Their leaving made me melancholy, though I also felt something like relief when they disappeared into the dark trees. I hadn't needed to get anything from my pack; I'd only wanted to be alone. Alone had always felt like an actual place to me, as if it weren't a state of being, but rather a room where I could retreat to be who I really was.
Cheryl StrayedI 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 daysโthose very days in which I was naming myselfโI 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 StrayedThe most important thing for aspiring writers is for them to give themselves permission to be brave on the page, to write in the presence of fear, to go to those places that you think you canโt write - really thatโs exactly what you need to write.
Cheryl StrayedThat's how we find our way outward and onward. By holding onto beauty hardest. By cradling it like the cure that it is. By making it realer than anything ever was. The rest is just monsters and ghosts.
Cheryl StrayedDonโt do what you know on a gut level to be the wrong thing to doI donโt think thereโs a single dumbass thing Iโve done in my adult life that I didnโt know was a dumbass thing to do while I was doing it. Even when I justified it to myselfโas I did every damn timeโthe truest part of me knew I was doing the wrong thing. Always. As the years pass, Iโm learning how to better trust my gut and not do the wrong thing, but every so often I get a harsh reminder that Iโve still got work to do.
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 Strayed