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

You will learn a lot about yourself if you stretch in the direction of goodness, of bigness, of kindness, of forgiveness, of emotional bravery. Be a warrior for love.

If you want to read anything nasty about me, just go to the backpacker websites. There's this kind of elitist branch where they really believe that I had no business going backpacking.

But if I could go back in time, I wouldn't do a single thing differently. What if all those things I did were the things that got me here?

It was my life — like all lives, mysterious and irrevocable and sacred. So very close, so very present, so very belonging to me. How wild it was, to let it be.

It seemed to me the way it must feel to people who cut themselves on purpose. Not pretty, but clean. Not good, but void of regret. I was trying to heal. Trying to get the bad out of my system so I could be good again. To cure me of myself.

Men's stories are seen as universal, women's as particular. What women are up against is the battle to not be marginalized.