Cheryl Strayed
Cheryl Strayed
Cheryl Strayedis an American memoirist, novelist, and essayist. The author of four books, her award-winning writing has been published widely in national magazines and anthologies...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth17 September 1968
CitySpangler, PA
CountryUnited States of America
retrospect complicated sometimes
The complicated thing about friends is that sometimes they are totally wrong about us and sometimes they are totally right and it's almost always only in retrospect that we know which is which.
people advice know-it-all
My concept of an advice giver had been a therapist or a know-it-all, and then I realized nobody listens to the know-it-alls. You turn to the people you know, the friend who has been in the thick of it or messed up - and I'm that person for sure.
mother self pieces
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.
mom sunset wild-beauty
My mom said there's a sunrise and a sunset every day and you can choose to be there or not. You can put yourself in the way of beauty.
what-if wild-girl ifs
What if I was never redeemed? What if I already was?
mom whole-life died
My whole life sort of ended when my mom died.
inspirational life-changing flower
I set my toothbrush down, then leaned into the mirror and stared into my own eyes. I could feel myself disintegrating inside myself like a past-bloom flower in the wind. Every time I moved a muscle, another petal of me blew away. Please, I thought. Please.
I could go back in the direction I had come from, or I could go forward in the direction I intended to go.
light stronger path
There is a path toward the light. The one that goes blink, blink, blink inside your chest when you know what you're doing is right. Listen to it. Trust it. Let it make you stronger than you are.
mean writing office
And if you're gonna be a writer, you just truly have to be a writer. You have to throw yourself into it and deal with the negative consequences of that. And there are negative consequences. I mean, there are. But, it's also true that you wouldn't be interviewing me right now if I had worked at the post office. You wouldn't. I would be still writing, but I wouldn't have gotten as far as I've gotten, because I wouldn't have had the time.
life positive success
Jump high and hard with intention and heart.
perception stories world
In my perception, the world wasn't a graph or formula or an equation. It was a story.
what-if go-back-in-time if-i-could
But if I could go back in time, I wouldn't do a single thing differently. What if all those things I did were the things that got me here?
distance differences risk
We are all at risk of something. Of ending up exactly where we began, of failing to imagine and find and know and actualize who we could be. The only difference is the distance of the leap.