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?
Cheryl StrayedThe useless days will add up to something. The shitty waitressing jobs. The hours writing in your journal. The long meandering walks. The hours reading poetry and story collections and novels and dead peopleโs diaries and wondering about sex and God and whether you should shave under your arms or not. These things are your becoming.
Cheryl StrayedWhen someone you love truly dies, you have to find them over and over again in the world, and I think you do that on a very psychic, unconscious level, and I think in some ways I was calling out to that spirit of my mother when I saw the fox. It doesn't surprise me it's in animals that I find my mother.
Cheryl StrayedLooking back at my younger self, that I'm not so different than I am now. I was always a seeker. I wanted very ambitiously to be a writer and what happened between now and then is that I continually threw myself in the way of those things that would help me become that, of doing and finding and learning from things that altered me along the way.
Cheryl Strayed