Cheryl Strayed: Don’t Let Your Dreams Ruin Your Life
August 2, 2022
Glennon Doyle:
Welcome to We Can Do Hard Things. We have been waiting for this day for lo, so many months. The day is here when we get to sit down with the Cheryl Strayed. Cheryl Strayed is here today.
Cheryl Strayed:
Yay. I’m so thrilled to be here.
Glennon Doyle:
Aw.
Cheryl Strayed:
Yeah. I mean, I already said this, I love you, guys. And I love this podcast, so thank you.
Glennon Doyle:
We love you back. Cheryl Strayed is the author of the number one New York Times best selling memoir, Wild, as well as the best sellers Tiny Beautiful Things, Brave Enough… I know. And Torch. Wild was adapted into an Oscar nominated film, starring Reese Witherspoon and Laura Dern. Tiny Beautiful Things is currently being adapted for a TV show for Hulu and will star Kathryn Hahn. Could that have been cast any better?
Cheryl Strayed:
No.
Abby Wambach:
Obsessed.
Cheryl Strayed:
I know. I love Kathryn Hahn. We were looking for somebody who would be able to do really funny, but also really, really deep and poignant and serious. And some really heavy stuff. And of course she’s the master of all of that.
Glennon Doyle:
Yes, she is. Kathryn Hahn is one of my favorite actors, but Tiny Beautiful Things is one of my favorite books of all times.
Cheryl Strayed:
Aw, thank you.
Glennon Doyle:
This is a very big happening. Okay. In addition to writing her widely acclaimed essay stories and scripts, Strayed has hosted two hit podcasts for The New York Times, Sugar Calling and Dear Sugars, which she co-hosted with Steve Almond. She lives in Portland, Oregon, with her husband, Brian Lindstrom, and their two teenagers and their two dogs and their three cats. Is that right?
Cheryl Strayed:
That’s right. And counting. It seems like we’re always being conned into more animals living in our house.
Glennon Doyle:
Okay. There’s something that happens with the animals, but I actually have a deep discomfort in my body with the idea that I can’t have all the animals. When I see a dog, I think that should be my dog. And then I think, all the dogs should be my dog and that’s not going to happen, but maybe that’s what heaven is.
Abby Wambach:
Yeah, maybe. We have three teenagers and Glennon would then be the fourth because, you know, teenagers are like, “Can we get a new dog? Can we get a new cat?” And Glennon is like, “Can we get a new dog?” I’m not the bad guy. I’m like, “No, we can’t have 17,000 animals running around this house.”
Cheryl Strayed:
That’s right. Because animals require things. Yeah, no. Abby, I just want to tell you, my husband, Brian and I have been conned into this over and over and over. My kids Carver and Bobbi who are now, Bobbi’s 16, my daughter’s 16. My son, Carver, is 18. They’re going into their junior and senior years in high school. And since they were little babies, they would say, “We promise we will walk the dogs. We will do the litter box.” They don’t even… I mean, no, they don’t follow through with anything.
Abby Wambach:
It’s just lies. I just think that they’re all lies.
Cheryl Strayed:
It’s just lies. And then we get the animals. And then what happens is, you end up loving them-
Glennon Doyle:
The most.
Cheryl Strayed:
… because you can’t… Yeah. I mean, because they’re the best. I mean, really, they are. I do think not only do they bring us joy and pleasure and laughter and cuteness and all that stuff, which I think you especially need when you have teenagers who maybe don’t want you loving on them and stroking them and cooing at them all the time.
Amanda Doyle:
They’re like a medium for emotions. That kids don’t want our direct emotion, they can’t give it back to us-
Cheryl Strayed:
Yes.
Amanda Doyle:
… but we just stand around the dog and we’re like, “Look at me loving the dog. Are you receiving the transmittal through you?”
Glennon Doyle:
And maybe that’s like a biological evolution. They con us because they know we need a transition animal.
Abby Wambach:
Yeah.
Cheryl Strayed:
Many years ago when my kids were little and still in that phase where they wanted to snuggle in bed and be all lovey-dovey, my fried, Natalie, had two teenagers and she had this little dog that she just loved. And she said, “Oh, I’m so bonded to this dog.” And she said, “I had to get him because then I would have at least one person in my family who loved me.”
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah.
Cheryl Strayed:
You know?
Abby Wambach:
Aw.
Cheryl Strayed:
Yes. I know. And what I thought at the time is, “My kids will never be that way.” And of course now her kids are in their 20s and they do love her and they always loved her, but they didn’t necessarily act like it a lot.
Glennon Doyle:
Exactly.
Cheryl Strayed:
So now I understand what she was talking about because my kids are in the… They want to socially distance.
Glennon Doyle:
They want to.
Cheryl Strayed:
… with us. Like when the pandemic came and they’re at this age, I was like, we’re being told to socially distance from everyone and they were forced to be like not socially distanced with the two people they most wanted to socially distance themselves.
Abby Wambach:
That’s interesting.
Cheryl Strayed:
Me and my husband.
Glennon Doyle:
Oh, my God, that’s so freaking true.
Cheryl Strayed:
Yeah.
Abby Wambach:
Poor teenagers during the pandemic.
Glennon Doyle:
Aw, poor teenagers.
Cheryl Strayed:
I know.
Glennon Doyle:
So, Cheryl, we want to start by talking about your beloved mama, because your love for her has been such a, I don’t know, guiding-
Abby Wambach:
Teacher.
Glennon Doyle:
… light for all of us.
Abby Wambach:
Yeah. It’s helped all of us a lot.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah. So after your mama died, you were only 22.
Cheryl Strayed:
That’s right. And she was only 45.
Glennon Doyle:
And she was only 45.
Amanda Doyle:
You were both seniors in college, right?
Cheryl Strayed:
Yes, we were. We were.
Glennon Doyle:
Oh, my God. So one of the things I heard you say that I thought was so fascinating is, you spiraled for a while after that.
Cheryl Strayed:
Yeah.
Glennon Doyle:
And self-proclaimed what you would call unhealthy promiscuity and heroin use. Of that time you said, “In so many ways I was trying to honor my mother by ruining my life.”
Cheryl Strayed:
Mm-hmm.
Glennon Doyle:
That just rang a bell in me. Can you talk to us about what you meant by that, in that time?
Cheryl Strayed:
Yeah. So, let’s back up. I just want to tell you a bit about my mom. I mean, you know about her, but maybe some people listening don’t. She was really, in so many ways, my hero. She was this incredibly wonderful, loving mom in really difficult circumstances. She got pregnant in 1965 when she had just graduated high school and she didn’t want to be pregnant and didn’t want to marry my father. But she really considered having an illegal abortion. Her parents, when she told her parents she was pregnant they said, “Unless you get married, we’ll send you to a home for wayward girls and you can have the baby.” And they wanted her to give her the baby and they would raise it as their own and pretend it was their own. So, her choices were really limited.
Cheryl Strayed:
A lot of women in that era ended up getting married because they were pregnant, and that was my mom. And so she found herself really in this relationship that by day three was violent. My father beat her up for the first time on the third day they were together. And over the course of the next 10 years, she had three kids with him. I’m the middle child. I have an older sister, I’m the middle, and then my younger brother. And some of my earliest memories, I have this really kind of split childhood memories. My earliest memories, some of them are the most beautiful, lovely, wonderful, loving things you’d ever imagine with my mom who made life magic in hard circumstances and loved us in a devoted… With wild abandon, essentially. And then the terror and the fear and the sorrow of my father who abused her physically in front of us all the time, and also, to a lesser extent, abused us.
Cheryl Strayed:
And I remember fleeing the house with my mom, her piling us into the car and driving all night because this was the ’70s. I think a lot of us forget how recent… Any understanding of intimate partner violence is really actually a new thing. The first what we used to call battered women’s shelter was opened in 1975 in the nation. So this is really, within my lifetime, I’m 53, has changed. There was nowhere for my mom to go. There were no resources for her to leave that marriage. And she finally and bravely did. Then I was the child of a single mom and we were poor. I spent every year of my childhood in poverty and yet it was only economic poverty.
Cheryl Strayed:
I spent every year of my childhood in riches and it was because I had an incredibly emotionally rich mother who knew how to love and who really loved her kids. And so, even though there were many hardships in my childhood, I do think, “Wow, what a glorious, glorious life I got to have because I had a mother who made me know with every breath that I was loved.” And so we did go off to college. It ended up being together. It was a pretty amazing experience in those years that I was for the first time stepping through that portal into becoming the educated person. I wanted to be the writer. I wanted to become a writer from the beginning, but to see my mom go through that transformation, and when she died in our senior year, on the spring break of our senior year, very suddenly of cancer. She only knew she had cancer for seven weeks before she died.
Cheryl Strayed:
She was a perfectly healthy woman who wasn’t a smoker, who was told she had advanced stage lung cancer and died. And the only words I have for it, and their words that I knew the day she died, I felt like life as I knew it ended the day my mother died. I thought for many years that I was crazy to say that. And now of course, through my writing about grief, I’ve met thousands of people around the world who say, “Yes, that’s how it feels when you lose somebody essential.” And so I felt like, “How do I live in the world without my mother?” And one of the things that was so painful that I know now, too, is a really universal feeling, is that the world goes on and doesn’t notice that somebody extraordinary is gone. My mother, on paper, was the most ordinary woman ever, but in life, to her children, to the people who loved her, she was extraordinary.
Cheryl Strayed:
And I didn’t have anything as a young woman, but my own life, my own body, my own trajectory. I didn’t have anything with which to prove to the world that her death mattered. So I wanted to say very loudly, “Listen, world, we lost something big and I’m going to wreck myself to prove it. I’m going to ruin my life to show you how much her life mattered.” And of course I didn’t do it consciously. It wasn’t until years later I was understanding that this was an act of love. That this decision to say, “Okay, I’m going to turn away from that ambitious girl I’d been and become somebody who was promiscuous in ways that are self-destructive, that does drugs, that says yes to all the bad things, to say, ‘Yeah, I’m going to show you. That’s how I’m going to love my mother.'” Does that make sense?
Glennon Doyle:
It makes-
Abby Wambach:
Yes.
Glennon Doyle:
… utterly perfect sense to me.
Abby Wambach:
I mean, it floored me. It’s like, “Oh, my gosh.” To be able to come to that realization as well. I think one of the most interesting things that I’ve learned about you is that Strayed in fact is not-
Cheryl Strayed:
Yeah.
Abby Wambach:
… your born into last name. You chose it. Why did you choose Strayed?
Cheryl Strayed:
Yeah. Well, it’s complicated. I think for a lot of us who carry our father’s names and those of us who have fathers who aren’t people who were what a father should be to us, who harmed us rather than loved us, who abandoned us rather than be there for us. And that was that name I carried all through my childhood. My name was Cheryl Nyland. I mean, we’re sort of leaping ahead, but I got married super crazily young, and we wanted to be like this… My ex-husband and I were like these feminists and were like, “We’re going to take on each other’s names,” which was, of course, then I had this long, complicated, hyphenated name that nobody could ever say, Cheryl Nyland-Littig. Cheryl Nyland-Littig. And my ex-husband also took on my name, which of course, then he was congratulated for being-
Glennon Doyle:
Of course.
Cheryl Strayed:
… this amazing man, and I was just like this troublesome person who had insisted that he do this, of course, but even though he did it willingly. So when we got divorced when I was 25, it was really a simple thing, Abby, because we were doing like a do-it-yourself divorce, because we had no kids, we had two cats, and nothing. Maybe a… I don’t know, like-
Amanda Doyle:
A couch.
Cheryl Strayed:
… some towels. Yeah. I don’t even think we had a couch, Amanda. Okay. So we’re doing this do-it-yourself divorce and you fill out the form. And it literally says, “My name after the divorce will be…” And you could have written Mickey Mouse in there. And I was really struck by that line. And of course, as someone who cares an awful lot about words and at that point in my life I realized, “Okay, I’m alone. I’m an orphan. My mom’s dead. I don’t have a father.” He was still alive then, but, I don’t have a father. “I’m nobody’s daughter or wife or mother. And I need to step into my life in a powerful way and what better way to do it than to define it through language.” And so I spent some time searching for words. What am I? Am I a stone? I ran through all these different words and I landed upon strayed, and I saw the definition of it, and it was like a punch to the gut because I knew this is me. This is me.
Cheryl Strayed:
And Strayed, it has layers of definitions and meanings, but at root it’s somebody who finds her way on an alternate path, who finds her way in the world without a mother and a father, somebody who carries her own home on her back, and it fit. What’s interesting to me about that, too, is a lot of people… I’m so glad you asked the question, the way you asked it, Abby, because so many people will say, “Well, Strayed isn’t your real name,” which I find interesting that we use that language because, of course, if I had taken on a man’s name through marriage, nobody would say, “That’s not your real name.”
Glennon Doyle:
That’s right.
Cheryl Strayed:
People just feel really threatened and addled and bewildered by people choosing their own names.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah.
Abby Wambach:
I think it’s cool. Badass.
Glennon Doyle:
I think it’s amazing.
Cheryl Strayed:
Thank you. I’ve been Cheryl Strayed longer than I’ve been any other name, and it feels like my heritage.
Amanda Doyle:
I read something where you were talking about how so many people think of Strayed as kind of an escape, but you think of it more as a seeking and finding ourselves. Was that related to your hike?
Cheryl Strayed:
Yeah. One of the most interesting things that I’ve come to understand about human experiences, so many things that seem like one thing are actually at the core of the other. So, when you go on the kind of journey that I went on in my 1,100 mile hike on the Pacific Crest Trail, very often that’s kind of framed as escape. You’re escaping. You’re running away from. And I always think, it’s we’re stepping into. And I even came to understand, honestly, my foray into using heroin is that way. In so many ways, what was compelling to me about heroin, and I know anyone who has any experience with drugs understands this, and it’s like, you use it and you think, “Thank you. I have escaped. Now there’s this other world that feels more bearable to me. It feels like a world that I don’t feel my suffering.”
Cheryl Strayed:
So even I, when I stepped into heroin, I was like, “Okay, this is the escape.” And really what I was looking for in looking for that experience is a way back in, a way into the depths of my suffering, a deeper understanding of how I could live with my suffering, not a way to escape it. And that’s everything, too, that happened on my Pacific Crest Trail journey. I was alone but never did I feel more connected to everyone in my life and to the world at large, and not just the humans. All the living things. I felt myself a part of the world again when I was radically alone. And it was because I was consciously stepping in while also in some ways going away. And sometimes we have to go away to do that, to understand how it is we’re connected.
Glennon Doyle:
So was that a way, because you talked about doing the destructive things, ruining your life to do something big enough to show your pain. So was hiking the trail something that you thought would be a positive, huge action to show-
Cheryl Strayed:
Yeah.
Glennon Doyle:
… your loss? Was it a constructive, huge act instead of destructive huge act? And how does one decide? Because most people are like, “Okay, I’ve got to get my shit together, so I’m going to, I don’t know, go to a yoga class.” But you’re like, “No.”
Abby Wambach:
I’m going to go hike 1,100 miles.
Cheryl Strayed:
Glennon, I somehow think that we’re kindred spirits in this way. In fact, all three of you. Like I go big rather than go… So, here’s what happened. I reached that place, I guess, of rock bottom that we talk about, the bottom place, which I think is the glorious place of beginning.
Glennon Doyle:
Amen.
Cheryl Strayed:
Because the only place to go when you hit the bottom is up. When I teach writing workshops, if I say, “Let’s write, write about that hardest moment.” It’s always the thing that also brought people their greatest strength and courage and beauty. So what happened to me is, I was ruining my life. I was using heroin. I had gotten pregnant by the guy I was doing heroin with, who had really become a heroin addict and stayed a heroin addict for many years. And I realized I was pregnant. And it was honestly, for me, I woke up and I thought, “What has become of me? What has happened to me? Who am I?” And the awakening I had was, it was really connected with this destruction. It was like, “I love my mother, World, so I’m going to destroy myself.”
Cheryl Strayed:
And then I realized that the exact opposite thing was true. This is what I’ve said. It was like something that looks one way is very often the other way. What was true is, I have been loved too well to ruin my life. If I want the world to love my mother, if I want to honor my mother’s life with my own life, I actually have to become everything she raised me to be. I have to become everything I ever intended to be. I have to live again ambitiously, like that girl I used to be before she died, who was going to say unapologetically, “I want to be a great American writer.”
Cheryl Strayed:
I would say those things out loud and it seemed audacious and wrong, and I lost my way. Like I lost my sense of that ambition. And so I woke up and I was like, “Okay, I have to do something big, not to become a different person, but to find my way back to the person I knew I was inside of me.” And I think that’s almost always true. That’s the journey we need to take.
Glennon Doyle:
That’s right.
Cheryl Strayed:
It’s not like go find that great person. It’s dig it back up. You buried it inside of you.
Abby Wambach:
It is one of my greatest dreams to hike the Appalachian Trail. And so when your book came out and then of course it got turned into a movie, I was so invested. I’ve struggled with addiction stuff throughout my life, so this felt like it was such an important poignant thing specifically to me. And so I have yet to do the Appalachian Trail. I am sober now, so that’s good. What is the greatest lesson you learned? What am I hoping to get out of hiking thousands of miles?
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah. And just tell us so we don’t have to do it.
Cheryl Strayed:
Yeah. I was going to say, first of all, Abby, I want to know when you’re going to do it because I don’t want you to like, “I’ve always wanted to. I’ve always wanted to.” Like, you got to do it. You got to make a plan, okay?
Abby Wambach:
Yeah.
Cheryl Strayed:
Even it’s like 10 years from now. Also, I hope… Are you planning to bring.. Have you met Glennon?
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. I just feel like time apart is important for relationships.
Abby Wambach:
Literally and last week she just said, for the first time in our marriage, that maybe she could go camping for one night.
Glennon Doyle:
Because, Cheryl-
Abby Wambach:
So we’re working on it.
Glennon Doyle:
… I went hiking with my son.
Cheryl Strayed:
Yeah.
Glennon Doyle:
And we hiked and hiked and hiked for hours and hours and hours. I felt very strayed.
Cheryl Strayed:
And you thought of me. Did you?
Glennon Doyle:
And I saw the PCT. I didn’t go on it.
Abby Wambach:
No, you did. You hiked a little portion of the PCT. Just a little portion.
Glennon Doyle:
Oh, okay.
Abby Wambach:
Yeah.
Glennon Doyle:
Anyway, I also learned some great lessons, but I assume that you maybe learned more. I mean, I was on it for 12 minutes.
Cheryl Strayed:
I’m proud of you, Glennon.
Glennon Doyle:
Thank you, Cheryl.
Cheryl Strayed:
I’m really proud of you. But, Abby, maybe you and I’ve always wanted to hike the AT, too. Maybe we’ll go together.
Abby Wambach:
That would be amazing.
Cheryl Strayed:
And then we write a memoir called Really Wild.
Glennon Doyle:
Oh, yes.
Cheryl Strayed:
What I learned, again, really just the biggest things, as I know you all know, are those tiny, tiny things that you’re like, “Oh, my gosh, if I can just live with this, if I can hold this.” It was really acceptance. And what I mean by that is this. It was so hard so often that I just had to accept each moment and I had to say, “I know I have a long way to go, but the only thing I can do to get there is to take this step and then the next step and the step after that.” And so the humility and the, I guess, strength that acceptance demands, it was something I had to do every day, is to say, “Oh, it’s really hot right now but here I am. This is where I live. This is my home. It’s raining, it’s snowing. I’m scared. I’m alone. I’m hungry. I’m mad at myself for being here.”
Cheryl Strayed:
Because I was 26, and one of the things I kept thinking about is, I would get so mad at myself sometimes and think like, “All of my friends are having so much more fun than me. They’re somewhere drinking margaritas and lounging around, and I’m just out here eating refried beans by myself in the dirt.” But it was really good for me to just accept what was, and it really has allowed me to do that in other parts of my life, too, to realize that the only way we ever get anywhere is one step at a time, even if we want to tell ourselves otherwise. It’s not true.
Glennon Doyle:
Mm-hmm. Yeah. We felt like, when we were talking about this part, we felt like it so reminded us of the We Can Do Hard Things idea, because-
Cheryl Strayed:
Oh, yeah.
Glennon Doyle:
… you said, “Part of being able to bear the things we can’t bear is not about tossing them off. Not about making the weight lighter, but simply learning that we have the capacity to carry it.” So it’s not we should do easier things, or we could do a few less hard… It’s like we can do this hard thing that’s been placed upon us.
Cheryl Strayed:
I would say that if there was just one core kind of sentence I would use to describe Wild, like what message people ask, “What message would you take from it?” I didn’t plant a message in there, but what I think Wild is at core about is that we can bear the unbearable. And of course that was true when it came to lifting a backpack that I literally couldn’t lift and carrying it through the wilderness. And also in a more emotional and metaphorical sense, I thought I can’t live without my mother.
Cheryl Strayed:
And everyone out there who’s lost anyone who was essential to them thinks, “I can’t live without that person.” And then what’s true is that we can, and we will, and we do. And so, yeah, I’ve always, I love that you’re famous for that, We Can Do Hard Things, and it’s totally connected, too. We can bear the unbearable. It’s just different language for a very similar idea. And I think it’s one that is incredibly important for all of us to remember every day, because very often our first response is, “I can’t.”
Glennon Doyle:
Mm-hmm.
Abby Wambach:
Yeah.
Amanda Doyle:
And what’s so cool about that is you don’t have to believe it, because the part of the grief is that you can’t believe it. You can’t believe that you can live without your mother. It’s just the one step on the trail at a time, one day at a time. And then you realize that even though you can’t go on, you are, and therefore you can.
Cheryl Strayed:
Yeah.
Amanda Doyle:
It’s not like, you can do it because you believe you can. It’s, you can do it and therefore you begin to believe that you can.
Cheryl Strayed:
Yeah, absolutely. And I think it’s also about rejecting that kind of dichotomy. Like the ways that we think about what courage looks like, or strength looks like. When people say like, “I could never do that.” And it’s like, “Well, you actually could.” It’s not like there’s one category of people who are the strong ones who can endure tremendous loss or face very difficult physical circumstances of like… Fill in the trouble, whatever the hard thing is. It’s like, they’re not the people who can do it and then there’s this other category of people who can. It’s that if we step into, I guess, embracing that both things can be true at once, that this is a hard thing that I don’t want to do, but I’m doing it and I will and I can. I mean, I think we can do hard things even if we don’t like doing them, right?
Abby Wambach:
Yeah.
Glennon Doyle:
Mm-hmm.
Amanda Doyle:
You said before about how, even when you were a lot younger, you would say, “I’m going to write the great American novel. I’m going to do big things.” I had a shift in me when I heard you talk about, don’t let your dreams ruin your life.
Cheryl Strayed:
Yeah.
Glennon Doyle:
So good. So good.
Amanda Doyle:
Can you just tell us about that? Because so many times we have these big dreams that we know were meant for them, but in the process of trying to do what we think is our purpose, we are ruining the entirety of our lives.
Cheryl Strayed:
Totally. I’m so glad you asked that, Amanda, because when I said that, I was like, “Oh, no, people are going to think that I’m just…” Yeah, I’m so glad I get to explain this a bit more. I do think it’s really important when I think about how I became a writer and my own journey into life, I think I really needed to have that kind of ambition and that sense of like, “I’m going to aspire to greatness.” And so that, in so many ways, was the engine that brought me to a certain place. And then as with anything, our job here is to evolve. So sometimes you need one story to get to the other story. And that’s what I needed. The story I needed is, “I’m going to be great.” And then I found myself in a cottage in Sheffield, Massachusetts, in my mid 30s, trying to finish my first book, my novel, Torch.
Cheryl Strayed:
I just finished graduate school and I was just like, “Okay, I am going to just finish this book.” I was two-thirds of the way done with it, and it was the first time I didn’t have a job. I just was left to write. My husband was like, “Finish that dang book,” and I was working on it. Except I ended up distracting myself with all kinds of other things, reality television, for example. And I would just kind of while the days away, and then in the last 15 minutes of the day, be like, “Oh, my gosh, I’m going to just try to write.” And I got into this really deep shame cycle. And I realized, “I can’t do this.”
Cheryl Strayed:
And maybe actually not only have I been lying to everyone else when I keep saying, “Yes, I’m writing the great American novel,” that I was lying to myself because I thought, “Well, if I say that I want to do this, why am I not doing this?” And I realized it was really deep shame and fear that I wouldn’t be great. And it was really a powerful thing for me to sit down and just have that conversation with myself. So what matters more? That I write the great American novel, or that I write a novel that I finish? My humble little puny novel that may or may not be good, that may very well just be mediocre, and I call this my sort of surrender to my own mediocrity moment.
Amanda Doyle:
Yes.
Cheryl Strayed:
Which it seems like a reverse. It seems like it obliterates any, like, “Yeah, you go girl,” message. But I think it’s one of the truest ones that we all need to take into our hearts where that surrender to my own mediocrity, what that means to me is, I just accepted, Abby, that lesson from the PCT, I accepted what was true, which is this. My dream is to write a book, and the only book I can possibly write is the one I write. And I don’t know if it’s going to be great or good or bad or terrible, and that is none of my business. That my work here, the true thing that I need to do, is to let go of greatness, let go of all of those wild dreams.
Cheryl Strayed:
Don’t let those wild dreams get in the way of my wild intention, which is to do this thing, write this story. And to be able to say to myself, “I did it. I did it.” And what happens to it after I do it is not up to me. It’s none of my business. And it was such a huge shift in my life to just accept. It really is ultimately about accepting yourself and that word surrender. We think of it as a kind of weakness or a letting go. But in so many ways, again, it was the opposite of that. It was me stepping into my truest power, the only true power that I could wield, which is the work that I could do.
Glennon Doyle:
And so often the pursuit of the thing is what keeps us from the thing. Like the pursuit of greatness keeps us from greatness. The pursuit of happiness keeps us from happiness. The pursuit of love, it keeps us from love. Because those things are right here in the everyday mundane things that we’re doing, right?
Cheryl Strayed:
That’s right.
Glennon Doyle:
And the idea of being amazing is what keeps us from doing the daily mediocre shit.
Abby Wambach:
And it doesn’t insulate us from pain either. I’ve been a gold medal champion and a world cup champion in my life, and I was riddled with extreme amounts of pain. So it’s got to be about that intention, and I think that that’s so beautifully put.
Glennon Doyle:
Well, you have a different way of looking at that. Like you said when we read this quote together, you said, “My dream destroyed my life, but in a different way.” You achieved your dream too, but she didn’t surrender. She didn’t do the surrendering you did beforehand.
Abby Wambach:
No.
Glennon Doyle:
She just kept going to get to the greatness.
Abby Wambach:
And there was a lot of cost to that ambition for greatness. And so it’s been a really interesting journey into what I would call mediocrity because now I’m stepping into a completely different life. And I think that your quote, this whole concept, is just revolutionary for me right now in just being a person. I just did soccer really well and now I’m a parent, which is the most humbling mediocre-
Cheryl Strayed:
It is.
Abby Wambach:
… situation there is.
Cheryl Strayed:
But you know, Abby, I’m curious. I mean, my assumption is, too, like this shift that we’re talking about. It’s like, in some ways, if you don’t have that surrender to your own mediocrity moment, very often what’s driving you to greatness is outside of you.
Abby Wambach:
That’s right.
Cheryl Strayed:
Right? And to me, that shift, I’m not saying that I’m definitely going to be mediocre. I’m saying I’m going to be only what I can be, and it might be any number of things.
Abby Wambach:
It’s beautiful.
Cheryl Strayed:
It might be failure. It might be… And so to be driven by the engine that is inside of you rather than the engine that is the cultures or your youthful idea of what success was, or somebody else’s expectation or hope for you. Like that engine always runs out of steam.
Abby Wambach:
That’s right.
Cheryl Strayed:
It just does.
Abby Wambach:
And I see so many athletes and I never wanted to be one of these athletes that when they retire, they completely lose themselves. So my retirement has been spent trying to identify who I am and what I want and what is true about me and what I want out of this life. Because I think I spent so much time exhausting the steam train that was external, that was outside of myself. So I think that that’s really interesting.
Amanda Doyle:
I do think it’s so important what you said about, it doesn’t mean you’re going to be mediocre, but surrendering to, this is my thing to do regardless of whether it’s mediocre or amazing, is so important because when you think about it, sometimes we don’t do things even if we think they’re our purpose, because some part of ourselves is protecting ourselves to say, “Well, if I don’t do it, I can still tell myself and other people that if I did do it, it would’ve been amazing.” Whereas if I do it and it’s not amazing, I can’t hold on to that myth that if I had done it, it would’ve been amazing.
Cheryl Strayed:
That’s right.
Amanda Doyle:
And so, it’s really so courageous.
Cheryl Strayed:
It keeps you out of the arena in a way. If you’re working on a book, you’re still on that little safe shelf of like, it has the potential, right? Whenever I get the questions, sometimes people will say, “Well, how do you write a bestselling book?” It’s like, “I have absolutely no idea. I have no idea.” There is no answer to that question. You don’t sit down and write a bestselling book. You sit down and you write a book that is in your heart and in your mind, and in your soul, and then come what may.
Glennon Doyle:
That’s right.
Cheryl Strayed:
And to really wrap your mind around that, you do have to redefine the definition of success, the way that we’ve been told that success is measured outside of us by attention and money and fame and gold medals. Abby, I haven’t yet fangirled all over you, but I mean, that is so thrilling that you have those medals. So that’s no way to diminish that achievement. And yet it can’t, in the end, be the thing that drives your passion for your work and for your life.
Abby Wambach:
Come what may.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah. Cheryl, one of the last things your mom said to you was, “You are a seeker.”
Cheryl Strayed:
Mm-hmm.
Glennon Doyle:
Now you see that as true, but it pissed you off at first. And the fact that it pissed you off, we have talked about this endlessly this week, because I just love that it pissed you off at first because it just to me speak so much about the complications in relationship between mother and daughter and like how much you put on what your mom thinks of you, and…
Cheryl Strayed:
Yeah.
Glennon Doyle:
Tell us about first of all, why it pissed you off you think?
Cheryl Strayed:
Well, it’s interesting because it’s very much born of that era I was in in my life, which made my mom’s death even more complicated. Again, now, I’ve talked to so many people who relate to this, but when you lose a parent, when you’re in your teens or early 20s, you are developmentally doing that social distancing. Like your actual job as a teenager and early 20s person is to establish yourself separate from your parents, right? And so I didn’t want my mom to say I was anything. I wanted to define myself. So there was first this instant recoil, like, “Oh, you can’t say who I am or what I am.”
Cheryl Strayed:
She said that to me in the context of, I had told her I wanted to join… There was in the hospice where she was dying, I saw this sign for this grief support group and I told her I was going to go to it. And there was something about it that embarrassed me, too. That she could see in me that kind of longing I had to sort of join the world or find others, or find things. I think a lot of it was really just that not yet wanting to be seen so clearly by my mother. And of course now I would welcome her seeing me.
Glennon Doyle:
Longing is embarrassing when you’re young.
Cheryl Strayed:
Yeah.
Glennon Doyle:
Anyone seeing your longing or your reaching or your needing or your… It’s like-
Amanda Doyle:
Only when you’re young?
Glennon Doyle:
… that’s embarrassing.
Amanda Doyle:
Well, that’s lucky for you.
Glennon Doyle:
No, I think at some point we can-
Amanda Doyle:
Still very embarrassed by their longing.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah. Good point. Well, good point.
Abby Wambach:
Well, it’s too cool for school. You don’t want to embarrass yourself and you don’t want to make yourself vulnerable to it not happening or whatever.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah. You don’t want to ever admit you don’t have everything you need.
Abby Wambach:
Yeah.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah. So now, though, how do you feel about the word seeker? And what is that to you?
Cheryl Strayed:
Oh, I think that would be one of the words I would use to define myself. Yeah. It’s beautiful. I mean, it’s interesting, Glennon, that you’re asking about this because I would use that word to define myself. That is pretty moving to me to think my mom said that to me all those years ago, and that’s what I’ve spent my life doing. Yeah, I think I’m very much a seeker, and I think in my work as Dear Sugar, one of the things I knew when I first took on the Sugar column, now, like, gosh, 12 years ago or so, was that I wasn’t going to be the person who would have the answers and to just tell people what to do, but that I would seek with them the questions that sat beneath their questions.
Cheryl Strayed:
I would seek with them the ways to see more clearly their conundrum or their sorrow or their suffering or their question. And I do think that that’s my work from a very early age. What I felt called to do was to be a writer, and it was because, as a reader, I could feel that sort of big transcendent thing we look for when we read and write. It’s like I could feel myself connected to people who were not me, people through all time and place. And I’ve always sought to make that kind of beauty in my life and to find that beauty in my life, and also to be a person who helped people seek that in their own lives, too.
Glennon Doyle:
So what do you find yourself seeking now? What are you seeking?
Cheryl Strayed:
Oh, my goodness. Well, you know, that’s such a great question. The last couple years of my life, basically since the pandemic, I would say that they have been the second hardest era of my life after the era during which my mom died. It’s been a very serious, difficult time just in my family’s life and in my life as a mother. Raising two teenagers through the pandemic has been hard in all the ways that we all have been reading about in The New York Times and elsewhere about struggles that teens have had during this time. And I’ve been right there in the thick of it.
Cheryl Strayed:
And it has brought me, Abby, you used this word humility. It’s the most humbling thing I’ve ever done is be a mother. And I’m really trying to find my way, always to figure out how to be the best mother to my kids, and also how to be stable and balanced in my own life when they’re struggling. I said earlier that a teen’s job is to find independence and to find themselves, step into their own identity. And I think a lot of parents during this era of kids’ lives go through that, too. Who am I without my kids? Can I be happy if my kids aren’t?
Glennon Doyle:
Yes.
Cheryl Strayed:
Those are questions I’ve been asking myself a lot. And so, the way it’s been humbling for me is to remember that I’ll always be a seeker and that there are happy times and there are sad times and there are hard times and there are easy times and they’re going to come and go, and come and go, and come and go again. And I think sometimes there have been parts of my life that I’ve gotten a little complacent about that. Things were great and I thought everything’s going to stay great. And then things haven’t been great. And it’s like, “Wow, how do I move through this with some intelligence and grace?” So, humble seeker that I am, I’m just trying to do that thing I’ve told the world to do, to keep putting one foot in front of the other.
Abby Wambach:
Which leads to my next question. Do you still hike now that you have a family and kids?
Cheryl Strayed:
Of course I hike. I mean, we’re going to hike the AT together, Abby.
Abby Wambach:
That’s right.
Amanda Doyle:
Reese get ready… to resurrect your role.
Cheryl Strayed:
That’s right.
Glennon Doyle:
Reese is like, “Damn it to hell. That was hard just playing her.”
Cheryl Strayed:
Yeah. So-
Glennon Doyle:
So much.
Cheryl Strayed:
… I love to hike. It’s still my favorite thing to do. And my family loves to hike, too. My kids know, every Mother’s Day and on my birthday, they have to go on a hike with me. But I’ve also made them hike before the pandemic. In 2017 we went to New Zealand and we hiked the Milford Track and the Routeburn Track. New Zealand has amazing hiking trails. And, yeah, I love to hike so much. Yes.
Glennon Doyle:
How stressful to go hiking with your mom, and your mom is fucking Cheryl Strayed.
Cheryl Strayed:
Yeah. Yeah.
Abby Wambach:
They’re like, “When can we stop?” She’s like-
Glennon Doyle:
Like, “Never. We’re never stopping.”
Abby Wambach:
… “Just another 400 miles, kids.”
Cheryl Strayed:
Well, that is such an awkward thing. When I have been hiking and then I meet people on the trail and I just always try not to really say who I am, because people are so disappointed. They’re like, “You’re Cheryl Strayed?” Like, “Yeah, I’m just an old middle-aged mom trying to hike along the trail.”
Glennon Doyle:
Okay. That’s so good.
Abby Wambach:
That’s amazing.
Cheryl Strayed:
But so, yeah. I’m like, “Yeah, I’m Cheryl Strayed, motherfucker.”
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah.
Cheryl Strayed:
I don’t know if I’m allowed to say that on this podcast.
Abby Wambach:
That’s right.
Glennon Doyle:
Can that be the title?
Abby Wambach:
We’re kind of disappointed that it took this long. Yeah.
Cheryl Strayed:
Okay. Okay.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah. I’m Cheryl Strayed, motherfucker.
Cheryl Strayed:
Or as Liz Gilbert would say to me, “You’re Cheryl fucking Strayed.”
Abby Wambach:
Yes.
Cheryl Strayed:
I love Liz. I loved your episodes with her.
Abby Wambach:
Isn’t she-
Glennon Doyle:
Oh, cute.
Abby Wambach:
… the freaking best?
Cheryl Strayed:
Yes. She is.
Glennon Doyle:
She’s the absolute best.
Cheryl Strayed:
We’re lucky to have her.
Abby Wambach:
We really are.
Glennon Doyle:
What are your little spiritual practices now? Like you can’t go for a hike, but life is so stressful and you’re trying to make it through the day. What are your little things that you do to survive?
Cheryl Strayed:
Walking. I mean, I know this is different than a hike, but I think of myself as sort of… I do like walking meditation and I think it’s one of the things that… I’ve literally never gone on a walk and felt worse afterwards. Like you always feel a little bit better.
Abby Wambach:
Yes.
Cheryl Strayed:
It actually is part of my creative life. It’s part of my psychological wellbeing life, and part of my spiritual life. There’s something about silence and motion that’s really powerful, whether it be running or walking. I used to be a runner. Now I just walk. That’s something I turn to a lot. Books. I mean, it’s interesting to me how, from a very young age, like I said, when I first felt called to be a writer, the beauty and the power and the truth in words makes me feel… Like it puts me in contact, I think, with the divine. And I turn to words. I turn to stories and poetry and words by others that make me feel less alone.
Cheryl Strayed:
I think that most people don’t think of reading as a sacred act, but I do. I think of literature really kind of as my religion, to be honest. It’s in the pages of books that I’ve felt that thing I think a lot of people feel when they talk about God. And in writing them, too. I feel like all of my work is really spiritual, even though I am not what you would consider… I guess I don’t really believe in God, but I believe in the divinity that is in all of us, and my portal to that divinity is absolutely through my writing.
Glennon Doyle:
So for you being a renowned advice giver, what’s the best advice that you’ve ever been given that you still keep in the back of your mind and heart?
Cheryl Strayed:
Well, this one is from my mom, and in some ways it’s also an answer to your previous question about what I do to feel better each day. My mother would always say to me, “Put yourself in the way of beauty.” And when she would say that, I would just be a surly teenager and roll my eyes. But what I later came to understand is that she was right. What she would say is, “No matter how hard things are, no matter how miserable or ugly things seem in your life on any given day, you always have the opportunity to put yourself in the way of beauty. There’s always a sunrise and there’s always a sunset, and it’s up to you to be there for it or not.”
Cheryl Strayed:
And I really did just ignore that. And I was on the Pacific Crest Trail and I’d been out there maybe 50 days and nights by that point, and I was standing there watching yet another gorgeous sunset. And I remembered this advice from my mother. And I realized she had given me, in so many ways, the tools I needed to save myself. And it was something that simple, is that like, “Seek beauty. Put yourself in the way of beauty and your life will be better for it.”
Cheryl Strayed:
And I think about that all the time, every day. Like I told you, the struggles I’ve had over these last few years, feeling just like things are difficult in my life, really each day going and seeking something simple. It can be the simplest thing. The thing that makes you feel that you are in the presence of beauty, that you are part of beauty, it’s a powerfully transformative act to do that.
Glennon Doyle:
So for our next right thing, this is just a little helpful thing we like to give people at the end of an episode so that they can… Forget everything else we just said, just one little easy thing that they could take with them. Can you talk to us about our ITSs, our inner terrible someones, and how we can banish them? Just-
Cheryl Strayed:
Yes.
Glennon Doyle:
Just leave us with that.
Cheryl Strayed:
Did you say how we manage them?
Glennon Doyle:
We can’t banish them. You’re right, yeah. What the hell is ITS?
Cheryl Strayed:
Okay. The ITS, it’s your inner terrible someone. I know all three of you have one inside of you. We all do, okay? So here’s-
Abby Wambach:
Can you have multiple ITS?
Cheryl Strayed:
This is my best advice.
Glennon Doyle:
I have triplet ITS.
Cheryl Strayed:
You have like-
Glennon Doyle:
Tripl-ITS.
Cheryl Strayed:
Okay. You have a lot of ITS. We all do. Let’s put them into one big monster ITS, your inner terrible someone, and that is that that voice inside of you that says, “No, you can’t. You shouldn’t. You’re stupid. You’re ugly. Nobody wants you.” You know, all that stuff. You can’t write. You’re a terrible mother. All that stuff, right? And what I think is incredibly powerful and important is to remember that that is not something that we necessarily need to reject.
Cheryl Strayed:
For a long time I think I felt like that is a sign that I’m not an evolved person, a sign that I’m in some way falling down at the job of being an enlightened, healthy, whole person. And this shift in me really in my own life is when I realized, “No, no. Hello, ITS my friend, you are part of me and here is your seat at my table. You get to be one of the people who guides me in my life. But the thing you need to know about yourself is you’re 99.9% of the time dead wrong. You’re not going to be the thing that rules me.”
Glennon Doyle:
And we all have a friend like that who’s always wrong. Yeah.
Cheryl Strayed:
Yeah. For me the key, Glennon, was not to work against it. It’s kind of like when I was… A lot of people ask me, like, “How did you hike the Pacific Crest Trail by yourself? Weren’t you afraid?” That’s always the question. “Weren’t you afraid? Weren’t you afraid?” And one of the very first decisions I made when I decided to hike that trail alone is that I could not let fear rule me, which is different than saying I wouldn’t be afraid, okay? So the decision we’re always making is like, here are all the feelings I have. Shame, fear, doubt, all of those feelings we have, are they going to be the thing that makes the decisions for us, that rules our lives, that tells us what we can and cannot do?
Cheryl Strayed:
My answer to that is absolutely no. So harnessing your ITS is saying, “I see you. You’re part of me, and you’re not my ruler.” My ruler is my wise inner sage, my deepest inner truth. That clarity at the core of me that knows that I am worthy of love, that I am capable of great things, even if they’re mediocre, and I’m going to allow that bigger, I guess, what I think of it as that bigger self within me to guide my life. And ITS can trail along behind me yammering away, saying all those negative things, but they’re not going to be the things I believe.
Glennon Doyle:
Ugh. I remember my dad, he always says, “You’re never as good as you think you are Glennon, but you’re never as bad as you think you are.” And it’s like the two voices that screw us up are the one you started with and the one you’re ending with now, the voice that says, “You are great and you must be great.” That grandiosity is just the flip side of the ITS, right?
Cheryl Strayed:
That’s right. That’s right.
Glennon Doyle:
Those two highs and lows of telling us who we are. Because really what the voice inside, the wise one you’re talking about, is always saying, “It’s just one more step.”
Cheryl Strayed:
That’s right. The wise voice isn’t the grandiose one. The wise one is a very humble, very grounded and very, I think, generous and loving voice. When I was on the Pacific Crest Trail and that thing that I said about deciding fear wasn’t going to be my ruler and that’s what allowed me to go, and one of the ways that I would trick my brain is I decided before I went that whenever I felt afraid, what I would say to myself, I would directly, out loud, say, “I am not afraid. I am not afraid. I’m not afraid.”
Cheryl Strayed:
And of course the contradiction is, I only said it when I was afraid. And I think that in some ways, like Glennon, you were talking about those two oppositions, your ITS and then that grandiose voice, like for me to say, “I’m not afraid,” while I’m afraid. But what happens when you bring those two together is the center, which is, “Okay, I’m a little bit afraid, but guess what? I’m brave. I’m a courageous person. I can do this hard thing.” And so doing hard things is not about it being easy.
Glennon Doyle:
No.
Cheryl Strayed:
It’s not saying like it’s in your imagination that it’s hard. It’s saying, “I can do hard things.” That’s the middle path.
Glennon Doyle:
Cheryl, thank you for being a sage of the middle. That’s what you do. The two dichotomies. I cannot go on. I will go on.
Cheryl Strayed:
Uh-huh. Yeah.
Glennon Doyle:
I am afraid. I am not afraid. And as wisdom is the ability to hold two different ideas at the same time and keep walking. Thank you.
Cheryl Strayed:
That’s right, Glennon.
Glennon Doyle:
Thank you.
Cheryl Strayed:
Yes. Thank you dear sisters. I could talk to the three of you all day long. I mean you’re just such wonderful, dear, brilliant, brave, good people. Thank you.
Glennon Doyle:
Well lucky for us, we are going to continue this conversation.
Cheryl Strayed:
That’s right.
Glennon Doyle:
We’re going to be right back in a couple of days with an incredible episode where Cheryl turns into Sugar.
Cheryl Strayed:
That’s right.
Glennon Doyle:
Do not forget. Do not miss this next one. But thank you so much, Cheryl Strayed. You are a guide for us. And for the rest of you, we know you can’t go on, but you will go on. See you next time.
Cheryl Strayed:
Bye.
Glennon Doyle:
We Can Do Hard Things is produced in partnership with Cadence13 Studios. Be sure to rate, review and follow the show on Apple podcasts, Audacy, or wherever you get your podcasts. Especially be sure to rate and review the podcast if you really liked it. If you didn’t, don’t worry about it. It’s fine.