Cheryl Srayed Quotes

Mirror - Blaming my mother In her memoir, Cheryl Strayed talked about how she secretly blamed her mother for not able to receive enough care and get what others have. After her mother’s death, she realized “[there] was only [her] dead, insular, overly optimistic, non-college-preparing, occasionally-child-abandoning, pot-smoking, wooden-spoon-wielding, feel-free-to-call-me-by-my-name mom to blame” (Strayed 267). This made me think about the way I had always blamed my own parents. I blamed them for not giving birth to me at a young age, for not able to treat me the way other parents do, and for leaving me no choice but to go to a country I knew nothing about. As I read Cheryl’s memoir, I realized that one day I would also have no one to blame,

She felt “something inside of [her]released.” (Strayed 306) and found her direction, that what she actually wanted was “to find was a way in [instead of] a way out” (Strayed 290). She understood that her life was “like all lives, mysterious and irrevocable and sacred [and]so very close, so very present, so very belonging to [her]” (Strayed 303). This reminded me of a book I read last winter. In Everything Beautiful is not ruined, the main character Ingrid went on a wilderness trip as a deal with her mother. Before the trip, she did not understand her mother and suffered from overwhelming grief and stress. Her diaries written to her mother revealed her thoughts and feelings she had on the trip and reflected how she had changed over the course of three weeks in the wilderness. She gradually came to an understanding of her mother, the reason for her mother’s decisions and the reason she was on this trip. Her true feelings toward her mother and other people in her life became more clear to her as well. The trip also made her realized that she could be strong and needed to be ready to face the challenges ahead of her. The resemblance of how Cheryl and Ingrid had changed by the wilderness deepened my admiration of the power of nature, not that it teaches people new things, but that it forces them to think about their own life. Thinking is an important part of life as it changes people’s way of thinking and makes people

She indicated that “[she felt] more alone than anyone in the whole wide world [but] that was okay” (Strayed 189) and that “it felt good to be alone” (Pg 306). This reminded me of the time when I felt stressful from things that had happened in my life, the time when I did not want to deal with them anymore, the time when I did not want to be with anybody but myself. I wanted to run away from everything. So I ran. I did not run fast, but just fast enough when all I can focus on was the sound of my breath and the rhythm of my feet. It felt soothing, as if I was the only one in the world and as if everything that had caused me problems faded away. Though I could not actually run away from the difficult situations I was facing, by running alone, I could have a break from the exhausting life and have some time to regather myself. By connecting to my own personal experiences, I had a better understanding of how Cheryl had felt on her hike and the reason people wanted and enjoyed being