hiking-the-pct

The way to self-love and admiration is to behave like someone whom you love and admire.

I saw now that bad men existed who would take advantage of any weakness and insecurity they found when violating a victim. I saw it was not my fault; I did not choose to be raped or kidnapped. But now I was learning how to protect myself from the predators, to trust my No and my instinct and my strength. I was learning I was not to blame, I couldn't prevent men from trying to hurt me, but I could definitely fight back. And sometimes fighting back worked.

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.

In the power of my newfound strength, I saw clearly__ven though I__ been empowered to have my old college finally address my __orrific trauma,_ make me finally feel heard, this event would never have happened had I not first given myself my own voice, the permission to call my rape rape and not shame. In telling, I forced the school that silenced me, that minimized my trauma, that blamed me for the rape, to finally respect my voice and give me the platform they should have given me in the first place. I did not need the school to call it by its name; I did it myself, and they listened. I was the powerful party that brought the closure and empowerment I__ hoped, in first finding their invitation, that Colorado College would bring.

I was so much more powerful than anyone knew. I was an animal learning to fight back, instinctively, fiercely. I was a brave girl. I was a fit fox.I realized that the most empowering important thing was actually simply taking care of myself.

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__ble__o change. Our enmeshment had been enabled by my belief that I needed her to help me, to take care of things for me__nd to save me__ut, back in the home where I'd learned this helplessness, I found I no longer felt that I was trapped in it.

From that unremarkable gap in dense northern forest, I could finally see clearly that if I hadn__ 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__eeling terror and the gratitude that followed the realization that I__ survived rape____ 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.

Fire is not essential. Fire is warm comfort. From fire, cultures are born.

I wanted both things: strength in my independence and also this new desire. This felt like the beginning of a new kind of love.

I reached into my pack and held something small in the fist I made. __t__ a pocketknife,_ I said, enunciating each letter. I was asserting myself, I__ snapped out of something; he visibly snapped out of something too. I saw it acutely in his dropping posture: doubt in his movement. I said, __he truck works._ And so it did.

Already, this little-walked gigantic trail through my country__ 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.

I wrote through darkness, vividly seeing: my passivity was not a crime; my desire to trust was not a flaw.

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.

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.

Happy people have everything to give.

The night Junior stayed, my right to myself was taken from me in a way that had felt more final than ever before. Then the school had denied my rape__y word. The subsequent silencing and exile__isplaced shame__ere the catalysts for me to finally break free of my mother's grasp and my voicelessness and do what I truly wanted, alone. I wished to prove myself as independent and valid and strong__o my mother, and to the world. I'd believed I had needed something huge and external that no one could deny was impressive, so I could show my family I was able__o they could finally know that I was strong.Instead I had shown myself.And it felt wonderful.

I sensed he was the one who might be able to see me clearly, the way I most wished to be seen.

If I wanted to go to bed at ten o__lock I did. If I wanted to go to bed at six p.m., I did. I woke at sunrise because the new sun lit my eyes. The sun was my clock; my body my pace-keeper. I started walking when I wanted, kept going until precisely when I wanted to stop.When I was tired, feeling like stopping but wanting to persist, I__ listen to Blood On The Tracks.