Don’t lament so much about how your career is going to turn out. You don’t have a career. You have a life. - Cheryl Strayed

But I wasn’t out here to keep myself from having to say I am not afraid. I’d come, I realized, to stare that fear down, to stare everything down, really — all that I’d done to myself and all that had been done to me. I couldn’t do that while tagging along with someone else.

The truth was, in spite of all that, she’d been a spectacular mom. I knew it as I was growing up. I knew it in the days that she was dying. I knew it now. And I knew that was something. That it was a lot. I had plenty of friends who had moms who — no matter how long they lived — would never give them the all-encompassing love that my mother had given me.

A terrible thing happened to you, but you mustn't let it define your life.