Finding peace in solitude from "summary" of Wild by Cheryl Strayed
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. The fundamental fact of existence is that nobody gets to stay here forever. Nobody. I had only a little time left and I didn't want to spend it living out the cliche of the troubled woman who couldn't make her way in the world. I wanted to change. I wanted to be a woman who could get through things, a woman who could deal with whatever life throws at her. I was scared. I was scared to be alone, but I was scared to be in a relationship. I was scared to be me. I was scared to be not me. I knew that if I allowed fear to overtake me, my journey was doomed. 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. Insisting on strength was something I clung to, as if it were a life raft. I had no experience to tell me what to do when I was afraid. So I focused on the trail, the sky, the sun, and the way the light fell upon the land. I'd never been so aware of the earth and the sky.
The thing about hiking the Pacific Crest Trail, the thing that was so profound to me that summer, and yet also, like most things, so very simple, was how few choices I had and how often I had to do the thing I least wanted to do. How there was no escape or denial. No numbing it down with a martini or covering it up with a roll in the hay. In a way, everything in my life had been leading me to this decision, this moment. The realisation that all of the things I had been so afraid of, the things that had made me an angry and sad person, were just things. They weren't me.
I was not to be defined by my fears, but rather by how I faced them. The trail was a place I could go to walk and figure out everything in my life that needed to be figured out. I could sit there and be quiet and nobody would ask me to be anyone that I wasn't. I could sit there and
