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"I had stripped naked in front of men. Drunk. In morning's somber brightness I tried to remember why I had done it. Total exposure had seemed like the only way to be seen more clearly, heard, but now it seemed the opposite: a wild act that would define me."
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"I didn't want my picture taken because I was going to cry. I didn't know why I was going to cry, but I knew that if anybody spoke to me or looked at me too closely the tears would fly out of my eyes and the sobs would fly out of my throat and I'd cry for a week. I could feel the tears brimming and sloshing in me like water in a glass that is unsteady and too full."
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Personal Development
"Anything cracked will shatter at a touch."
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Personal Development
"What is it?Nothing. I had a bad dream.What did you dream about?Nothing.Are you okay?No.He put his arms around him and held him. It's okay, he said.I was crying. But you didnt wake up.I'm sorry. I was just so tired.I meant in the dream."
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Personal Development
"As humans, we are all insecure to a certain degree, and we don't want to risk looking stupid, being rejected, or feeling awkward."
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Personal Development
"Maybe we don't ever feel that sweetly untainted and wholly majestic kind of love that takes every longing captive because we are hopelessly entangled in the illogical fear that despite all of love's grand goodness, it might not be good enough to keep us safe."
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Personal Development
"I embrace my sensitivity and let it enhance my joy every day."
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Personal Development
"What she really meant was: here is my heart, have a care."
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Personal Development
"I'll tell them that on bad mornings, it feels impossible to take pleasure in anything because I'm afraid it could be taken away."
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Personal Development
"I fear I have praised you too much too soon. Will I lose you in your shame of believing that you can never be what I think you are?"
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Personal Development
"Turns out rolling your eyes in a bar when 'Land Down Under' plays is like someone belching during the Star Spangled Banner in America."
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Personal Development
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"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 then of course there must be other things that seemed impossible that weren't, and so anything-great and terrible-felt possible to me now."
Possibility
"Though I was starved for contact, I didn't stop to talk to any of these strangers. I had forgotten how to convincingly speak the polite things strangers say to each other."
Loneliness
"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
"Chinese proverb says that a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. This journey had begun with the coercion of my body, with my own wild hope."
Journey
"I had feared this end, wondered where I would go from it, from the moment I first stepped on this footpath in the desert. But I found I was not afraid of reaching it now. I was happy. I hadn't found every answer for where I was going, but I now had all I needed to take these next steps. I knew I would do what I needed to become a writer now."
Fulfillment
"I wanted both things: strength in my independence and also this new desire. This felt like the beginning of a new kind of love."
Independence
"When we apply the lessons we've struggled for our whole lives to learn to the lives of people we love, our love becomes judgment-which is toxic. Our fear our daughters will fail leads us to fail them."
Parenting
"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
"I didn't know if I was brave or reckless."
Bravery
"But the truth was stranger than an aimless road, it always was."
Truth
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