01/06/2026
Has this ever happened to you? 😭
There is a principle in quantum physics called the observer effect. It states that the act of observing a particle changes its behavior. The particle, when unobserved, exists in a state of pure potential, simultaneously everything it could be. The moment someone looks at it, it collapses into a single, definite, and frequently disappointing state.
I am that particle.
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For the past several weeks I have been riding Fhil, my six year old, large, enthusiastic, profoundly unbothered warmblood, and I have felt, in the privacy of my own arena, like Carl Hester. Not Carl Hester on a difficult day. Carl Hester on his best day.
The transitions were fluid. The connection was solid. There were moments, I am not exaggerating, where Fhil and I were simply the same creature moving through space with a shared intention, and I thought: this is it. This is what they meant. I have arrived.
I had not arrived.
I had simply not yet been observed.
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Last week Kyla came to watch me ride.
She is not a judge, but she is something so much worse, she is the person who bred Fhil. She made him. She knows exactly what he's capable of. And she came out to watch me demonstrate that I am not.
She sat on the bench.
That's all she did. She sat and watched.
And Fhil, who moments before had been a willing, swinging, genuinely lovely horse, immediately became a different animal entirely. Not because Fhil changed. Because I changed. Because somewhere between Kyla sitting down and raising her eyes to watch, Carl Hester quietly left my body and was replaced by something I can only describe as a beached whale attempting to ride a camel.
The camel was also confused.
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The connection I had spent weeks carefully crafting dissolved in approximately four seconds. My position, which had been quietly excellent, relocated itself to somewhere north of correct and south of embarrassing. My seat, which had been soft and following, remembered that it was attached to a person being watched and began to tense and tighten like that time I ate Bolivian street food.
Fhil, to his eternal credit, did his best.
He is six. He deserved better.
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Kyla said nothing for a long time.
Then she said: "You looked really good before I got here."
She meant it kindly. This is the worst kind of meant it kindly. Because what she was actually saying, what we both knew she was saying, was: I have now seen the thing you become when someone is watching, and it is not the thing you described to me when we talk about Fhil.
I mustered up one more circle.
It was not better.
I brought Fhil to the halt and we stood there together, two beings united in the shared experience of having just been observed, and I thought about quantum physics and collapsing particles and the specific cruelty of potential versus reality.
Fhil thought about lunch.
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I have since ridden Fhil four more times without an audience.
Carl Hester has returned.
He is very good. You should see him sometime.
Just don't come watch.
