I felt like I belonged to an ancient tradition of all young people given this same task of finding their own ways through to the futures they wanted for themselves.
If I wanted to go to bed at ten o’clock I did. If I wanted to go to bed at six p.m., I did. I woke at sunrise because the new sun lit my eyes. The sun was my clock; my body my pace-keeper. I started w...
I’d begun at the soundless place where California touches Mexico with five Gatorade bottles full of water and eleven pounds of gear and lots of candy. My backpack was tiny, no bigger than a schoolgirl...
Chinese proverb says that a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. This journey had begun with the coercion of my body, with my own wild hope.
The entire time, he’d only ever looked at my body, never at my face, his empty eyes hungry, never seeing me at all. I wasn’t the presence of a person, but a body. I could have said anything, he wouldn...
I sensed he was the one who might be able to see me clearly, the way I most wished to be seen.
My mother overstated the dangers of the world – invented threats. And so I saw: Starbursts’ hoof-made gelatin never gave me mad cow. Mad cow was not a threat to me. And so I thought: most risks weren’...
I couldn’t yet piece together the disconnected clues to understand the origin of these lights. To explain away strange magic, I’d convinced myself there was an unseen road cutting across the boundless...
Death is not a pretty flower that had almost pricked me. It was not a small annoyance I could simply bypass and quickly disregard. It was really The End.
My path, beyond doubt or denial. I just hadn’t looked toward it. I wasn’t lost. I’d always known the way. If I’d only allowed myself to look. I had never been lost, only scared.
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.
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.
