Historian Rebecca Solnit, reflecting on the autobiographies of people kidnapped and raised among Indians in frontier America:

“Reading these stories, it’s tempting to think that the arts to be learned are those of tracking, hunting, navigating, skills of survival and escape… But the real difficulties, the real arts of survival, seem to lie in more subtle realms. There, what’s called for is a kind of resilience of the psyche; a readiness to deal with what comes next.

These captives lay out in a stark and dramatic way what goes on in every life: the transitions whereby you cease to be who you were. Seldom is it as dramatic, but nevertheless, something of this journey between the near and the far goes on in every life. Sometimes an old photograph, an old friend, an old letter will remind you that you are not who you once were, for the person who dwelt among them, valued this, chose that, wrote thus, no longer exists. Without noticing it, you have traversed a great distance; the strange has become familiar and the familiar if not strange at least awkward and uncomfortable, an outgrown garment. And some people travel for more than others. There are these who receive as birthright an adequate or at least unquestioned sense of self, and those who set out to reinvent themselves, for survival or satisfaction, and travel far. Some people inherit values and practices as a house they inhabit; some of us have to burn down that house, find our own ground, build from scratch.”

-Rebecca Solnit
"A Field Guide to Getting Lost"