He hadn’t treated me with the love and compassion I wanted, but I was worthy of that love, and someday some boy would have it for me. I hadn’t found it yet, but I would find it soon.
This was a vision of wildness contained – caged. Huge, powerful animals whose wild dignity was stripped from them.Panic jolted me. These animals had had their freedom seized by people who put their ow...
I didn’t know what I would do. There was no way I could survive. I stared at my damp tent ceiling, feeling the frigid air against me, the frozen ground against my bottom, so cold my bare skin burned....
I hoped my solitude would help me reclaim my innocence, remember who I’d been, to find who I wanted to be. To become her. To love her, Deborah, Debby, Doll Girl, Wild Child, me, despite the irreversib...
Squatting on my bed–after twelve years of trying and missing, in about two minutes total–I put my own contacts in for the first time. Second try on the right eye, first try on the left. I blinked in t...
She’d taken care of me in all the ways my body needed, but the devastation of my rape had made me feel the weight of the essential way she had neglected me: she hadn’t nurtured the potential of my str...
Living as Wild Child, I could no longer be Debby Parker comfortably — this name that I’d been given at birth that defined me before I’d had the chance to define myself.
My relationship with my mother trapped me in the identity of a child.
But the truth was stranger than an aimless road, it always was.
In the aftermath of destruction, a silence settles – the stillness of fresh loss. People’s cheerful chatter is fainter, the blue color of sky dimmer; now that horror is undeniable and feels inescapabl...
We aren’t afraid of what we can explain.
It finally had to.I understood that it wouldn’t be easy, it would be very hard; I’d need to resist the habit I had developed long ago – with conviction. I’d have to be impolite, an inconvenience, and...
As if violence could make light. Maybe violence could make light.
All I could think as he was speaking was that, if he touched me at all, all the miles I’d walked, the pain I’d felt, the beauty I’d drunken like milk, like good wine making me happy, the four million...
I had feared this end, wondered where I would go from it, from the moment I first stepped on this footpath in the desert. But I found I was not afraid of reaching it now. I was happy. I hadn't found e...
For all my life, I had been passive when faced with dangers. I was stunned as I swam to find that I had, for the first time in my history, asserted myself and been truly heard—respected. It felt monum...
For this entire walk, my desire had ashamed me, as if my wanting to be kissed that night mitigated the fault of Junior's sudden deafness. I'd been given stacks of reasons to blame myself for an act of...
If I couldn't find the trail before dark, I could wake tomorrow disoriented and desperate, without having even made any new miles; my loss of the PCT should have distressed me, but a new instinct led...
You don’t need extra food, extra water, extra clothing for extra warmth – anything extra. You don’t need soap or deodorant. Everything you carry you should need daily.
I saw for the first time that I could stop giving people the power to make me feel disrespected. In my anger I began to see the absurdity of allowing this boy to shame me.
