Wild – Cheryl Strayed

Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail by Cheryl Strayed
Date read: 2/25/23. Recommendation: 9/10.

I had high expectations and Cheryl Strayed’s memoir still blew me away. She’s such a wonderful writer. She reflects on her own truth and struggles in a way that gives a voice to an experience that so many other people can relate to. The book details her solo three-month hike on the Pacific Crest Trail and the painstaking miles where she was able to reflect on everything that had left her broken and begin to make herself whole again. It’s a wonderful story of letting go, finding yourself, persevering, and choosing gratitude despite it all.

See my notes below or Amazon for details and reviews.

My Notes:

Adventure:
Solo three-month hike on the Pacific Crest Trail (PCT)

“I’d set out to hike the trail so that I could reflect upon my life to think about everything that had broken me and make myself whole again.” 

“But the truth was, at least so far, I was consumed only with my most immediate and physical suffering.” 

“But hiking the PCT was hard in a different way. In a way that made the other hardest things the tiniest bit less hard.”

“I thought it would help me find my center, to come out here.”

“I had only just begun. I was three weeks into my hike, but everything in me felt altered. I lay in the water as long as I could without breathing, alone in a strange new land, while the actual world all around me hummed on.” 

What mattered was utterly timeless: “It had only to do with how it felt to be in the wild. With what it was like to walk for miles for no reason other than to witness the accumulation of trees and meadows, mountains and deserts, streams and rocks, rivers and grasses, sunrises and sunsets. The experience was powerful and fundamental. It seemed to me that it had always felt like this to be a human in the wild, and as long as the wild existed it would always feel this way.”

Tragedy:
Her mother was diagnosed with cancer and told she had a year to live. But she only lived 49 days after her diagnosis. During that time, each day was an eternity. 

“It was only after her death that I realized who she was: the apparently magical force at the center of our family who’d kept us all invisibly spinning in the powerful orbit around her. Without her, Eddie slowly became a stranger. Leif and Karen and I drifted into our own lives…we were four people floating separately among the flotsam of our grief.”

Fear:
“Fear, to a great extent, is born of a story we tell ourselves…Every time I heard a sound of unknown origin or felt something horrible cohering in my imagination, I pushed it away. I simply did not let myself become afraid. Fear begets fear. Power begets power. I willed myself to beget power. And it wasn’t long before I actually wasn’t afraid.”

Doubt:
“I staggered north toward Kennedy Meadows, furious with myself for having come up with this inane idea. Elsewhere, people were having barbecues and days of ease, lounging by lakes and taking naps….I was going to quit. Quit, quit, quit, I chanted to myself as I moaned and hiked and rested (ten, five, ten, five). I was going to get to Kennedy Meadows, retrieve my resupply box, eat every candy bar I’d packed into it, and then hitch a ride to whatever town the driver who picked me up was going to.” 

Letting go:
“Perhaps the impulse to purchase the PCT guidebook months before had been a primal grab for a cure, for the thread of my life that had been severed. I could feel it unspooling behind me—the old thread I’d lost, the new one I was spinning…”

The void: the place where things are born, where they begin. Black holes absorb energy and then release something new and alive. 

“It was all unknown to me then, as I sat on that white bench on the day I finished my hike. Everything except the fact that I didn’t have to know. That it was enough to trust that what I’d done was true.”

“How wild it was, to be let be.”

Rediscovering yourself:
“Someone was in here. It was me. I was here. I felt it in a way I hadn’t in ages: the me inside of me, occupying my spot in the fathomless Milky Way.”

Perseverance:
“So much of being able to hike the PCT depended upon mind control: the stout decision to move forward, regardless. I covered my wounds with duct tape and 2nd Skin, then I put on my socks and boots and hobbled over to the campground’s spigot to fill up my two bottles with sixty-four ounces of water, which had to last me for fifteen searing miles across Hat Creek Rim.”

“Miles weren’t things that blazed dully past. They were long, intimate struggles of weeds and clumps of dirt, blades of grass and flowers that bent in the wind, trees that lumbered and screeched….The PCT had taught me what a mile was. I was humble before each and every one.”

Gratitude:
“Thank you. Not just for the long walk, but for everything I could feel finally gathered up inside of me; for everything the trail had taught me and everything I couldn’t yet know, though I felt it somehow already contained within me.” 

Brave Enough – Cheryl Strayed

Brave Enough by Cheryl Strayed
Date read: 2/23/23. Recommendation: 8/10.

If you’ve read any of Strayed’s work or heard her speak, you know how compelling her advice, thoughts, and quotes are. The way she structures and communicates her ideas is both memorable and original. Brave Enough is a tiny book that’s a compilation of her most famous quotes about love, compassion, forgiveness, and endurance. It deserves a spot on your desk to act as a constant reminder and reference as you face challenges in your own work and life.

See my notes below or Amazon for details and reviews.

My Notes:

Do the work:
“We don’t reach the mountaintop from the mountaintop. We start at the bottom and climb up. Blood is involved.”

“Stop asking yourself what you want, what you desire, what interests you. Ask yourself instead: What has been given to me. Ask: What do I have to give back? Then give it.”

“You are a writer because you write. Keep writing and quit your bitching. Your book has a birthday. You don’t know what it is yet.”

Live your truth:
“You don’t have to get a job that makes others feel comfortable about what they perceive as your success. You don’t have to explain what you plan to do with your life. You don’t have to justify your education by demonstrating its financial rewards…You have to be kind. You have to give it all you’ve got. You have to find people who love you truly and love them back with the same truth. But that’s all.” 

“Eight of the ten things you have decided about yourself at the age of twenty will, over time, prove to be false. The other two things will prove to be so true that you’ll look back in twenty years and howl.” 

“Trust your gut. Forgive yourself. Be grateful.”

“Whatever happens to you belongs to you. Make it yours. Feed it to yourself even if it feels impossible to swallow. Let it nurture you, because it will.” 

“You can’t fake the core. The truth that lives there will eventually win out. It’s a god we must obey, a force that brings us all inevitably to our knees. It asks, eternally: Will you do it later or will you do it now?” 

“Trusting yourself means living out what you already know to be true.” 

Allow yourself to evolve:
“Don’t surrender all your joy for an idea you used to have about yourself that isn’t true anymore.”

“It’s good you’ve worked hard to resolve childhood issues while in your twenties, but understand that what you resolve will need to be resolved again. And again. You will come to know things that can only be known with the wisdom of age and the grace of years. Most of those things will have to do with forgiveness.” 

“Transformation doesn’t ask that you stop being you. It demands that you find a way back to the authenticity and strength that’s already inside of you. You only have to bloom.”

“If it is impossible for you to go on as you were before, so you must go on as you never have.” 

Kindness:
“We are all entitled to our opinions and religious beliefs, but we are not entitled to make shit up and then use the shit we made up to oppress other people.” 

Roots:
“It’s in the most basic, essential, beginning stories that so much of our lives are written. Who loved you best? What made you finally believe in yourself? From what garden or pot or crack in the pavement did you grow? How did you get your water?”

“Humility is about refusing to get all tangled up with yourself. It’s about surrender, receptivity, awareness, simplicity. Breathing in. Breathing out.” 

Success:
“Success is measured only by your ability to say yes to these two questions: Did I do the work I needed to do? Did I give it everything I had?”

Tiny Beautiful Things – Cheryl Strayed

Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice from Dear Sugar by Cheryl Strayed
Date read: 2/21/23. Recommendation: 8/10.

The best of Strayed’s advice from her column Dear Sugar in a single collection. The columns cover dozens of topics from relationships and finding yourself to writing and doing hard things. At its core, as Strayed explains, the column has always been about connection and one person writing a letter to another—in pain, courage, confusion, clarity, love, and faith. My favorite columns were those that discussed writing, authenticity, rites of passage, and taking what’s yours.

See my notes below or Amazon for details and reviews.

My Notes:

Origins of Advice from Dear Sugar:
At its core, Dear Sugar has always been about one person writing a letter to another—in pain, courage, confusion, clarity, love, and faith. And about connecting. “It has always been about believing that when we dare tell the truth about who we are and what we want and how exactly we’re afraid or sad or lost or uncertain that transformation is possible, that light can be found, that courage and compassion can be mustered.”

Writing:
“As my thirtieth birthday approached, I realized that if I truly wanted to write the story I had to tell, I would have to gather everything within me to make it happen. I would have to sit and think of only one thing longer and harder than I thought possible. I would have to suffer. By which I mean work.”

“But I’d finally reached a point where the prospect of not writing a book was more awful than the one of writing a book that sucked.” 

“When I was done writing it, I understood that things happened just as they were meant to. That I couldn’t have written my book before I did. I simply wasn’t capable of doing so, either as a writer or a person. To get to the point I had to get to to write my first book, I had to do everything I did in my twenties. I had to write a lot of sentences that never turned into anything and stories that never miraculously formed a novel. I had to read voraciously and compose exhaustive entries in my journals…”

“I’d finally been able to give it because I’d let go of all the grandiose ideas I’d once had about myself and my writing…I stopped being grandiose. I’d lowered myself to the notion that the absolute only thing that mattered was getting that extra beating heart out of my chest. Which meant I had to write my book.”

“I know it’s hard to write, darling. But it’s harder not to. The only way you’ll find out if you ‘have it in you’ is to get to work and see if you do.” 

“So write, Elissa Bassist. Not like a girl. Not like a boy. Write like a motherfucker.” 

Take what’s yours:
“Nobody is going to give you a thing. You have to give it to yourself. You have to tell us what you have to say.” 

“I woke up to the realization that if it was true that my life was going nowhere and the reason it was going nowhere was me, then it was also true that only I had the power to change it. No one could do it for me. I had to do it myself, wildly.”

Authenticity is your now:
“The future has an ancient heart.” Carlo Levi

“Who we become is born of who we most primitively are; we both know and cannot possibly know what it is we’ve yet to make manifest in our lives.” 

“There is absolutely nothing wrong with law school, but don’t go unless you want to be a lawyer. You can’t take a class if taking a class feels like it’s going to kill you.”

“Let whatever mysterious starlight that guided you this far guide you onward to whatever crazy beauty awaits.” 

Rites of passage:
“Difficulty, solitude, and risk, are the three things that all rites of passage have in common. It’s because putting ourselves in situations where we must do hard things that scare us without anyone there to intervene pushes us beyond what we previously thought ourselves capable of. It expands our perception of our own courage, strength, and endurance.”

“I tested myself when I went on my long hike on the Pacific Crest Trail, which I embarked on about nine months after I hacked my braid off in Blue Fourche. I had to do something hard so I could know my strength. I had to do something scary so I could find my courage. I had to do something alone so I could see who I was. I didn’t know that doing those things at twenty-six would change my life in all the ways it has….”