Stray: Memoir of a Runaway

by Tanya Marquardt

When you’re just thinking about surviving, when you’ve been abused and berated, hurt as a child before you even had the language to describe the hurt like I had, you come to believe that the world is a traumatic place, without respite. Holding someone’s hand doesn’t just scare you—it makes you feel like cutting it off. And that’s when you know you’re in a lot of trouble. And even after years of struggling, after dropping the alcohol and the cigarettes and the sex, after therapy and silent retreats, yoga classes and acupuncture and Rolfing, prayer and meditation, the trying and failing and trying again to learn how to give and receive love, I have to trust in my own strength and all the work that I’ve done to parent myself. Because I also know how little it takes to break a broken person.