Hard as I fought for it to be otherwise, finally I had to admit it too: without my mother, we weren’t what we’d been; we were four people floating separately among the flotsam of our grief, connected by only the thinnest rope.
I think of quotes as mini–instruction manuals for the soul. It.
No matter what unjust, sad, sucky things have befallen you. Self-pity is a dead-end road. You.
I could only be who it seemed I had to be.
I didn’t wake from these dreams crying. I woke shrieking. Paul grabbed me and held me until I was quiet. He wetted a washcloth with cool water and put it over my face. But those wet washcloths couldn’t wash the dreams of my mother away. Nothing did. Nothing would. Nothing could ever bring my mother back or make it okay that she was gone. Nothing would put me beside her the moment she died. It broke me up. It cut me off. It tumbled me end over end.
The thing about hiking the Pacific Crest Trail, the thing that was so profound to me that summer – and yet also, like most things, so very simple – was how few choices I had and how often I had to do the thing I least wanted to do. How there was no escape or denial. No numbing it down with a martini or covering it up with a roll in the hay.
Resentful of her own repressive Catholic upbringing, she’d avoided church altogether in her adult life, and now she was dying and I didn’t even have God.
In mijn dagelijkse pre-PCT-leven hield ik al van boeken, maar tijdens de voettocht kregen ze een diepere betekenis. ZE vormden de wereld waarin ik mezelf kon laten gaan wanneer de realiteit te eenzaam, hard of moeilijk werd om te verdragen.
You get to define the terms of your life. You get to negotiate and articulate the complexities and contradictions of your feelings...
You will feel insecure and jealous. How much power you give those feelings is entirely up to you.
When the path reveals itself, follow it.
I’d made the arguably unreasonable decision to take a long walk alone on the PCT in order to save myself. When I believed that all the things I’d been before had prepared me for this journey. But nothing had or could. Each day on the trail was the only possible preparation for the one that followed. And sometimes even the day before didn’t prepare me for what would happen next.
Fear begets fear. Power begets power. I willed myself to beget power.
Nobody’s going to do your life for you.
Fear, to a great extent, is born of a story we tell ourselves, and so I chose to tell myself a different story from the one women are told.
Who would I be if I didn’t? Who would I be if I did?
When you’re speaking in the truest, most intimate voice about your life, you are speaking with the universal voice.
The good things aren’t a movie. There isn’t enough to make a reel. The good things are a poem, barely longer than a haiku. There.
The narratives we create in order to justify our actions and choices become in so many ways who we are.
It felt now as if I’d never known them and I couldn’t know them again. It seemed to me that whatever had existed back in the place where I’d grown up was so far away now, impossible to retrieve.