Guest Voice: Rediscovering myself with the help of a little horsepower

Elizabeth Amber, a writer and artist who has cystic fibrosis, had a double-lung and liver transplant in late 2020 at the age of 38. She says she’s always been passionate about personal growth and finding joy no matter the circumstances. She lives in Anchorage, Alaska, with her husband and ninja cat, Pi, and is pursuing a degree in social work and Alaskan Native studies.

So there I was, in January 2022, making goals for myself 13 months after my double-lung and liver transplant and one month after my last round of chemotherapy for the cancer I developed eight months after the transplant.

I was finally ready to feel better and start enjoying life after transplant and cancer. My body had been through a lot, so I decided to start with some “easy” goals. I’d write and read for 30 minutes every day. No more romance audiobooks for me. It was time to be productive.

On Day 1, I was successful. On Day 2, I struggled to focus and keep my eyes open, so I decided just to read. By Day 3, I gave up entirely because my brain felt like mush and I couldn’t handle the strain. I’d hit a wall of exhaustion. By the next day, I was an emotional mess due to the exhaustion and frustration of where my abilities were when it came to getting back in the saddle.

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I’d done plenty of recovery pre-transplant and had gotten knocked down many times after telling my body we were done lying around. But what I was mentally and emotionally experiencing now was on a level I’d never seen before.

Usually, it was my body and lungs giving out. But this time, it was my mind. Thinking felt like stretching a brittle rubber band: The thoughts stretched but then broke, and I’d be left wondering what I was trying to figure out.

Thankfully, I failed so gloriously that January that I realized through my tears and emotionally hungover haze that this was no ordinary recovery; I was going from death to life, and the on-ramp was long.

The linear path so prized by our culture, which focuses on goals, work, and progress, wasn’t going to work. I’d have to feel my way through — not just rebuilding my physical muscles, but also paying more attention to my intuition and discovering who I am on this side of recovery. I couldn’t dictate the terms or my identity as a transplanted “healthy” person. I’d need to go back to basics, to a childhood intuition where I just followed what felt good and what brought joy, staying curious about this crazy life I’d been reborn into.

So I scrapped my lofty goals and took a left turn into what I knew from my years of being sick and burned out: You have to wait until your soul — the “you” that’s your true identity — feels safe enough, rested enough, and curious enough to come back out and start collaborating with you. I needed to find myself again, the me that loved doing things and was curious about life.

Maybe I needed to focus on a different part of me that didn’t involve creating, but rather simply being and getting my bearings in this second chapter of life. But how to be in my body without it being a chore?

I hated going to the gym. The idea made my insides shrivel with depression. The question that emerged while lying on my couch was what, besides the gym, would motivate me to be in my body regularly? I needed something that could lure me out of the house, rain or shine, and without guilt or shame, but rather excitement. The clarity was instant: horses.

I grew up loving horses. It’d been years since I’d felt well enough to be around them or ride them. Yes, there were still risks now, but the feeling of excitement that spread through my entire body told me to consider it. That was the first clue about a path I knew would lead me to the version of myself I wanted to recover.

Horses bring out my intuition and confidence. I love who I get to be with them. After a lifetime of cystic fibrosis and enduring the most brutal year of transplant complications and cancer, I needed a place that returned me to my best: the girl with her boots and messy bun, bossing and loving on horses, and especially being gloriously in her body and not thinking about a dang thing.

My year of riding lessons and caring for them did that. I wasn’t fully healed or recovered yet, but I had relaxed into myself and seen firsthand what my body with these new organs was capable of. I’d regained confidence and moved past the withered exhaustion into someone grounded in her body and psyche.

It’s been more than four years since my transplant, and I feel like I’m still finding myself, but the image is clearer. My thoughts still stutter, but I’m settled enough to keep going. My biggest takeaway from these years has been that recovery takes time, but mostly, it takes grace for your body, your future, the exhaustion, and the season you find yourself in. And sometimes it also takes horses.

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