top of page
.png){kind=small}
"From that unremarkable gap in dense northern forest, I could finally see clearly that if I hadn't walked away from school, through devastating beauty alone on the Pacific Crest Trail, met rattlesnakes and bears, fording frigid and remote rivers as deep as I am tall-feeling terror and the gratitude that followed the realization that I'd survived rape-I'd have remained lost, maybe for my whole life. The trail had shown me how to change.This is the story of how my recklessness became my salvation.I wrote it."
Standard
Customized
More
"Emotional pain cannot kill you, but running from it can. Allow. Embrace. Let yourself feel. Let yourself heal."
Author Name
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."
Author Name
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."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Feel guilty. Mourn this. But move on. Don't let it destroy you. Forgive yourself."
Author Name
Personal Development
"We may not be able to change the reality but we can change how our minds see and store it."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Total freedom from your past, both the good and the bad things is the foundation for a successful life."
Author Name
Personal Development
"The truth of life is that almost all that we achieve through pain is the best medicine for us, as most drugs are bitter."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Most of the poems I write take 5 minutes, but the words can give a lifetime of relief. Many people that have read my book say it helped them with their grief."
Author Name
Personal Development
More
"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
"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 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
"I saw for the first time that I could stop giving people the power to make me feel disrespected. In my anger I began to see the absurdity of allowing this boy to shame me."
Empowerment
"I wrote through darkness, vividly seeing: my passivity was not a crime; my desire to trust was not a flaw."
Healing
"I'd have to be impolite, an inconvenience, and sometimes awkward. But if I could commit, all that discomfort would add up to zap predatory threads like a Taser gun. I'd stun them. They'd bow to me. I'd let my no echo against the mountains.And better to feel bad for a moment saying no-and stop it-than to get harmed.I would take better care.That small word, no. I'd see its deity."
Boundaries
"My relationship with my mother trapped me in the identity of a child."
Identity
"Each year, Gracie Henderson moons a thousand strangers, collects their shocked faces in an annual photo album."
Rebellion
"I doubted I could survive in the woods without these very basic things to help me. It seemed like a tremendous leap of faith to forsake the tools I'd always been told I needed. And yet leaving college to walk was such a massive leap of faith already, and nothing I'd ever trusted and believed in seemed true any longer."
Faith
bottom of page