I didn’t run away—not exactly. I left a note on the kitchen counter that said, “Gone to find something real. Don’t worry.” And then I disappeared into the woods behind our neighborhood with nothing but a flint, a pocketknife, and an old camping pack I barely knew how to use.

I was sixteen, cracked in all the places no one could see. My parents were locked in a divorce that left them more like ghosts than guardians. School felt like a factory line of expectations I didn’t fit. I was suffocating in concrete, screens, noise—everything that felt manufactured and hollow.

On the third day of my self-imposed exile, soaked, hungry, and starting to believe this was the dumbest decision I’d ever made, I unzipped the bag I’d stuffed with random things in my panic to leave. At the very bottom, water-warped but intact, was “My Side of the Mountain” by Jean Craighead George. No memory of packing it. Maybe it had been there from a trip years ago. Maybe it found me.

Either way, it saved me.

This book, \"My Side of the Mountain\"—about a boy named Sam who leaves the chaos of New York City to live alone in the Catskill Mountains—wasn’t just a story. It was a manual for the soul. Sam wasn’t running away; he was running toward something—freedom, self-reliance, silence, truth. And for the first time, I had language for what I’d been seeking.

I read it cover to cover in the dark with a flashlight, the forest outside echoing with every line. Sam’s journey—his taming of a falcon, his learning to make fire from flint, his carving of a home inside a tree—was more than adventure. It was a quiet defiance of the idea that we must be shaped by a world that has forgotten how to listen.

I didn’t last in the woods like Sam did. By the fifth day, a ranger found me and took me home. But something had shifted. I stopped fighting the world and started carving a small, intentional space within it. I began hiking regularly, learned to grow herbs on my windowsill, journaled like my life depended on it. I even built a makeshift falcon out of driftwood and wire, perched now on my bookshelf—a reminder.

The metaphor that remains with me is this: sometimes, you must go into the wild not to escape life, but to find the stillness where your truest voice lives. “My Side of the Mountain” isn’t just a children’s novel. It’s a blueprint for reclaiming yourself.

If you feel lost, buried under noise, unsure if there\'s a place for you in the world as it is—read this book. Let Sam show you another way. Not to run, but to remember.