Quotes About Resilience

I'm not afraid, I said, calling up my old mantra to calm my mind. But it didn't feel the same as it usually did to say it. Perhaps because that wasn't entirely true anymore. Perhaps by now I'd come far enough that I had the guts to be afraid.

I'm a slow walker, but I never walk back. ABRAHAM LINCOLN Tell

But the thing about rising is we have to continue upward; the thing about going beyond is we have to keep going.

ou let time pass. That's the cure . You survive the days. You float like a rabid ghost through the weeks. You cry and wallow and lament and scratch your way back up through the months. And then one day you find yourself alone on a bench in the sun and you close your eyes and lean your head back and you realize you're okay.

when I lay alone and lonely in my tent at night I asked, often out loud: Who is tougher than me? The answer was always the same, and even when I knew absolutely there was no way on this earth it was true, I said it anyway: No one.

I can't do this," he kept repeating through his tears. "I can't live without Mom. I can't. I can't. I can't." "We have to," I replied, though I couldn't believe it myself.

There are so many things to be tortured about, sweet pea. So many torturous things in this life. Don't let a man who doesn't love you be one of them.

My feet? Well, they were still entirely, unspeakably fucked.

Until, that is, a tree stopped me in my path.

If it is impossible for you to go on as you were before, so you must go on as you never have.

You dont have the right to the cards you believe you should have been dealt. You have an obligation to play the hell out of the ones you're holding...

I stopped in my tracks when that thought came into my mind, that hiking the PCT was the hardest thing I'd ever done. Immediately, I amended the thought. Watching my mother die and having to live without her, that was the hardest thing I'd ever done.

They were the world I could lose myself in when the one I was actually in became too lonely or harsh or difficult to bear.

it with their fingers out of my hands,

There was the woman I was before my mom died and the one I was now, my old life sitting on the surface of me like a bruise. The real me was beneath that, pulsing under all the things I used to think I knew.

I felt better than I'd ever felt in all of my life, now that the trail had taught me how horrible I could feel.

was who I was: the same woman who pulsed beneath the bruise of her old life, only now I was somewhere else.

I looked north, in its direction—the very thought of that bridge a beacon to me. I looked south, to where I'd been, to the wild land that had schooled and scorched me, and considered my options. There was only one, I knew. There was always only one. To keep walking.

I'd been on the PCT for a little more than a month. It seemed like a long time and also it seemed like my trip had just begun, like I was only now digging into whatever it was I was out here to do. Like I was still the woman with the hole in her heart, but the hole had gotten ever so infinitesimally smaller.

This is not how your story ends. It's simply where it takes a turn you didn't expect.

I only felt that in spite of all the things I'd done wrong, in getting myself here, I'd done right. I

There was nothing to do but go on.

I asked, often out loud: Who is tougher than me? The answer was always the same, and even when I knew absolutely there was no way on this earth it was true, I said it anyway: No one.

I decided I was safe. I was strong. I was brave. Nothing could vanquish me. Insisting on this story was a form of mind control, but for the most part, it worked.