It Wasn’t Luck

When I moved closer to Boise in 2009 I was excited to be closer to the city that held most of the states concerts. Music meant a lot to my brother so to honor him I chose to attend concerts. Tickets were out of my budget so I chose a few special shows to attend but dabbled in radio contests to win tickets.

My winning streak started in 2013/14 where I won numerous concert tickets but also won a cash prize of $1400 once. Man that was exciting! Not long after that my friends started noticing how much I was winning because my name was always on the radio.

It wasn’t a problem so much because I had a concert buddy that always took my extra ticket. The problems started when my “friends“ started making snide comments about how “lucky” I was always winning radio contests.

I was able to see so many concerts and meet so many bands it was truly incredible. The more I won the more my friends reached out, I even had people befriending me and asking me to win them tickets as concerts would get announced. Every year the radio station gives out a huge trip to a festival and in 2017 I won that trip. We went to Columbus Ohio for a 3 day festival and it was truly a special experience, absolutely something I could never afford to do on my own.

That year was the peak of my “luck” winning concert tickets and as the year wound down my fingers didn’t dial the stations number much and as of today I’ve only won a few concert tickets in the last 4 years.

I run into my favorite people from the radio station once in a while and they ask me where I vanished to and I always reply with the word “horses”.

Sometimes I wonder if I stopped trying to win so much because the people who always had their hands out for concert tickets were only using me. Horses don’t really use people like people do and I can’t take a horse to a concert so I kind of stepped away to see if any of those people were really my friends.

By the time I stopped going to concerts I was going solo and giving my extra ticket to someone standing in line that I didn’t know and my “friends” stopped reaching out when a new show came to town. In fact, most of them stopped reaching out completely proving to me that they weren’t really interested in being friends.

All those concert tickets I won didn’t come easy for me. I had to always be listening to the radio, I always had to have the phone ready and it was work. My focus was more on winning tickets than my job because I couldn’t win if it wasn’t my main focus. They all said it was luck but they weren’t there watching me put my life on hold to call in, they didn’t see me rearrange my schedule to make the live remotes. They didn’t see all the time and energy I spent trying to win all the time. They only saw the prizes. So I stopped.

A similar situation is happening to me in the horse community now. I spend my days watching the groups, meeting people in the community and making little notes on who is who and little lists of people I probably wouldn’t get along with. I know who the horse traders are, the abusive trainers and I know who the negligent owners are. I even created a couple groups to try to corral people and have a place where we can feel safe from those people but that’s back firing on me similarly to my “luck” winning concert tickets.

It’s frustrating when one person does an immense amount of work to try to educate themselves on who’s who in the horse world only to have numerous other people wanting your knowledge that you worked so hard for. The amount of work I’ve done in the community for FREE is astounding. It was pretty good for a while until I decided that I didn’t like feeling similar to how it was winning concert tickets.

The same year I stopped winning tickets was the same year I spent 6 months reading anything and everything about psychology and studying people. I learned so much my desire to win tickets stopped because it brought out things in people I didn’t want in my life. Greed.

Now I see the same thing happening in the horse community. Every one wants all that knowledge I’ve spent so long collecting and they expect it for free without having to do any work on their part. A few nice words does not buy hay for my horses. It wasn’t hard to gain what I’ve gained, I just paid attention to what people showed me. That year spent learning psychology has helped me learn my place in others lives and my place is here at home with my husband and our animals.