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
love-you giving people
You have to pay your own electric bill. You have to be kind. You have to give it all you got. You have to find people who love you truly and love them back with the same truth. But that's all.
children husband thinking
Aside from marrying my husband and having my children, hiking the PCT was the best thing I ever did. The hike very literally forced me to put one foot in front of the other at a time when emotionally I didn't think I could do that.
thinking people brain
On my hike my brain was left to wander. That was often maddening because it was tedious and monotonous sometimes, but then my the mind would take over, and that's when I'd start hearing the music in my head or thinking deeply about people I know or things that I didn't even know I remembered anymore. Those thoughts would be there. I wouldn't have had them otherwise.
sex body music-love
I love music and listen to music all the time, but I didn't realize how much my body needed music. I needed it more than sex.
wilderness heavy packs
You can't replicate walking 94 days through the wilderness by yourself with a really heavy pack until you do it.
change effort pushing
Uncertain as I was as I pushed forward. I felt right in my pushing, as if the effort itself meant something.
names wild-places darkness
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.
bravery stories overcoming-fear
Fear, to a great extent, is born of a story we tell ourselves...
writing men thinking
Writing is hard for every last one of us—straight white men included. Coal mining is harder. Do you think miners stand around all day talking about how hard it is to mine for coal? They do not. They simply dig.
struggle long new-life
I walked all those miles, I learned all those lessons. It's as if my new life was the gift I got at the end of a long struggle.
Let yourself be gutted. Let it open you. Start here.
miscarriage healing talking
The healing power of even the most microscopic exchange with someone who knows in a flash precisely what you're talking about because she experienced that thing too cannot be overestimated.
letting-go morning pain
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.
healing dark light
The place of true healing is a fierce place. It's a giant place. it's a place of monstrous beauty and endless dark and glimmering light.