Cheryl Strayed is the author of Wild.
If you haven’t read the book, I highly recommend it. It’s a book about changing the story that you tell yourself. It’s about becoming the person you want to be, instead of remaining the person you’ve let yourself become.
At one point in the book, Cheryl starts using heroin. She loves it and wants more because it is the first thing that has worked for her to ease the pain. Realizing the danger, she bows out before the drug takes over her life.
Cheryl decides to hike the Pacific Crest Trail, and she decides to hike it alone. She was struggling to make sense of her life because it just wasn’t working for her.
The story reminds me a bit of when my daughter went off to a Wilderness Camp in Loa, Utah. She also had a backpack on her back. I tried to pick it up at the end of her trip, and couldn’t lift it. She hiked for 5 weeks, no shower and no amenities. She was discovering and understanding why she had allowed herself to become addicted to crystal meth.
She was not alone. There were plenty of other people around her, except for a 24 period of time. It was her right of passage at the end of the experience to spend 24 hours alone in the wilderness. All went well, except when she woke up, there was a cow standing in the middle of her campsite. No harm was done.
Getting clarity by immersing ourselves with nature can inspire and empower us to find our way home.
We tell ourselves a story from when we were young. We keep replaying that story over and over. We believe that is who we are. When you question your beliefs, you may come to find that there is another way, a better way to live your life.
Naturally, after losing her mother, a broken marriage and the round with heroin, Cheryl was ready to give up on herself, but she decided to try something bold, something courageous, something new. The purpose was to change her life and become strong.
Here are the quotes that Oprah shared. You’ll see their broader meaning.
1. I’d finally come to understand what it had been: a yearning for a way out, when actually what I had wanted to find was a way in.
2. I could feel myself disintegrating inside myself like a past-bloom flower…Every time I moved a muscle, another petal of me blew away.
3. There’s no way to know what makes one thing happen and not another. What leads to what? What destroys what? What causes what to flourish or die or take another course?
4. He hadn’t loved me well in the end, but he’d love well when it mattered.
5. I’d done it. It seemed like such a small thing and such a tremendous thing at once, like a secret I’d always tell myself, though I didn’t know the meaning of it just yet.
6. It was my life — like all lives, mysterious and irrevocable and sacred. So very close, so very present, so very belonging to me. How wild it was, to let it be.
7. It seemed like my trip had just begun like I was only now digging into whatever it was I was out here to do. Like I was still the women with the hole in her heart, but the hole had gotten ever so infinitesimally smaller.
8. The father’s job is to teach his children how to be warriors, to give them the confidence to get on the horse and ride into battle when it’s necessary to do so. If you don’t get that from your father, you have to teach yourself.
9. 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.
10. The universe, I’d learned, was never, ever kidding.
11. There were so many other amazing things in this world. They opened up inside of me like a river.
12. But I wasn’t out here to keep myself from having to say I am not afraid. I’d come, I realized to stare that fear down, to start everything down, really…I couldn’t do that while tagging along with someone else.
13. Uncertain as I was as I pushed forward, I felt right in my pushing, as if the effort itself meant something.
14. Perhaps being amidst the undesecrated beauty of the wilderness meant I too could be undesecrated, regardless of what I’d lost, of what had been taken from me….
15. Of all the things I’d been skeptical about, I didn’t feel skeptical about this: the wilderness had a clarity that included me.
16. I only felt that in spite of all the things I’d done wrong, in getting myself here, I’d done right.
17. I’d walk and think about my entire life. I’d find my strength again, far from everything that had made my life ridiculous.
18. I was amazed that what I needed to survive could be carried on my back. And, most surprising of all, that I could carry it. That I could bear the unbearable.
19. That my complicated life could be made so simple was astounding.
20. Alone had always felt like an actual place to me as if it weren’t a state of being, but rather a room where I could retreat to be who I really was.
21. Alone wasn’t a room anymore, but the whole wide world, and now I was alone in that world, occupying it in a way I never had before.
22. It felt something growing in me that was strong and real.
23. Fear, to a great extent, is born of a story we tell ourselves and so I chose to tell myself a different story from the one women are told. I decided I was safe. I was strong. I was brave.
24. I had to change…Not into a different person, but back to the person I used to be..
25. I considered my option. There were only two and they were essentially the same. I could go back in the direction I had come from, or I could go forward in the direction I intended to go.
Picture credit Environment Blog.
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