Quotes About Transformation

I could only be who it seemed I had to be.

In mijn dagelijkse pre-PCT-leven hield ik al van boeken, maar tijdens de voettocht kregen ze een diepere betekenis. ZE vormden de wereld waarin ik mezelf kon laten gaan wanneer de realiteit te eenzaam, hard of moeilijk werd om te verdragen.

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.

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.

A glorious something else awaits.

It was a world I'd never been to and yet had known was there all along, one I'd staggered to in sorrow and confusion and fear and hope. A world I thought would both make me into the woman I knew I could become and turn me back into the girl I'd once been.

Don't surrender all your joy for an idea you used to have about yourself that isn't true anymore.

we often become our kindest, most ethical selves only by seeing what it feels like to be selfish assholes first.

It was the thing that had grown in me that I'd remember years later, when my life became unmoored by sorrow. The thing that would make me believe that hiking the Pacific Crest Trail was my way back to the person I used to be.

The most terrible and beautiful and interesting things happen in a life. For some of you, those things have already happened. Whatever happens to you belongs to you. Make it yours. Feed it to yourself even if it feels impossible to swallow. Let it nurture you, because it will.

Foot speed was a profoundly different way of moving through the world than my normal modes of travel. Miles weren't things that blazed dully past. They were long, intimate straggles of weeds and clumps of dirt, blades of grass and flowers that bent in the wind, trees that lumbered and screeched.

the thing that had grown in me that I'd remember

There are so many tiny revolutions in a life, a million ways we have to circle around ourselves to grow and change and be okay.

that I didn't have to be amazed by him anymore. There were so many other amazing things in this world. They opened up inside of me like a river. Like I didn't know I could take a breath and then I breathed. I laughed with the joy of it,

The Awakening, by Kate Chopin, and The Optimist's Daughter,

The thing that would make me believe that hiking the Pacific Crest Trail was my way back to the person I used to be.

transformation often depends that we separate our emotional responses from our rational minds.

Alone had always felt like an actual place to me, as if it weren't a state of being, but rather a room where I could retreat to be who I really was. The radical aloneness of the PCT had altered that sense. Alone wasn't a room anymore, but the whole wide world, and now I was alone in that world, occupying it in a way I never had before.

world I thought would both make me into the woman I knew I could become and turn me back into the girl I'd once been.

Afterwards, I limped around gathering rocks and built a small crap cairn, burying the evidence before hiking on.

Bring the man you aspire to be, the one who already has the love he longs for. Play every piece of yourself and play it with all you've got until you're not playing anymore. That's what Cary Grant did. The lonely boy who lost his mom in the fog of his father's deceit found himself in the magic of wanting to be. His name was Archibald Leach.

I was not meant to be this way, to live this way, to fail this darkly.

Kennedy Meadows

The void? I'd asked," crestfallen. "It's a good thing," she said. "It's the place where things are born, where they begin, Think about how a black hole absorbs energy and then releases it as something new and alive.