“Quit Crying”

As hard as it is to imagine, more than once during her trip, Ashcraft actually had to snap herself out of profound sadness. “I had to talk to myself and tell myself, ‘I have to quit crying.’ I had to quit crying because I was losing so much water, and I didn’t have a lot of water.”

“A lot of the grief was really muted, really shoved back because of the survival and having to keep pushing forward,” Ashcraft recalled. Still, after spending more than a month alone on the Pacific Ocean, the young woman truly started wondering if she would make it out alive…