Latest Posts by gone-a-strayed - Page 2

Don't surrender all your joy for an idea you used to have about yourself that isn't true anymore.

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

I didn't know how living outdoors and sleeping on the ground in a tent each night and walking alone through the wilderness all day almost every day had come to feel like my normal life, but it had. It was the idea of not doing it that scared me.

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

As difficult and maddening as the trail could be, there was hardly a day that passed that didn't offer up some form of what was called trail magic in the PCT vernacular-the unexpected and sweet happenings that stand out in stark relief to the challenges of the trail.

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

Each night the black sky and the bright stars were my stunning companions; occasionally I’d see their beauty and solemnity so plainly that I'd realize in a piercing way that my mother was right. That someday I WOULD be grateful and that in fact I was grateful now, that I felt something growing in me that was strong and real.

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

It had nothing to do with gear or footwear or the backpacking fads or philosophies of any particular era or even with getting from point A to point B. It had to do with how it felt to be in the wild. With what it was like to walk for miles with 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.

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

Put yourself in the way of beauty.

Cheryl Strayed, quoting her mother’s advice

Uncertain as I was as I pushed forward, I felt right in my pushing, as if the effort itself meant something. That perhaps being amidst the undesecrated beauty of the wilderness meant I too could be undesecrated, regardless of the regrettable things I'd done to others or myself or the regrettable things that had been done to me. Of all the things I'd been skeptical about, I didn't feel skeptical about this: the wilderness had a clarity that included me.

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

I walked and I walked, my mind shifting into a primal gear that was void of anything but forward motion, and I walked until walking became unbearable, until I believed I couldn't walk even one more step. And then I ran.

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

“The void?” I'd asked, crestfallen. “It's a good thing, she said. It's the place where things are born, where they begin. Think about how a black hole absorbs energy and then releases it into something that's new and alive.”

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

I could feel myself disintegrating inside myself like a past-bloom flower…Every time I moved a muscle, another petal of me blew away.

Cheryl Strayed

I had problems a therapist couldn't solve; grief that no man in a room could ameliorate.

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

It seemed to me the way it must feel to people who cut themselves on purpose. Not pretty, but clean. Not good, but void of regret. I was trying to heal. Trying to get the bad out of my system so I could be good again. To cure me of myself.

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

...but thinking about it didn't do a thing. Thinking about it was a long dive into a bucket of shit that didn't have a bottom.

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

What if I forgave myself? I thought. What if I forgave myself even though I'd done something I shouldn't have? What if I was a liar and a cheat and there was no excuse for what I'd done other than because it was what I wanted and needed to do? What if I was sorry, but if I could go back in time I wouldn't do anything differently than I had done? What if I'd actually wanted to fuck every one of those men? What if heroin taught me something? What if yes was the right answer instead of no? What if what made me do all those things everyone thought I shouldn't have done was what also had got me here? What if I was never redeemed? What if I already was?

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

You have to say I am forgiven again and again until it becomes the story you believe about yourself.

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

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

Forgiveness doesn't sit there like a pretty boy in a bar. Forgiveness is the old fat guy you have to haul up a hill.

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

Forgiveness bellows from the bottom of the canoe. There are doubts, dangers, unfathomable travesties. There are stories you'll learn if you're strong enough to travel there. One of them might cure you.

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

...the death of my mother was the thing that made me believe the most deeply in my safety: nothing bad could happen to me, I thought. The worst thing already had.

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

My mother's death put me in touch with my most savage self. As I've grown up and come to terms with her death and accepted it, the pieces of her that I keep don't exist materially.

Cheryl Strayed

She would always be my mother, I told her, but I had to go. She wasn't there for me in that flowerbed anymore anyway, I explained. I'd put her somewhere else. The only place I could reach her. In me.

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

I put her burnt bones into my mouth and swallowed them whole

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

I was reading about animals a while back and there was this motherfucking scientist in France back in the thirties or forties or whenever the motherfuck it was and he was trying to get apes to draw these pictures, to make art pictures like the kinds of pictures in serious motherfucking paintings that you see in museums and shit. So the scientist keeps showing the apes these paintings and giving them charcoal pencils to draw with and then one day one of the apes finally draws something but it's not the art pictures that it draws. What it draws is the bars of its own motherfucking cage. Its own motherfucking cage!

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

Accept that this experience taught you something you didn't want to know. Accept that sorrow and strife are part of even a joyful life. Accept that it's going to take a long time for you to get that monster out of your chest. Accept that someday what pains you now will surely pain you less.

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

If, as a culture, we don't bear witness to grief, the burden of loss is placed entirely upon the bereaved, while the rest of us avert our eyes and wait for those in mourning to stop being sad, to let go, to move on, to cheer up. And if they don't - if they have loved too deeply, if they do wake each morning thinking, I cannot continue to live - well, then we pathologize their pain; we call their suffering a disease. We do not help them: we tell them that they need to get help.

Cheryl Strayed, The Love Of My Life

We like to pretend that our generous impulses come naturally. But the reality is we often become our kindest, most ethical selves only by seeing what it feels like to be a selfish jackass first. ...we have to get burned before we understand the power of fire...

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

I had diverged, digressed, wandered, and become wild. I didn't embrace the word as my new name because it defined negative aspects of my circumstances or life, but because even in my darkest days- those very days in which I was naming myself- I saw the power of the darkness. Saw that, in fact, I had strayed and that I was a stray and that from the wild places my straying had brought me, I knew things I couldn't have known before.

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

I happen to believe that America is dying of loneliness, that we, as a people, have bought into the false dream of convenience, and turned away from a deep engagement with our internal lives-those fountains of inconvenient feeling-and toward the frantic enticements of what our friends in the Greed Business call the Free Market. We're hurtling through time and space and information faster and faster, seeking that network connection. But at the same time we're falling away from our families and our neighbors and ourselves. We ego-surf and update our status and brush up on which celebrities are ruining themselves, and how. But the cure won't stick.

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