Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

by Cheryl Strayed

I followed behind, not allowing myself to think a thing.

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.

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.

And reality is what we have to accept, like it or not.”

It seemed like such a small thing and such a tremendous thing at once, like a secret I’d always tell myself, though I didn’t know the meaning of it just yet.