"I felt great. I felt triumphant. It was no longer a secret," Smart said Monday evening during a rare public interview.
Five years after the March 2003 return to her family, Smart, now 20, says she gets involved with the news media only when she thinks it will help someone.
On Monday, she was talking about a survival guide for kidnap victims that features advice from Smart and four others who were abducted as children.
You're Not Alone: The Journey From Abduction to Empowerment will be unveiled during a ceremony in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday, which is National Missing Children's Day.
Elizabeth will attend the ceremony with her father, Ed Smart, who is the keynote speaker.
Elizabeth said her experience and those of the other four contributors were "so different. Hopefully, we covered a lot of different angles."
But she said the emphasis was on "helping people to move on, and not to feel like they're alone, because they're not."
The U.S. Department of Justice publication also is meant as "a message of hope, and lets [survivors] know they don't need to sacrifice any more of their life" to their abductor, she said.
Coming home was "kind of like waking up from a bad dream," Elizabeth said. "You wake up and you go on."
Elizabeth said her comments in the publication stress the importance of "good relations with family, friends, school teachers, religious leaders - someone you can trust . . . and is able to help you through whatever you're dealing with."
She said one of her special heroes is her grandfather, with whom she engaged in long talks while horseback riding.
"We'd talk about history, animals, nature, religion - whatever was going on in my life, whatever I wanted to talk about, he was always there for me and I'll always be grateful to him for that," she said.
Elizabeth - who plays the harp and just finished her junior year as a music major at Brigham Young University - said she suggested that kidnapping survivors seek positive outlets, such as music, sports and school.
She also said, "It's OK to feel whatever you feel when you come back. If you feel angry, its OK to feel that way. We each have our own way to deal with it."
Ed Smart said his speech Wednesday will urge support for Senate Bill 1738, which proposes spending $1 billion over eight years to combat child pornography.
Smart said Internet Crimes Against Children Task Forces have traced child porn to 650,000 computers, but because of manpower and funding issues can investigate less than 2 percent of the offenders.
"The bad thing," Smart said, "is that child porn is not just a matter seeing a child naked, its a child crime scene."
He said that in one of three cases that are investigated, a child is rescued from an abusive situation.
shunt@sltrib.com
Elizabeth Smart's story
Brian David Mitchell, 54, and his wife, Wanda Eileen Barzee, 62, are charged with aggravated kidnapping and sexual assault in the disappearance of then-14-year-old Elizabeth Smart from her Federal Heights home the night of June 5, 2002.
Authorities say the pair kidnapped Elizabeth from her bedroom and allegedly held her at several camps in the foothills east of Salt Lake City until October, when the three migrated to Lakeside, about 30 miles east of San Diego.
Thousands of volunteers scoured the foothills and plastered posters of Elizabeth on telephone poles and storefront windows. In October 2002, sister Mary Katherine - who feigned sleep while the kidnapper took Elizabeth from their bed - recalled the abductor as a man calling himself Immanuel who had done odd jobs at their home in the fall of 2001. "Immanuel" was later identified as Mitchell, whose photo was publicized. On March 12, 2003, Mitchell's picture was still fresh in the minds of two sets of citizens who simultaneously spotted the man walking down a Sandy sidewalk with two veiled women. Mitchell, Barzee and Elizabeth had recently returned to Utah and were taken into custody. Although Smart was wearing a wig, veil and sunglasses and initially told police she was Mitchell's daughter, Augustine, she was, in fact, the long-lost Elizabeth.
