“Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail” tells the true story of Cheryl Strayed’s 1,100 mile solo trek from California to Washington State. I finished this book in three days flat, voraciously guzzling page after page. This book is everything a woman should, at some point in her life, experience. Strayed is a legitimate superhero!!
Wild has been adapted for the big screen and will be released worldwide in the coming months. In honour of its release, allow me to tell you in five quotes (no spoilers, promise) why this book matters.

‘I was a pebble. I was a leaf. I was the jagged branch of a tree. I was nothing to them and they were everything to me.’

I challenge you to finish this book without experiencing a strong urge to drop everything and run away to a field. As Cheryl describes the trees, the air, the horizons and breathtaking wildlife, I found myself remembering the giving power of nature. As she hikes excruciating mile upon mile, the earth heals Strayed as much as it breaks her.

 “I always did what someone else wanted me to do. I’ve always been someone’s daughter or mother or wife. I’ve never just been me.”

As women we are often told by society (and perhaps ourselves) that our worth is greater when we’re connected to another person. At the age of twenty four, I’m routinely asked when my boyfriend will propose, when I will ‘settle down’. These questions are asked far more than those about my career, dreams, projects or future goals. In films we seldom see women as a single entity. Their identity orbits others – falling in love, helping girlfriends, becoming mothers, pleasing bosses. Those are of course worthy activities, and stem from our innate desires to connect with others. The problem is when these things occur at the cost of knowing and connecting with one’s self.
It’s commonplace to see men forging alone on screen, but when women do the same, its often at the perceived detriment of something – her attractiveness, sanity, or even the ‘spinster’ label rearing its ugly head. Our worth is not defined by others, and this a crucial theme throughout Wild.

‘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’m walking down a dark street by myself. I am scared out of my mind. My brain automatically jumps to the absolute worst scenario, and I berate myself for voluntarily entering such a terrifying situation. I had a girl friend who was the polar opposite. ‘Nothing will happen to me, the chances are so low. It just won’t’. She would walk around in confidence, never granting her mind the ‘what if’s. I could never understand her surety, her blissful ignorance – didn’t she know the terrible things that happened to women?!
I now understand she was controlling her thoughts, and have since attempted to do the same.
As Strayed hikes day after day, the thought control she uses is quite incredible. Along with physical pain, she deals with emotional strain, teaching herself to be okay in the face of everything from snow to sweltering heat.
Babies are often taught to self-soothe, being left for a limited time in cots to cry so they’ll learn to calm themselves. As we grow older, we often forget this valuable skill, and watching Strayed discover how to care for her emotional self was inspiring.

‘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.’

At this section of the book, Strayed had been on the trail for eight days without seeing another human being. Eight days. We rarely, if at all, have that experience. The longest I’ve gone without any human contact is possibly 24 hours.
Whilst backpacking the Philippines, the times I was apart from my friends, I was continuously asked, ‘Where is your companion?’ from kind, concerned locals. People hoped that I was with a man, for my safety, for my all-round sanity and wellbeing!

In today’s world, it seems that being alone is the worst that could happen, the ultimate failure. Even when we are alone, we busy our minds with music, earphones, phones, calls, work. Strayed hiked this trail in 1995, without music, without a phone, with only a whistle for safety. Discovering how to be alone, and more importantly, embracing that, is easier in theory than practice.

‘I felt like a hard-ass mother****ing Amazonian queen’

Read this book, watch the film. Hike, travel, run, live, dance. Find your own personal journey and take it. Do whatever it is that makes you feel this way. Do it again. And then do it as much as humanly possible. Because who on earth doesn’t want to feel like a hard-ass Amazonian queen?!