The Love of My Life Cheryl Strayed: Biography Essay

Many individuals in society are dissatisfied with their lives but refuse to make any changes. Cheryl Nyland is among the small number who decide to take action and alter her lifestyle. Nyland, a writer, who was born September 17, 1968, in Spangler, Pennsylvania, had a very difficult childhood which ultimately shaped her into the person she is today. Her parents, Bobbi Lambrecht, and her abusive husband, divorced when she was five years old. After moving the family to Minnesota, her mother remarried. Although the family was very poor, Nyland’s mother was working many jobs and provided for the family as best as she could. The strength, optimism, and love she showed gave Nyland a view of the world that most do not see. She had “an understanding of the actual value of a single dollar by virtue of having witnessed that dollar being stretched again and again. A particular brand of faith, humility, pride, and resilience takes root when everything you have was earned in spite of the odds, not because of them (4). Due to this view, Nyland was able to get through the difficult times she was about to face. In her senior year, her mother was diagnosed with lung cancer and passed away 49 days later. Nyland had lost the one thing she needed the most. After losing her mother, her stepfather distanced himself f the family and remarried. During this time, Nyland was married to Marco Littig, a very good man who loved her very much. But, she began acting out due to the grief she felt and got involved with a heroin addict. This eventually led to her becoming a heroin addict herself. While considering divorce, she realized that she could not keep the last name of her husband or go back to her name in high school, because that would cause her to become the girl she used to be. Eventually, the word strayed came to mind. Upon looking it up in the dictionary, she knew it was perfect: “Its layered definitions spoke directly to my life and also struck a poetic chord: to wander from the proper path, to deviate from the direct course, to be lost, to become wild, to be without a mother or father, to be without a home, to move about aimlessly in search of something, to diverge or digress. I had diverged, digressed, wandered, and become wild. . . . I saw the power of the darkness. Saw that, in fact, I had strayed and that I was a stray and that from the wild ­places my straying had brought me, I knew things I couldn’t have known before.” (Shapiro). So, she was now Cheryl Strayed. The divorce was finalized in 1995. Shortly after she made the most impulsive decision of her life: a 1,100-mile hike of the Pacific Crest Trail. Cheryl Strayed, doleful with uncontrollable circumstances, rebels against her lifestyle as she sets out to hike the Pacific Crest Trail. Although she encountered setbacks, she found many successes.

As the feeling of being destroyed capitulates Strayed, she starts her journey with no experience or training. Strayed rebelled against society's standards of normal. Most people would not impetuously decide to hike with no insight on how to complete the journey or what is needed. But, realizing she needed to make a change in her life, Strayed resolved to rebel against the way she was living. At age 22, thinking she had lost everything, started planning to hike the Pacific Crest Trail alone: “I knew I needed to do something that would snap me out of the kind of life I was living. I was just so sad and broken, I hardly recognized myself. I was always obsessing: Should I get divorced? What should I do about this heroin stuff? Or these boyfriends? And then I found out that I was pregnant, which to me was just completely symbolic of everything that I'd fucked up, and I was like, Okay, I really have to get myself out of this dark place” (Nelson). She started by going to the outdoors store and purchasing everything she could think of for her journey: “fleece pants and an anorak, a thermal shirt, two pairs of wool socks and underwear, a sleeping bag, a camp chair, a head lamp, five bungee cords, a water purifier, a tiny collapsible stove, a canister of gas and a small pink lighter, two cooking pots, utensils, a thermometer, a tarp, a snakebite kit, a Swiss Army knife, binoculars” and many other items (Shapiro). She would hike from Mojave Desert through California and Oregon to Washington State for a total of 1,100 miles, and “people with any hiking experience… will know that this is the backpack of a rank amateur, that setting out on a 1,100-mile trek from the Mojave Desert to the Cascades outfitted in brand-new hiking boots — a size too small, it turned out — and with 24.5 pounds of water in a dromedary bag is a recipe for disaster” (Shapiro). Strayed walked for a little over three months: “I was out there 94 days, and most of those days I didn't see another human soul. The first eight days of my trip I didn't see another human being, and that was very intense, especially to have it be right at the beginning when I was really coming to grips with the fact that I had an awful lot to learn” (2). Despite having no radio, phone, credit cards, or experience, Strayed survived.

Cheryl Strayed eased her emotional affliction by physically putting her body through suffering. Upon starting her journey, she was in a place of emotional suffering. The hike was very physically testing and more strenuous than Strayed assumed it would be. Throughout her time on the trial, the “physically suffer really alleviated a lot of the emotional suffering. You know, suddenly I wasn't thinking about how I was going to live without my mother. I was thinking about how I was going to bear to walk another, you know, five miles that afternoon with these terrible blisters on my feet” (2). Strayed started to realize that drawing the focus away from emotional issues is how she had to deal with them. Throughout the three months, Strayed dealt with many feelings that came with her mother’s death. The grief slowly diminished and she started to accept everything that was going on in her life. The journey led her to self-discovery and she came out of the Pacific Crest Trail as a new person. The journey turned Strayed into the strong individual she is today: “Seventeen years later, she credits the hike with saving her life--not only by giving her the chance to find the time and, quite literally, the space to grieve her losses, but also by giving her the mental energy to write her first novel” (Schwartz). Although Strayed started the journey emotionally suffering, it broke her down and rebuilt her. She overcame her fears and learned so many things about herself.

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Without prior training, Cheryl Strayed encountered many setbacks. She dealt with many challenges that nature threw at her. Strayed had many confrontations with “bears, rattlesnakes, mountain lion scat, ice, record snow, and predatory men. She lost six toenails, suffered countless bruises and scabs, improvised bootees made of socks wrapped in duct tape, and woke up one time covered in frogs” (Shapiro). She also dealt with many accidents, for example: “halfway through the hike, one of her boots has fallen off the side of a mountain--forcing her to make do with a pair of camp sandals” (Schwartz). One of her biggest setbacks was the “Monster” or her backpack. The night before Strayed started the trail, it sunk in that she may not be able to carry the backpack: “I actually could not lift it. I could not even lift it a centimeter… It was the biggest backpack of anyone I encountered that whole summer, and maybe the biggest backpack that's ever existed” (2). Monster weighed nearly 70 pounds and a mere 50 at its lightest (Schappell). But the biggest setback of all was her disappointment: “I thought I was going to be spiritually reawakened, but after a couple of weeks of hiking, I thought, Well, this isn't working. I should be crying every night and having all these incredibly transcendent and beautiful moments of stillness. And instead, I'm like: Okay, my feet are killing me and I'm hungry” (Nelson). The many setbacks Strayed encountered helped her to become a stronger individual.

The setbacks and successes led Cheryl Strayed to emerge from the Pacific Crest Trail as a different person. Although Strayed still grieves the loss of her mother, her perspective has changed: 'At first I was frozen and trapped without her, and if I admitted anything except that I loved her--and back then, that was the greatest truth--if I let anything else in, I would lose my grip on her. Now I honor my mom in a different way. For the longest time, I was only defining her in relation to me. It took hiking the PCT to understand the fullness of my grief--to see that, outside of being my mom, she was a real person who had, at such a young age, lost her life. I came to see that my grief could transform itself from how her death had affected me, to how it had taken her from her own vibrant life' (). Throughout the journey, Strayed found truths about life and love. She learned how to survive through emotional and physical difficulties and “though the experience was difficult and mistake-filled, she persisted because she could not fail” (4). This mindset is what led Strayed to accept everything that had occurred and become a stronger version of herself in all aspects.

The setbacks Strayed faced helped her learn so much about herself. While the successes helped her to become a new her. Although Strayed encountered a difficult childhood, she chose to learn from it. In the same way, she chose to learn from the difficult years of her mother’s passing. She was unhappy with her life and choose to do something about it. Many people do not take action to better themselves and their lives. Cheryl Strayed rebelled against the way she was living and in turn, saved her own life.

Works Cited

1. Nelson, Sara. “Cheryl Strayed Hikes Her Way Through Heartbreak in Wild.” Oprah.com, 2012, www.oprah.com/spirit/wild-by-cheryl-strayed-cheryl-strayed-interview. Accessed 22 September 2019.
2. 'A 'Wild,' Solitary Journey On The Pacific Crest Trail.' Weekend Edition Sunday, 18 Mar. 2012. Gale In Context: Opposing Viewpoints, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A284485241/GPS?u=west67671&sid=GPS&xid=e89e37ca. Accessed 22 Sept. 2019.
3. Shapiro, Dani. “The High Road.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 30 Mar. 2012, www.nytimes.com/2012/04/01/books/review/wild-a-hiking-memoir-by-cheryl-strayed.html.
4. Accessed 22 September 2019.
5. 'Cheryl Strayed.' Newsmakers, vol. 4, Gale, 2013. Gale In Context: High School, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/K1618005794/GPS?u=west67671&sid=GPS&xid=a34eac1a. Accessed 22 Sept. 2019.
6. Schappell, Elissa. “The Advice Reese Witherspoon Gave Wild Author Cheryl Strayed.” Vanity Fair, Vanity Fair, 7 Nov. 2014, www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2014/11/cheryl-strayed-wild.
7. Schwartz, Leslie. 'The beauty of a brutal honesty: in a new memoir, wild, author Cheryl Strayed reveals all she lost following the death of her mother, and takes readers along on her three-month hike through the wilderness to find it again.' Poets & Writers Magazine, vol. 40, no. 2, 2012, p. 46+. Gale In Context: High School, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A281900979/GPS?u=west67671&sid=GPS&xid=7dbabdf1. Accessed 22 Sept. 2019.