A Long Journey To Find Yourself: Wild by Cheryl Strayed

The way one person feels or how they react to a situation is very different for each person because no two brains are identical. Every person handles each situation in life different than the next person, which was made very apparent in Wild by Cheryl Strayed. In her book, she is very upfront with all her “coping skills” and does not apologize for what she did in order for her to “cope”. Strayed lost her mother at the age of 22, her whole world shattered around her. She ends up single handedly destroying anything that was good in her life, her husband, her career, even her degree. Cheryl Strayed is brave in the way she describes all of her misgivings without trying to make herself nobler than she is and without seeming as though she is ashamed.

In her article The Love Of My Life she talks about the 5 stages of grief and how everyone she knows has the same ideals on someone who is grieving and how they should deal with them and in what order they should be felt. She goes straight to the point when she says "I did not deny. I did not get angry. I didn’t bargain, become depressed, or accept. I fucked. I sucked. Not my husband, but people I hardly knew, and in that I found a glimmer of relief…With them, I was not in mourning; I wasn’t even me. I was happy and sexy and impetuous and fun. I was wild and enigmatic and terrifically good in bed” (Strayed).

She knew how people were “supposed” to do deal with grief but for her, fucking was the only way in which she found relief. Cheryl knew what she did was wrong but still gives more detail without remorse and very matter of factly:

I did what I did with these people, and then I returned home to Mark, weak-kneed and wet,

bleary-eyed and elated. I’m alive, I thought in that giddy, ...

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...me back into the girl I'd once been”(Strayed, 4). She might have been from the woods of Minnesota but she was ill prepared for this journey she was undertaking. This is mainly seen in the immense size of her backpack which she later names monster. Not long after she begins this journey does she begin to feel as though her pack is her burdens and she feels as though she must bear it. As her journey continues she rids herself of the unneeded weight, both in the physical and psychological sense. The strength of her character, can be measured by the sheer determination she has to push on and ultimately come out the other side a changed woman.

Works Cited

Strayed, Cheryl. Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail. New York: Vintage, 2013.

Print.

Strayed, Cheryl. “The Love of My Life.” The Sun. The Sun Magazine. 2002. 02 February

2014. Web.