Can I convince the person about whom I’m crazy to be crazy about me? The short answer is no. The long answer is no.
Men’s stories are seen as universal, women’s as particular. What women are up against is the battle to not be marginalized.
When going on a date with someone they met online, the number-one fear that straight women have is going on a date with a serial killer. The number-one fear straight men have is going on a date with a fat woman. That says everything.
Writing is part intuition and part trial and error, but mostly it’s very hard work.
What if I was never redeemed? What if I already was?
It’s a long life, sweetheart, and time heals all wounds.
Because when an artist has to assert that her intended audience is all humans rather than those who happen to be of her particular gender or race, what she’s actually having to assert is the breadth and depth of her own humanity.
There isn’t a thing to eat down there in the rabbit hole of your bitterness except your own desperate heart.
I was trying to find a new home in the world.
It was my life – like all lives, mysterious and irrevocable and sacred. So very close, so very present, so very belonging to me. How wild it was, to let it be.
The universe, I’d learned, was never, ever kidding.
Art isn’t anecdote. It’s the consciousness we bring to bear in our lives.
The obliterated place is equal parts destruction and creation. The obliterated place is pitch black and bright light. It is water and parched earth. It is mud and it is manna. The real work of deep grief is making a home there.
A lot of people go off and have fun adventures, or hard adventures, and their impulse is to write about them right away. What really makes a difference is having some perspective on what happened.
But the reality is we often become our kindest, most ethical selves only by seeing what it feels like to be a selfish jackass first.
What if what made me do all those things everyone thought I shouldn’t have done was what also had got me here? What if I was never redeemed? What if I already was?
Hiking the PCT was the maddening effort of knitting that sweater and unraveling it over and over again. As if everything gained was inevitably lost.
And every last one of us can do better than give up.
Of all the things I’d been skeptical about, I didn’t feel skeptical about this: the wilderness had a clarity that included me.
You get to define the terms of your life.