The healing power of even the most microscopic exchange with someone who knows in a flash precisely what you’re talking about because she experienced that thing too cannot be overestimated.
Uncertain as I was as I pushed forward. I felt right in my pushing, as if the effort itself meant something.
Being so alone and so silent for so long gave me the opportunity to see how our brains actually work. I think of that so often in my regular life, as I’m always interacting with people or with my computer or phone.
Run as far as you can in the direction of your best and happiest dreams across the bridge that was built by your own desire to heal.
Writing is hard for every last one of us – straight white men included. Coal mining is harder. Do you think miners stand around all day talking about how hard it is to mine for coal? They do not. They simply dig.
I asked, often out loud: Who is tougher than me? The answer was always the same, and even when I knew absolutely there was no way on this earth that it was true, I said it anyway: No one.
Obviously memoir is subjective truth: It is my memory, my perspective, that’s the beauty. But I still wanted to be as factual as I could.
That’s how we find our way outward and onward. By holding onto beauty hardest. By cradling it like the cure that it is. By making it realer than anything ever was. The rest is just monsters and ghosts.
Acceptance is a small quiet room.
If you want to read anything nasty about me, just go to the backpacker websites. There’s this kind of elitist branch where they really believe that I had no business going backpacking.
My concept of an advice giver had been a therapist or a know-it-all, and then I realized nobody listens to the know-it-alls. You turn to the people you know, the friend who has been in the thick of it or messed up – and I’m that person for sure.
My mother’s death put me in touch with my most savage self. As I’ve grown up and come to terms with her death and accepted it, the pieces of her that I keep don’t exist materially.
My mom said there’s a sunrise and a sunset every day and you can choose to be there or not. You can put yourself in the way of beauty.
But if I could go back in time, I wouldn’t do a single thing differently. What if all those things I did were the things that got me here?
I could go back in the direction I had come from, or I could go forward in the direction I intended to go.
My whole life sort of ended when my mom died.
You can’t replicate walking 94 days through the wilderness by yourself with a really heavy pack until you do it.
I had to go on without my mother, even though I was suffering terribly, grieving her.
I taught workshops at universities. I wrote for magazines. This took time and insane amounts of juggling, but it’s how I earned a living.
I felt something growing in me that was strong and real.