Straying away from society in general just to be distant from everyone else, some may state is the solid approach for self-discovery when managing extraordinary grief or personal crisis. In the book Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail (2013), twenty-two year old Cheryl Strayed goes through a roller coaster with unfortunate events both in her control and out of her control. Dealing with the loss of her mother, her family torn to pieces, and her very own marriage was being destroyed right before her very eyes. Living life with nothing more to lose, lifeless, she adventured on the most groundbreaking choice of her life, to hike the Pacific Coast Trail with just her backpack and grift trying to survive on her own while being completely …show more content…
When Strayed lost her mother, in a way she also lost the rest of her family and a piece of herself. Strayed’s mother was the glue, the mold that held what family she had left together. Strayed’s mother in highly present through out the book and I would say the inspiration on Strayed’s journey along the PCT. Strayed reflects in the beginning of the book that her journey actually truly began a over four years ago, on the day that she had learned her forty-five year-old mother was going to die of advanced stage lung cancer, she states “It hadn’t occurred to me that my mother would die. Until she was dying, the thought had never entered my mind. She was monolithic and insurmountable, the keeper of my life” (20). After her mothers dead, she feels alone and lost, unable to settle into her new identity, she decides she needs to become the woman her mother wanted her to. During her hike to re-discover the person she once was, the thoughts about her broken family haunt her on the trail every day and remind her that she needed to keep going as there was not anything she could loose even though she had no idea which way to go, so she just went