The trees were friendly, they gave me rest and shadowed refuge. Slipping through them, I felt safe and competent. My whole body was occupied. I had little energy to think or worry.
Beneath hot sun, desert roses bloomed. Under cold moon, I still refused to.
And so, despite the complex web of paths, waterfalls, cliffs, as a hiker wanders downhill, drainages merge, faint, abstract paths coalesce, thicken, until there is one path – the one, natural, trodden way.
Water was liquid silver, water was gold. It was clarity—a sacred thing. Drinking was no longer something to take for granted. I’d never needed to consider water before.
There was so little I wanted to carry. Packing my backpack took me all of four minutes
The bravest thing I ever did was leave there. The next bravest thing I did was come back, to make myself heard.
I’d believed I needed to be steady in myself before I could function with others—but surviving alone no longer felt like a good way either.
I realized that the most empowering important thing was actually simply taking care of myself.
I was promising myself strength.I had to write it, say it, make the effort and fake it before I actually believed I could do it.
I was the director of my life, it was already true, and I would soon lead myself to my dreamed-of destinations.It was the task of my one thousand miles of solitude.
I no longer needed to peel myself of my skin, or to hide. To Dash the colorless ephemeral things that existed just beneath my surface were as vivid as the beauty marks he traced on my cheek.
The way to self-love and admiration is to behave like someone whom you love and admire.
I’d crossed a border—Speaking openly, exposing the weak girl I’d been, I was no longer her.
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.
You don’t need extra food, extra water, extra clothing for extra warmth – anything extra. You don’t need soap or deodorant. Everything you carry you should need daily.
As if violence could make light. Maybe violence could make light.
In the aftermath of destruction, a silence settles – the stillness of fresh loss. People’s cheerful chatter is fainter, the blue color of sky dimmer; now that horror is undeniable and feels inescapable, the value of life seems lessened.
But the truth was stranger than an aimless road, it always was.
My relationship with my mother trapped me in the identity of a child.
Living as Wild Child, I could no longer be Debby Parker comfortably — this name that I’d been given at birth that defined me before I’d had the chance to define myself.
She’d taken care of me in all the ways my body needed, but the devastation of my rape had made me feel the weight of the essential way she had neglected me: she hadn’t nurtured the potential of my strong and healthy independence.
He hadn’t treated me with the love and compassion I wanted, but I was worthy of that love, and someday some boy would have it for me. I hadn’t found it yet, but I would find it soon.
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.
death is not a pretty flower that had almost pricked me. It was not a small annoyance I could simply bypass and quickly disregard. It was really The End.
My mother overstated the dangers of the world – invented threats. And so I saw: Starbursts’ hoof-made gelatin never gave me mad cow. Mad cow was not a threat to me. And so I thought: most risks weren’t truly real.
I sensed he was the one who might be able to see me clearly, the way I most wished to be seen.
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.
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.
I wrote through darkness, vividly seeing: my passivity was not a crime; my desire to trust was not a flaw.
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.
Fire is not essential. Fire is warm comfort. From fire, cultures are born.
I wanted him to declare in shock how overlooked and underestimated I had been ever since I was a child. How lucky he felt to be the one to have discovered me, to have me. I wanted him to look at me like maybe I was magic.
I wanted him to look at me like maybe I was magic.
I wanted both things: strength in my independence and also this new desire. This felt like the beginning of a new kind of love.
It felt amazing to make visible my boundaries.The rumors dissipated, then changed. Eventually I turned down enough men that I became the girl who turned down men.
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.
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.
The PCT would lead me to an otherworld, through the sadness I felt here, out of it.
I was no longer following a trail. I was learning to follow myself.
I needed only to allow myself to know what I already knew.
I wanted to come close to fierce wild things. They seemed prehistoric, rare and sacred.
She taught me only how to need to be taken care of. I was here because I needed to learn to take responsibility for making my own decisions — to earn my own trust.
These tools were my parents’ way of saying: What you’re doing is important. We support it. We want to help you find your way.
I was desperate not to confront the fact that this really could be it—that “nineteen” didn’t matter, that there really was a point at which even young bodies fail. I was not immortal.
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.
He understood. In lovesickness we had found a common language.
It was my first lesson in the fragility of attraction.
I walked without breaks, slept through nights without waking, inhumanly smooth – a small machine.
Each year, Gracie Henderson moons a thousand strangers, collects their shocked faces in an annual photo album.
I needed to begin respecting my own body’s boundaries. I had to draw clear lines. Ones that were sound in my mind and therefore impermeable, and would always, no matter where I walked, protect me. Moving forward, I wanted rules.
My malady was submission.The symptom: my compliance.The antidote was loud clear boundaries.
I felt unready to hold myself responsible for the decision if I slept with him
Rest fixed most things. Sleep was my sweet reward. I treated bedtime as both incentive and sacrament.
I needed to stop hiding: I was raped. It was time to honestly be exactly who I was. I saw—the shame wasn’t mine, it was his, and I could stop misrepresenting myself, and I could accept myself.
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.
She told me that women who wore makeup had bad values. Putting on makeup would have been a statement—a rebellion. I didn’t try it. I grew to feel guilty for wanting to feel attractive.
Water was liquid silver, water was gold. It was clarity—a sacred thing.
After twelve years of trying, I just decided to stop missing.
Children believe they are immortal, death is an empty word like the name of a country they’ve never been to on a time-faded map. I wasn’t a child anymore.
I realized that no, no one would actually come to save or even stop me, I had absolutely no choice. The scale tipped: the moment not doing it became more difficult and unbearable than just doing it.
Because I feared I couldn’t walk to Newton Centre without her, I needed to hike through desert, snow and woods alone.Childhood is a wilderness.
She had wanted me to hold rape inside me like a dark pearl, keep it in there, as it grew, as I grew cramped, as it overtook me as hidden things do. Secrets become lies. I’d carried in every step I took this lie, the shame of it.
It was heartbreaking to realize how we can fail the people we most love without even trying.
Maybe I’d die. Maybe I’d burn to ash in wind, or blacken like the pines. Charred skeletons, I’d add one to the count. I didn’t feel scared. I didn’t think to panic. The trail wasn’t burning. I was raw, ripe for loving. I wasn’t stopping.
I had no evidence. No physical signs of my rape existed anymore. My body had already purged them. That was the irreversible reality.
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.
I had once again proven that again alone, I was again enough.
A red leaf danced from a branch like a dropping flame, down into the calm blue lake. A gust had broken it free. There was a cold bite in the wind. It was now deep autumn in the mountains.