When Cheryl sets out to hike the Pacific Crest Trail, she is at the lowest point of her young life. Ravaged by grief in the wake of losing her mother and ending her marriage, she has succumbed to a barely-manageable heroin addiction, a toxic new relationship, and a cycle of self-destructive behavior that threatens to end her bright future. She embarks on the PCT in an attempt to redeem herself and change her life—but as she travels deeper and deeper into the mountains, Cheryl begins to realize that what she needed all along was healing, not redemption. Through Wild, Cheryl Strayed suggests that the ways people fail and the bad choices they make don’t require redemption—rather, these beautiful mistakes are the foundations upon which lives are forged and the healing process, however difficult, is found.
“I was trying […] to get the bad out of my system so I could be good again. To cure me of myself,” Cheryl writes of the period just before her journey along the Pacific Crest Trail, when she was dabbling in one-night-stands and heroin use in the wake of her mother’s death. Even before conceiving of the PCT hike as a way to restore herself to the whole, normal person she’d once been, Cheryl was desperate to “cure” herself—even if it meant going deeper into cruel, dangerous, or self-destructive behavior before finding her way out. It is from this place that Cheryl decides that what she needs is to be redeemed or changed—turned from “bad” to good again. As Cheryl sets out on the trail, she is obsessed with the idea that the PCT could have the power to remake her into the person she once was: “strong and responsible, clear-eyed and driven, ethical and good.” She makes a plan to think about her “entire life” as she hikes the trail—to go over her sins, missteps, and mistakes like prayers on a rosary until she has been able to understand them, atone for them, and move on from them. This mindset shows that Cheryl feels guilt over the things she’s done and the person she’s become: she doesn’t yet understand that she is playing into a false idea of redemption that doesn’t actually exist.
In the midst of her hike, Cheryl realizes that she hasn’t spent any time at all “weep[ing] tears of cathartic sorrow and restorative joy” or thinking deeply about the choices she’s made and why. She’s too busy thinking about where to find water, where to make camp, which way is north, and the constant pain she suffers as a result of her blistering boots and her monstrous pack. Cheryl, then, begins the healing process—what she still conceives of as redemption—without even knowing it. By learning lessons about resilience, preparedness, and the equal but different joys of solitude and community, Cheryl is healing herself with each step she takes, even if her healing process doesn’t look as cathartic as she imagined it would. As Cheryl continues on through the PCT, she encounters people, vistas, and animals that fill her with joy, peace, and an appreciation for the world around her and her place inside of it. She makes friends, pushes her mind and body to their limits, and overcomes every challenge that nature and circumstance place in her path. Cheryl’s healing is not about atoning for her perceived sins or reverting to an earlier, cleaner, purer state of being—it is about accepting who she is, the path she’s on, and the choices she’s making in a productive, nonjudgmental way.
“What if I’d actually wanted to fuck every one of those men? What if heroin taught me something? […] What if what made me do all those things […] was also what had got me here? What if I was never redeemed? What if I already was?” As Cheryl asks herself these major questions at a crucial point in her journey—after she’s had sex with a man named Jonathan during a stopover in Ashland, Oregon—the central idea of Wild becomes clear. Healing is different from redemption, Strayed suggests, and a traditional path to redemption—or redemption in and of itself—may not exist at all. Cheryl’s journey teaches her that she was never in need of redemption: she needed to accept her past mistakes, stop judging herself for them, and begin to see herself in a new light. In other words, she needed not to repent to or to be saved by some external force or power: her healing had to come from within.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Healing vs. Redemption ThemeTracker
Healing vs. Redemption Quotes in Wild
I’d been so many things already. A loving wife and an adulteress. A beloved daughter who now spent holidays alone. An ambitious overachiever and aspiring writer who hopped form one meaningless job to the next while dabbling dangerously with drugs and sleeping with too many men. […] But a woman who walks alone in the wilderness for eleven hundred miles? I’d never been anything like that before. I had nothing to lose by giving it a whirl.
Each night the black sky and the bright stars were my stunning companions; occasionally I’d see their beauty and solemnity so plainly that I’d realize in a piercing way that my mother was right. That someday I would be grateful and that in fact I was grateful now. […] It was the thing that had grown in me that I’d remember years later, when my life became unmoored by sorrow. The thing that would make me believe that hiking the Pacific Crest Trail was my way back to the person I used to be.
It took me years […] to be the woman my mother raised. […] I would suffer. […] I would want things to be different than they were. The wanting was a wilderness and I had to find my own way out of the woods.
[Monster] looked so cute, so ready to be lifted—and yet it was impossible to do. I sat down on the floor beside it and pondered my situation. How could I carry a backpack more than a thousand miles […] if I couldn’t even budge it an inch? […] The notion was preposterous and yet I had to lift that pack.
My new existence was beyond analogy, I realized on that second day on the trail. I was in entirely new terrain.
The thing about hiking the Pacific Crest Trail, the thing that was so profound to me that summer […] was how few choices I had. […] How there was no escape or denial. No numbing it down with a martini or covering it up with a roll in the hay. There were only two [options] and they were essentially the same. I could go back in the direction I had come from, or I could go forward in the direction I intended to go. […] And so I walked on.
I’d imagined endless meditations upon sunsets or while staring out across pristine mountain lakes. I thought I’d weep tears of cathartic sorrow and restorative joy each day of my journey. Instead, I only moaned, and not because my heart ached. It was because my feet did and my back did and so did the still-open wounds all around my hips.
I stopped in my tracks when that thought came into my mind, that hiking the PCT was the hardest thing I’d ever done. […] Watching my mother die and having to live without her, that was the hardest thing I’d ever done. […] But hiking the PCT was hard in a different way. In a way that made the other hardest things the tiniest bit less hard. It was strange but true. And perhaps I’d known it in some way from the very beginning.
[My pack] was still the biggest pack of the bunch—hiking solo, I had to carry things that those who hiked in pairs could divvy up, and I didn’t have the ultralight confidence or skills that Greg did—but in comparison to how my pack had been before Albert helped me purge it, it was so light I felt I could leap into the air.
“Come back,” I called lightly, and then suddenly shouted, “MOM! MOM! MOM! MOM!” I didn’t know the word was going to come out of my mouth until it did.
And then, just as suddenly, I went silent, spent.
“You could wish for a horse,” Brent said. “Then you wouldn’t have to worry about your feet.”
I looked at him in the dark. […] “I used to have a horse,” I said, turning my gaze back to the sky. […]
“Well then, you’re lucky.” He said. “Not everyone gets a horse.”
“I look the same, but I’m not the same in here. I mean, life goes on and all that crap, but Luke dying took it out of me. I try not to act like it, but it did. It took the Lou out of Lou, and I ain’t getting it back. You know what I mean?”
“I do,” I said. […]
“I thought so,” she said. “I had that feeling about you.”
I could pack up [Monster] in five minutes now. […] Monster was my world, my inanimate extra limb. Though its weight and size still confounded me, I’d come to accept that it was my burden to bear. I didn’t feel myself in contradiction to it the way I had a month before. It wasn’t me against it. We two were one.
My new boots had only chawed my feet afresh. I was passing through the beautiful territory I’d come to take for granted, my body finally up to the task of hiking the big miles, but because of my foot troubles, I sank into the grimmest despair. […] Perhaps my feet would never be okay.
There were so many […] amazing things in this world.
They opened up inside of me like a river. Like I didn’t know I could take a breath and then I breathed. I laughed with the joy of it, and the next moment I was crying my first tears on the PCT. I cried and I cried and I cried. I wasn’t crying because I was happy. I wasn’t crying because I was sad. I wasn’t crying because of my mother or my father or Paul. I was crying because I was full.
I reached the border only minutes later, stopping to take it in: California and Oregon, an end and a beginning pressed up against each other. For such a momentous spot, it didn’t look all that momentous. There was only a brown metal box that held a trail register and a sign that said WASHINGTON: 498 MILES—no mention of Oregon itself.
What if I forgave myself? […] What if I was a liar and a cheat and there was no excuse for what I’d done other than because it was what I wanted and needed to do? […] What if I’d actually wanted to fuck every one of those men? What if heroin taught me something? […] What if what made me do all those things everyone thought I shouldn’t have done was what also had got me here? What if I was never redeemed? What if I already was?
This was once a mountain that stood nearly 12,000 feet tall and then had its heart removed. This was once a wasteland. […] This was once an empty bowl that took hundreds of years to fill. But hard as I tried, I couldn’t see them in my mind’s eye. Not the mountain or the wasteland or the empty bowl. They simply were not there anymore. There was only the stillness and silence of that water: what a mountain and a wasteland and an empty bowl turned into after the healing began.
The PCT had gotten easier for me, but that was different from it getting easy.
It was all unknown to me then, as I sat on that white bench on the day I finished my hike. Everything except the fact that I didn’t have to know. That it was enough to trust that what I’d done was true. […] How wild it was, to let it be.
