I’m a free spirit who never had the balls to be free.
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Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail
#1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE At twenty-two, Cheryl Strayed thought she had lost everything. In the wake of her mother’s death, her family scattered and her own marriage was soon destroyed. Four years later, wit
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The universe, I’d learned, was never, ever kidding. It would take whatever it wanted and it would never give it back.
I’m a free spirit who never had the balls to be free.
I decided I was safe. I was strong. I was brave. Nothing could vanquish me.
I decided I was safe. I was strong. I was brave. Nothing could vanquish me.
I decided I was safe. I was strong. I was brave. Nothing could vanquish me.
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.
How wild it was, to let it be.
How wild it was, to let it be.
When I lay alone and lonely in my tent at night I asked, often out loud: Who is tougher than me? The answer was always the same, and even when I knew absolutely there was no way on this earth that it was true, I said it anyway: No one.’
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.
He reached over and touched his finger very delicately to the edge of one of its straps, near my collarbone, but instead of pushing it down and off my shoulder as I thought he would, he ran his finger slowly along then upper edge of my bra in front and then traced it all the way down around the bott…
Wanting was a wilderness.
Fear begets fear. Power begets power.
I’m a free spirit who never had the balls to be free.
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.
I'd finally come to understand what it had been: a yearning for a way out, when actually what I had wanted to find was a way in.
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.
There's no way to know what makes one thing happen and not another. What leads to what. What destroys what. What causes what to flourish or die or take another course.
It had to do with how it felt to be in the wild. With what it was like to walk for miles with no reason other than to witness the accumulation of trees and meadows, mountains and deserts, streams and rocks, rivers and grasses, sunrises and sunsets. The experience was powerful and fundamental. It see…