Rachel Louise Snyder: I see Myself Reflected there.

I’m grown now. My daughter is 7. Her father makes her not alone in the world, and I also make her not alone in the world. I push my closest friends toward her, hoping they make adequate stand-ins for the extended family I cannot offer her. I am a journalist and for 20 years I’ve written stories of genocide, homicide, domestic violence, natural disasters. People with terrible histories in which they should, by any account, no longer be alive. The stories are not about tragedy, but about survival. I spend hours listening. I search their eyes for clues as to how they made it when so many others did not, their secrets of survival, of endurance, of tenacity. I see myself reflected there.
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Rachel Louise Snyder is the author of “What We’ve Lost Is Nothing” and of “Fugitive Denim: A Moving Story of People and Pants in the Borderless World of Global Trade.”