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"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 irreversible truth that I'd been raped. I was learning again that I could trust myself and, also, I was seeing, other people. I was brave enough now to go out alone towards what I wanted, to trust that I was strong enough for it, to know that help would come when I needed it. It always came."
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"Emotional pain cannot kill you, but running from it can. Allow. Embrace. Let yourself feel. Let yourself heal."
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Personal Development

"When someone hurts you, don't hurt him back but hit him with your unconditional love."
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Personal Development

"Slowly I swam up from the bottom of a black sleep."
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Personal Development

"We learn from pain that some of the things we thought were castles turn out to be prisons, and we desperately want out, but even though we built them, we can't find the door. Yet maybe if you ask God for help in knowing which direction to face, you'll have a moment of intuition. Maybe you'll see at least one next right step you can take."
Author Name
Personal Development

"But I love him.""So love him.""But I miss him.""So miss him. Send him love and light every time you think about him, and then drop it."
Author Name
Personal Development

"Grief ends up giving you the two best things: softness and illumination."
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Personal Development

"And I didn't think even eternity would be long enough to fix me."
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Personal Development

"One of the most difficult things I ever did was learn to support myself through my whole range of emotional experiences without running away."
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Personal Development

"Feel guilty. Mourn this. But move on. Don't let it destroy you. Forgive yourself."
Author Name
Personal Development

"What's up?" I asked.You tell me," he said. "You were the one about ready to start making out with Adrian."It was an experiment," I said. "It was part of my therapy."What the hell kind of therapy are you in?"
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Personal Development
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"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 walk would be my salvation. It had to be."
Transformation

"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 longer willing to permit this silencing. Helplessness didn't have to be my identity, I wasn't condemned to it. I was willing-able-to change. Our enmeshment had been enabled by my belief that I needed her to help me, to take care of things for me-and to save me-but, back in the home where I'd learned this helplessness, I found I no longer felt that I was trapped in it."
Empowerment

"But the truth was stranger than an aimless road, it always was."
Truth

"Happy people have everything to give."
Happiness

"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."
Destiny

"I was able to pitch a tent and carry a backpack twenty-five miles a day through mountains-I'd mastered a thousand amazing physical feats-physically I'd become undeniably confident and capable-but physical weakness had never been the problem that I had. My true problem had been passivity, the lifelong-conditioned submission that became my nature."
Transformation

"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 director of my life."
Responsibility

"But I couldn't say any of this yet. No one answer felt it could contain anything close to the truth about her. My thoughts of my mother were wild chaos, I didn't know how to tell him we'd been enmeshed for as long as I could remember."
Family

"If I could mark clearly, convincingly and consistently what was good for me and also what was bad-if I could say yes and also no, as if it were the law-it would become my law."
Self-Control

"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."
Tradition
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