The Narratives We Create In Order To Justify Our Actions And Choices Become In So Many Ways Who We Are.

You don’t have a right to the cards you believe you should have been dealt… You have an obligation to play the hell out of the ones you’re holding...

Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar

If I could go back in time I'd make the same choice in a snap. And yet, there remains my sister life. All the other things I could have done instead. I wouldn't know what I couldn't know until I became a mom, and so I'm certain there are things I don't know because I can't know because I did. Who would I have nurtured had I not been nurturing my two children over these past seven years? In what creative and practical forces would my love have been gathered up? What didn't I write because I was catching my children at the bottoms of slides and spotting them as they balanced along the tops of low brick walls and pushing them endlessly in swings? What did I write because I did? Would I be happier and more intelligent and prettier if I had been free all this time to read in silence on a couch that sat opposite of Mr. Sugar's? Would I complain less? Has sleep deprivation and the consumption of an exorbitant number of Annie's Homegrown Organic Cheddar Bunnies taken years off my life or added years onto it? Who would I have met if I had bicycled across Iceland and hiked around Mongolia and what would I have experienced and where would that have taken me? I'll never know, and neither will you, of the life you don't choose. We'll only know that whatever that sister life was, it was important and beautiful and not ours. It was the ghost ship that didn't carry us. There's nothing to do but salute it from the shore.

Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar

The obliterated place is equal parts destruction and creation. The obliterated place is pitch black and bright light. It is water and parched earth. It is mud and it is manna. The real work of deep grief is making a home there.

Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar

Don't listen to those people who suggest you should be over your daughter's death by now. The people who squawk the loudest about such things have almost never had to get over anything. Or at least not anything that was genuinely, mind-fuckingly, soul-crushingly life altering. Some of those people believe they're being helpful by minimizing your pain. Others are scared of the intensity of your loss and so they use their words to push your grief away. Many of those people love you and are worthy of your love, but they are not the people who will be helpful to you when it comes to healing the pain of your daughter's death. They live on Planet Earth. You live on Planet My Baby Died.

Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar

My mother's last word to me clanks inside me like an iron bell that someone beats at dinnertime: love, love, love, love, love

Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar

God is not a granter of wishes. God is a ruthless bitch.

Cheryl Strayed, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

I didn't feel like a big fat idiot anymore. And I didn't feel like a hard-ass motherfucking Amazonian queen. I felt fierce and humble and gathered up inside, like I was safe in this world too.

Cheryl Strayed, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

The narratives we create in order to justify our actions and choices become in so many ways who we are. They are the things we say back to ourselves to explain our complicated lives. Perhaps the reason you've not yet been able to forgive yourself is that you're still invested in your self-loathing. Perhaps not forgiving yourself is the flip side of your stealing-this-now cycle. Would you be a better or worse person if you forgave yourself for the bad things you did? If you perpetually condemn yourself for being a liar and a thief, does that make you good?

Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar

…compassion isn't about solutions. It's about giving all the love that you've got

Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear

The most terrible and beautiful and interesting things happen in life. For some of you, those things have already happened. 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.

Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar