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.

I didn’t know where to put my faith, or if there was such a place, or even precisely what the word faith meant, in all of its complexity.

In my perception, the world wasn’t a graph or formula or an equation. It was a story.

I’d set out to hike the trail so that I could reflect upon my life, to think about everything that had broken me and make myself whole again. But the truth was, at least so far, I was consumed only with my most immediate and physical suffering.

The universe, I’d learned, was never, ever kidding. It would take whatever it wanted and it would never give it back.

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.O

Fear begets fear. Power begets power. I willed myself to beget power. And it wasn’t long before I actually wasn’t afraid.

The silence was tremendous. The absence felt like a weight. This is what I came for, I thought. This is what I got.

Of all the things I’d been skeptical about, I didn’t feel skeptical about this: the wilderness had a clarity that included me.O