By Lauren Mauldin
When you’re a kid, everyone asks what you want to be when you grow up. But you’ll never hear a kid answer, “B2B Tech Marketing Expert.”
I knew as early as I could form opinions and memories that I loved horses and wanted to be around them. As a lucky kid with a lot of privilege, I got to start riding lessons when I was 10 years old and never looked back. That same horse-obsessed little girl also loved drawing, reading, writing, and anything creative. I didn’t know what I wanted to be when I grew up, but I knew I wanted to have a horse of my own.
Flash forward to my first year of college. Gap years weren’t really an option in the early 2000s, at least not in my family, and suddenly, the “What do you want to be when you grow up?” turns into declaring a major. Having been rejected from the art school I had my heart set on, I had no idea what to pick. But I knew I wanted to take my beloved little Quarter Horse to school with me, and started working at the barn and taking any odd job I could to pay for him.
Career is a funny thing. There are some people who know from the start what they want to do and follow that calling. My friend, the ER doctor, has always been drawn to that high stakes, life or death scenario. My wife, the social worker, has always wanted to help the people and improve the system. But me? I just wanted to be able to pay for my horse.
Society taught me pretty quickly that making a living drawing and writing wasn’t a lucrative option. So I kept my eyes open and learned skills I could use to make money. Through college, I built websites for local barns to help pay for my horse expenses. That led to a job in web design fresh out of college. Web design turned into web marketing. And fifteen years later, I blinked and was logging most of my working hours in meetings trying to align on timelines, stakeholders, and ROI.
While I was very fortunate to have stable employment, good benefits, and a salary that slowly crept up, I never stopped to think about what I was actually doing. How I was spending my time that we get so little of in this precious life. I just put each career step into a horse-focused calculator. Could I afford a fancier barn now? Can I go to A shows? Can I get my horse injected without stressing about the credit card bill? Check, check, and check. I told myself that was enough.
One of the things I love about this sport is that you never find a point of true stasis. There is always something to improve, an issue to work through, or a higher level to push to. When I met the dreams and went to the shows that once felt impossible, I wanted more.
My entire adult life, I have said I wanted to show 3’ at the Pin Oak Charity AA show in Texas. It’s a modest dream for many in the sport, but when I nailed my last lead change and came out of the ring beaming, the score didn’t even matter. I did it. I belonged.
So, of course, my brain immediately went to build the next goal. THJA year-end award? Out of state showing? Dare I try to qualify for some kind of finals? As I began to draft those goals, I realized something else.
Even though I was making more money in my career than I ever thought possible in my 20s, chasing these goals required even more. So much more. I looked around the ring at my fellow adult amateur competitors, and saw some people like me hustling to make it happen, some people with huge generational wealth, and others with spouse salaries that fund their passion.
I’m not exaggerating when I say that at my beloved Pin Oak, a show that is just another stop on the schedule for many, several of the horses I’m competing against cost more than I paid for my house. And that’s not hating on them. Lord, if I won the lottery, there would be signs and they’d be neighing. But it’s a reality that led me to see something clearly:
I could spend the rest of my life trying to climb the corporate ladder and never have enough to pursue my equestrian dreams—especially when I keep raising the bar. The true elite of this sport, the ones with the best horses and trainers and budgets for all the fancy shows and health treatments so their horse wants for nothing, are playing a different game than I am. And I’m not ever going to get a ticket to that game.
While that slowly sank in, I looked at my career. What was I actually doing with my life? Helping a company sell technology that other companies then used to make more money. In a 150+ person marketing team, I did good work, but I wasn’t essential. If I got smushed by a bus tomorrow, there’d be a sad office-wide email and offer for Employee Assistance Program counseling, but then I’d disappear… left in the shadows of PowerPoint slides.
I just turned 40, and had 25+ years of the rat race ahead of me, doing work that was burning me out at best and crushing my soul at worst. And largely, I was doing it because it afforded me my horse dreams.
If I loved or even sort of liked my job, I could have stayed doing it forever. And no, it wouldn’t fund a winter at WEF, but that was okay. I have always kept my horse dreams at a realistic level, and not being able to compete with the elite is by no means a failure. But my job was harming my mental health and affecting my most important relationships.
So on August 1st, I quit.
Now I’m on a new career journey to become a mental health therapist. I consciously chose this. It aligns to my values and the things I’m best at. The kid who didn’t know what she wanted to be when she grew up has an answer now. And she also gets to draw and write and do creative things again.
That kid still loves horses and prioritizes them in her life. I am still privileged and get to keep my horse and keep riding. But it’ll look different in the future.
Though it’s a first-world grief, I’m sad over stepping back from the equestrian dreams I’ve worked towards for so long. I tell myself that being able to still swing a leg over is really what winning looks like at my age. And most days, I believe this.
I know what I want to do “when I grow up” in my career now. I don’t know what that looks like in my horse world, but I will find out.
