Essay on Wild by Cheryl Strayed

In Cheryl Strayed's Wild, she gives readers vivid exposure to her turbulent and harsh past. She tells her journey from the beginning of what was the turning page in her life- her mother's death. Strayed goes through a roller coaster with unfortunate events both in her control and out of her control. She makes several poor choices, and she shares all her triumphs with pure honesty. Strayed speaks of her past with a distant remorse, as if she is looking at her past in a movie. She doesn't come across as ashamed of her past, but why should she? As all humans do, Cheryl Strayed makes mistakes and suffers their consequences as well. Everyone handles situations differently, and the best anyone can do is learn from the mistakes and apply it to

Strayed had gone through quite a bit before deciding on taking a hiking trip on the Pacific Crest Trail. Strayed thought the Pacific Crest Trail would help her find who she was before her mother’s death. To illustrate, “I’d set out to hike the trail so I could reflect upon my life, to think about everything that had broken me and make myself whole again” (84). This hiking trip was her way to find the person she was before her mother died. After hiking for three weeks she noticed, “I am not afraid… I realized…I’d done to myself and all that had been done to me” (122). Having spent three week hiking up Strayed become aware of a change in herself, she began showing confidence in herself (122). Her confidence is practically oozing out of her by the end of her journey (310). She tries to pass her confidence on to another person who was considering going on a similar journey on the Pacific Crest Trail. She emphasized, ‘“You could. You should. Believe me, if I can do this, anybody can”’ (310). Strayed has truly understood who she is after hiking eleven hundred miles through gruesome and extreme environments. Now, she is an inspiration to those who have hit rock bottom and need to find

But it’s up to us that the emotions we feel, is the way we react to the things we face in life, just like Jeanne’s family had too keep going on without the altar of the family. Struggle is evident when “We woke early, shivering and coated with dust that had blown up through the knotholes and in through the slits around the doorway. During the night Mama had unpacked all our clothes and heaped them on our bed’s for warmth. Now our cubicle looked as if a great laundry bag had exploded and then sprayed with fine dust. A skin of sand covered the floor. [41].” As a reader, we know that Jeanne and her whole entire family are now struggling more than ever, from living in nice neighborhood in Los Angeles, CA to live in place that the air is dust and live under barrack. Struggle was already a large part of Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston and her family’s life, but even through the very hard times they still managed to push through it and keep moving forward. After all, the struggles that they were facing were really hard, they still manage to teach us that no matter what struggles is going on in life, you have to keep pushing through them in order to find the change in life. The most important thing that they have taught us of struggle, is that they always tried to maintain the most precious

The memoir Wild, by Cheryl Strayed focused on a woman whose whole life was in turmoil. From the passing of her mother to the divorce of her husband, Cheryl lost sight of her values and viewed her life as one ruined by failure and loss. In desperate need of something new to believe in, Cheryl decided to begin the journey with herself by taking an epic journey on the Pacific Crest Trail. Her beliefs and values transform over the journey from the victim of a bad situation to her belief in herself, rebirth and forgiveness.

Cheryl Strayed author of the book Wild unfortunately loses her mother to the tragic disease of cancer, which left her with many emotional distress. Aside from losing her mother she also loses her marriage due to her promiscuous behavior, and falls into a drug addiction. While her mother was sick and helpless at the hospital Strayed is drowned in her sorrow and pain. After her mother’s death Strayed decides that she needs to spend some time alone to reflect on her own issues spiritually, and to learn how to cope with the loss of her mother. Strayed decides to take a trip to the PCT. As she executes the Pacific Crest Trail in California, she comes to realize that in fact she has grown internally and that the time that she has spent alone hiking has greatly empowered her to slowly learn how overcome her internal emotional wounds. In this essay we will analyze Strayed’s rhetorical appeals, and we will perform a rhetorical analysis on how successfully Strayed

Strength is a quality that continues to carry mankind through existence. Without this attribute, humans would fail to carry on living. One can show physical strength by being able to push hefty objects, or mental strength by being able to endure the most unfavorable conundrums. For a person to survive any conditions, this toughness is an absolutely necessary trait that they must have. The Most Dangerous Game, a short fictional story by Richard Connell, and Who Understands Me But Me, a poem by Jimmy Santiago Baca, are both examples of how in any situation, it is possible to survive with forms of resilience. Characters from both of these stories are able to sustain themselves with their strength, whether it be physically or mentally.

In this week’s reading, Anna Harrington uses a quote from Victor Frankel: “The last of human freedoms… is the ability to choose one’s attitude in a given set of circumstances. What a great way of restating, “Your response is your responsibility.” (Eggerichs, 2014). She communicates some ideas about resiliency she calls elements: emotional, spiritual, social, family, and physical. (Harrington, 2012).

Eventually she learned through being intimate with other men that she just wanted to be alone, and what better way than to go on a solo hike? Cheryl hoped that the hike would give her a fresh start because she had nothing to come back to and nothing to lose. Having never been on a hike in her entire life Cheryl over packs her backpack she nicknames “Monster” because of its bulk. Her bag is extremely heavy and ends up giving Cheryl more injuries than the actual trail. But all the pain she felt on the trail was good.

In the book Wild, Cheryl Strayed removes herself from society in order to travel the PCT alone. She faced

People become stronger by building up their self-confidence from, when they are faced with difficult times.

They connections in their family disappeared, and her siblings went away to avoid missing their mother, but Strayed decided to stay. She was alone, and the feeling of losing her mother and family was unforgettable. That kind of change in a life is something that no one wants in their life. Cheryl Strayed, one of the best authors of modern literature, in her book, Wild, #1 New York Times best seller and a NPR best book of the year, expresses her feelings of her mother passing away and her family falling apart, “By the time Thanksgiving rolled around eight months after my mom died, my family was something I spoke of in the past tense” (Strayed 35).

Walking and hiking have been around as long as man has been around. Walking was a means of survival as well as a relaxing because man had to hunt for food which meant he had to search for it. Walking has also been a way to relax and clear your mind and meditate for generations. If you think about it, the first people to organize this activity were probably cavemen. However, if you are talking about the people who first climbed a mountain, then the first people to climb Everest were Norgay and Hilary in 1953.

The kind of strength that I am talking about is not how much you can lift. It is the intangible and mental strength. It is not something that you can weigh or measure, but is very easy to notice. My grandfather describes this as, “Being strong where it counts.” For a long time I didn’t understand this and I was not aware of what he meant.

Believe it or not everyone still has that little kid inside them that never grew up. It’s those times when you want to have fun and enjoy life as an adult. In other words, to just forget all the worries and do something adventurous. Sometimes people like to refer it as “Releasing the wild child”. Above I had chosen this particular quotation because I strongly felt that it had shown the happiness of appreciating the little things in life. Clearly, Sparky is just overfilled with excitement from being able to step outside for the very first time into the sunlight again. From being trapped so long in that dark and cold bomb shelter, I guess anybody would be glad to flee from that barbarous environment. However unlike many, Sparky didn’t worry

I encourage you to discover the benefits of increased strength in your daily life. It’s said that “stronger people are harder to kill,” (Mark Rippetoe). All joking aside, strength is the one quality that serves to enhance other training