may have our issues to sort out, but unlike an irrational horse, I’ll be facing it head-on.

(If this were a movie, a horse would be seen galloping off into the distance, and it would all be a metaphor for me freeing myself of metal ties, and so on and so forth.

And… fade to black.

A horse’s whinny can be heard as the credits roll.)