Wild by Cheryl Strayed

909 Words2 Pages

Straying away from life as a whole only to be alone, some may say is the strong way to heal themselves when dealing with extreme grief or a major crisis . In the book Wild, twenty-two year old Cheryl Strayed thought she had lost it all. 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 made the most life changing decision of her life. Strayed never seems remorseful on her decisions to up and leave everything behind while deciding to flee from it all. This being her way of dealing with life, it shows her as being strong; a woman of great strength and character. She shows personal strength, which is more than just a physical word. It is a word of very high value and can only be defined by searching deep within your very own soul.
We have all been faced with countless tragedies in our lives such as the loss of a loved one or a divorce, which have tested our personal strengths. Losing your mother takes a lot out of you as a person. While reading the book and realizing how close Strayed and her mother were, Lord only knows how empty she felt inside. Personal strengths are mostly defined as incidents, or knowledge of incidents that surround our day to day lives.With no experience or training, Strayed decided to up and leave her entire way of life only driven by blind will. Strayed stated, “I knew that if I allowed fear to overtake me, my journey was doomed. Fear, to a great extent, is born of a story we tell ourselves, and so I chose to tell myself a different story from the one women are told. I decided I was safe. I was strong. I was brave. Nothing could vanquish me” (Strayed 30). She went o...

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...egories: physical, mental, and spiritual. Physical strength can be defined as; the quality of being physically strong, or capacity to sustain the application of force without yielding or breaking.” (Diaz 238). Reading this book brings about many different gestures of strength bringing about different emotions and showing that you can deal with heartache, pain, and every other emotion in various ways, but just like Cheryl Strayed said “Let yourself be gutted. Let it open you. Start here.”

Work Cited
Strayed, Cheryl. Wild: From Lost to Found On the Pacific Crest Trail. New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, 2012. Print.
Strayed, Cheryl. The Love of My Life. The Sun Magazine, 2002. Web.
Diaz , Cameron. The Body Book: The Law of Hunger, the Science of Strength, and Other Ways to
Love Your Amazing Body. 1st ed. New York, New York: Publisher: HarperCollins, 2013. Print.

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