Quotes About Resilience

I'd imagined endless meditations upon sunsets or while staring out across pristine mountain lakes. I'd thought I'd weep tears of cathartic sorrow and restorative joy each day of my journey. Instead, I only moaned, and not because my heart ached. It was because my feet did and my back did and so did the still-open wounds all around my hips.

The same as she'd always done when she'd seen me suffer because I wanted something to be different than it was and she was trying to convince me with that single word that I must accept things as they were.

But a woman who walks alone in the wilderness for eleven hundred miles? I'd never been anything like that before. I had nothing to lose by giving it a whirl.

The trees were tall, but I was taller

I had no roof I made Audacity my roof. ROBERT PINSKY, "Samurai Song

The staying and doing it, in spite of everything. In spite of the bears and the rattlesnakes and the scat of the mountain lions I never saw; the blisters and scabs and scrapes and lacerations. The exhaustion and the deprivation; the cold and the heat; the monotony and the pain; the thirst and the hunger; the glory and the ghosts that haunted me as I hiked eleven hundred miles from the Mojave Desert to the state of Washington by myself.

the PCT was hard in a different way. In a way that made the other hardest things the tiniest bit less hard.

God was a ruthless bitch.

It didn't matter whether someone came along anyway. I was in this alone. I

Not because I couldn't find God, but because suddenly I absolutely did: God was there, I realized, and God had no intention of making things happen or not, of saving my mother's life. God was not a granter of wishes. God was a ruthless bitch. The

I almost howled in agony. I almost choked to death on what I knew before I knew. I was going to live the rest of my life without my mother. I pushed the fact of it away with everything in me. I couldn't let myself believe it then and there in that elevator and also go on breathing, so I let myself believe other things instead.

But no one laughed. No one would. The universe, I'd learned, was never, ever kidding. It would take whatever it wanted and it would never give it back. I really did have only one boot.

Yes. I get to do this. I get to waste my life. I get to be junk.

Each day on the trail was the only possible preparation for the one that followed.

I walked through the spiderwebs, feeling them like magic on my face.

Heroin had made me dumb and distant from myself. A thought would form and then evaporate. I could not quite get ahold of my mind, even when I wasn't high.

I was lost but I was not afraid,

So much of being able to hike the PCT depended upon mind control: the stout decision to move forward, regardless.

I had to change. I had to change was the thought that drove me in those months of planning. Not into a different person, but back to the person I used to be—strong and responsible, clear-eyed and driven, ethical and good.

I knew that if I allowed fear to overtake me, my journey was doomed. Fear, to a great extent, is born of a story we tell ourselves, and so I chose to tell myself a different story from the one women are told. I decided I was safe. I was strong.

He pushed on, pillaging my pack, inquiring sternly each time before tossing another item I'd previously deemed necessary into the get-rid-of pile.

to me sitting alone in Old Station, California, on a picnic table beneath the magnificent sky. I didn't feel sad or happy. I didn't feel proud or ashamed. I only felt that in spite of all the things I'd done wrong, in getting myself here, I'd done right.

It was as if I'd finally come across a mountian lion and I'd remembered, against all instinct, not to run. Not to incite him with my fast motions or antagonize him with my anger or arouse him with my fear.

I have carried the weight of my student loan debt for about half of my life now, but I have not been "defined by my 'student loan' identity." I do not even know what a student loan identity is. Do you? What is a student loan identity?