More on this book
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
April 12 - April 17, 2024
This is why I came out here, I realize. For moments like this when I would be forced—literally, forced—to rely on myself.
Fine, I tell myself. If you are not strong enough to do this, you need to become someone who can.
This is how you do it, I think. This is how you become the new version of yourself: you start where you are and then you just keep going, no matter what.
Being here reminds me that I am just a tiny speck in a giant world. I am a tiny speck and the other people are tiny specks and these unyielding rocks will outlast us all.
get your shit together.”
I wish I didn’t feel like this. I wish that hiking alone as a woman could be the same as hiking alone as a man, but it’s not. My first instinct during an interaction like this will always be one of wariness and fear.
Take the pain and feed it to yourself again and again, and let it be the foundation of the you who comes out the other side.
the trail really does provide.
making a mental list of everything I feel grateful for in this moment.
My go to in moments of hard
Who could I be if I were able to feel pain and loneliness and fear without immediately reaching for relief? What kind of power might I have if I weren’t constantly numbing out?
I am mediocre at best, but then I think about how hard I am trying out here, the fears I have already faced, the fact that I am doing this on my own, and I realize that it feels worth it to try to get the best out of myself even if I will never be the best.
Breathe in peace, breathe out suffering.
So I do, I push on, I push hard, I don’t let up. And for the next two hours I hike myself into the ground, just absolutely into the fucking ground, going deep into myself, drawing on my last reserves of energy and strength, pulling power from somewhere inside of myself that I don’t think I’ve ever touched before.
“If you can’t do this, you need to become someone who can.”
“If you want to be a badass bitch,” I tell myself out loud, “then you’ve just got to go ahead and be one.”
“If at the end of the day that’s all you can say, that you did not quit, that is enough.”
“Never quit on a bad day,”
I’m struck yet again by the fact that a solo hike isn’t a solo hike at all.
it’s a privilege to be able to choose your suffering.
can I do it? Can I believe in myself enough to make it happen? “Come on,” I say. “You can do hard things.”
If they’re in the wash, then would I rather choose to have my skin ripped open by thorns on trail or risk crossing paths with a rattlesnake infestation in the wash? What kinds of questions are these? This is the worst choose-your-own-adventure game I’ve ever played.
Can you find peace amidst the suffering?
When you are at your lowest, can you be kind to yourself?
Can I hold onto this perspective after the trail, I wonder. Amidst the chaos of regular life, can I still be profoundly grateful for the small things?
“Something can suck and you can still do it,”
in that moment that I realize how many people believe in me, how many people have been supporting me with full faith for the past 41 days. My friends and family believe in me, my online community believes in me—I am the only one who didn’t believe. But I do now. I believe.
How is it, I wonder, that even if it’s not what we thought we wanted, we always seem to get exactly what we need?
“Only to the extent that we expose ourselves over and over to annihilation can that which is indestructible in us be found.”
thank you for letting me grow into the woman I was meant to be, even if that woman is different than the daughter you thought you raised.
