Author: Cheryl Strayed
They live on Planet Earth. You live on Planet My Baby Died.
I think I cry because it always strikes me as sacred, all those people going by. People who decided simply to live their truth, even when doing so wasn’t simple. Each and every one of them had the courage to say, This is who I am even if you’ll crucify me for it. Just like Jesus did.
It’s devastating for a child to hear one parent speak ill of the other.
I wept and shrieked and hid and got age- inappropriate headaches and peed my bed way beyond the age that’s normal.
Trust yourself. It’s Sugar’s golden rule. Trusting yourself means living out what you already know to be true.
There’s arrogance at its core. It presumes you should be successful at twenty-six, when really it takes most writers so much longer to get there.
Time describing how little you write. You loathe yourself, and yet you’re consumed by the grandiose ideas you have about your own importance. You’re up too high and down too low. Neither is the place where we get any work done.
The only way you’ll find out if you “have it in you” is to get to work and see if you do. The only way to override your “limitations, insecurities, jealousies, and ineptitude” is to produce. You have limitations. You are in some ways inept. This is true of every writer, and it’s especially true of writers who are twenty-six. You will feel insecure and jealous. How much power you give those feelings is entirely up to you.
They are inaccurate and melodramatic
So write, Elissa Bassist. Not like a girl. Not like a boy. Write like a motherfucker.
Go! Go! Go! You need it one more time, darling? GO.
But compassion isn’t about solutions. It’s about giving all the love that you’ve got.
life is long, that people both change and remain the same, that every last one of us will need to fuck up and be forgiven, that we’re all just walking and walking and walking and trying to find our way, that all roads lead eventually to the mountaintop.
You know how alcoholics who go to AA are always using that phrase “one day at a time”? They say that because to say “I will never drink again” is just too damn much.
Accept that someday what pains you now will surely pain you less.
Acceptance has everything to do with simplicity, with sitting in the ordinary place, with bearing witness to the plain facts of our life, with not just starting at the essential, but ending up there.
The most terrible and beautiful and interesting things happen in a life. For some of you, those things have already happened. Whatever happens to you belongs to you. Make it yours. Feed it to yourself even if it feels impossible to swallow. Let it nurture you, because it will.
What I want you to note is that Belle loved the beast when he was still a beast—not a handsome prince.
How quickly I shifted from the shock of my mother’s betrayal to the terror of my new reality to the pure delight of how it felt to swim.
Let yourself be gutted. Let it open you. Start there.
You have an obligation to play the hell out of the ones you’re holding
think really hard about what I’ll wish I did a year from now.
Love is our essential nutrient. Without it, life has little meaning. It’s the best thing we have to give and the most valuable thing we receive. It’s worthy of all the hullabaloo.
Boundaries teach people how to treat you, and they teach you how to respect yourself. In a perfect world,
Not regretting it later is the reason I’ve done at least three-quarters of the best things in my life.
Any of us could die any day of any number of causes. Would you expect your partner to explain what you might have to go through should he die in a car accident, of heart failure, or by drowning? Those are things that could happen too. You are a mortal being like every human and June bug, like every black bear and salmon. We’re all going to die, but only some of us are going to die tomorrow or next year or in the next half century.
Would it ring? It would not ring. Should you call? You should not call.
The one you are in charge of is the book. The one that happens based on forces that are mostly outside of your control is the book deal.
Your cause is to write a great book and then to write another great book and to keep writing them for as long as you can.