In the power of my newfound strength, I saw clearly—even though I’d been empowered to have my old college finally address my “horrific trauma,” make me finally feel heard, this event would never have...
I was so much more powerful than anyone knew. I was an animal learning to fight back, instinctively, fiercely. I was a brave girl. I was a fit fox.I realized that the most empowering important thing w...
Absolutely devout in her complete care of my body, she had only taught me to be weak and voiceless. But I had unlearned that lesson. Our enmeshment no longer felt to me like proof of love. I was no lo...
The night Junior stayed, my right to myself was taken from me in a way that had felt more final than ever before. Then the school had denied my rape—my word. The subsequent silencing and exile—misplac...
I realized that no, no one would actually come to save or even stop me, I had absolutely no choice. The scale tipped: the moment not doing it became more difficult and unbearable than just doing it.
I doubted I could survive in the woods without these very basic things to help me. It seemed like a tremendous leap of faith to forsake the tools I’d always been told I needed. And yet leaving college...
And the idea of light unexplainably produced out of nothing was haunting, it shook me. A flat drab mountain could produce its own light, no one in this whole world knows why, and if that was possible...
When I felt strongly I would say it strongly.
Rest fixed most things. Sleep was my sweet reward. I treated bedtime as both incentive and sacrament.
Second—I’d take much better care of myself.There were simple things I could do. I could start with my poor feet. These little two feet carried me each day for miles and miles, steady and flexed, tired...
I reached into my pack and held something small in the fist I made. “It’s a pocketknife,” I said, enunciating each letter. I was asserting myself, I’d snapped out of something; he visibly snapped out...
I walked without breaks, slept through nights without waking, inhumanly smooth – a small machine.
It was my first lesson in the fragility of attraction.
She taught me only how to need to be taken care of. I was here because I needed to learn to take responsibility for making my own decisions — to earn my own trust.
It took me almost two thousand miles in the woods to see I had to do some hard work that wasn’t simply walking—that I needed to begin respecting my own body’s boundaries. I had to draw clear lines. On...
Already, this little-walked gigantic trail through my country’s Western wilderness held in my mind the promise of escape from myself, the liberation only a huge transformation could grant me. This wal...
I was going to mean what I said, to be direct and firm.I found my moleskin notebook and on the page behind the pages addressed to Never-Never and my family—two unsent letters—I wrote: I am the directo...
It felt amazing to make visible my boundaries.The rumors dissipated, then changed. Eventually I turned down enough men that I became the girl who turned down men.
I don’t remember having one conversation with my dad in the three days I was home, but looking back at my journal, I see I wrote about him. I scrawled about how I heard him telling my mom that I neede...
I wanted both things: strength in my independence and also this new desire. This felt like the beginning of a new kind of love.
