Jane Ferguson

“Sitting on my balcony one night, sipping a cold beer and watching the bats circling over the rhododendrons, I let myself feel the weight I had carried with me all my life, that I had run from, humming under the surface. It was a feeling of worthlessness, a deep-seated shame. In that moment I was at the same time a recognized, celebrated thirty-year-old international TV correspondent and a little girl hiding under the stairs from her parents and incapable of loving herself. I knew well how to escape this feeling—head out on a plane, to a place with no cell service, a place where I didn’t really belong—but this time I would not. I would sit there and feel it. And it didn’t kill me. Those months felt like a cease-fire. A fragile peace emerged. Even my plants began to survive.”
― Jane Ferguson, No Ordinary Assignment: A Memoir