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 - Cheryl Strayed

Fear, to a great extent, is born of a story we tell ourselves...

Fear, to a great extent, is born of a story we tell ourselves,

Every now and then I could see myself — truly see myself — and a sentence would come to me, thundering like a god into my head, and as I saw myself then in front of that tarnished mirror what came was the woman with the hole in her heart.

Saying it's hard is ultimately a justification to do whatever seems like the easiest thing to do — have the affair, stay at that horrible job, end a friendship over a slight, keep loving someone who treats you terribly.

It had only to do with how it felt to be in the wild. With what it was like to walk for miles for 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 seemed to me that it had always felt like this to be a human in the wild, and as long as the wild existed it would always feel this way.