118. Cheryl Strayed: Don’t Let Your Dreams Ruin Your Life

I walked through fire.

I came out

the other side.

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 Strait.

Cheryl Straight is here today.

Yay.

I'm so thrilled to be here.

Yeah, I mean, I already said this.

I love you guys, and I love this podcast.

So thank you.

We love you back.

Cheryl Strait is the author of the number one New York Times bestselling memoir, Wild,

as well as the bestsellers, 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 Catherine Hahn.

Would that have been cast any better?

No.

Obsessed.

I know.

I love Catherine Hahn.

We were looking for somebody who would be able to do like 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.

Yes, she is.

Catherine Hahn's one of my favorite actors, but Tiny Beautiful Things is one of my favorite books of all time.

Oh, thank you.

This is a very big happening.

Okay.

In addition to writing her widely acclaimed essays, stories, and scripts, Straight has hosted two hit podcasts for the New York Times, Sugar Calling and Dear Sugars, which she co-hosted with Steve Allman.

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?

That's right.

And probably and counting.

It seems like we're always being conned into more animals living in our house.

Okay.

There's something that happens with the animals that 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.

Yeah, maybe we have three teenagers and Glenn 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's 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 that's right because animals require things no i 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 bobby who are now bobby'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 you know do the litter box they don't even i mean no they don't follow through with it's just lies i just think that they're all lies lies and then we get the animals and then what happens is you end up loving them you know

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 like loving on them and stroking them and cooing at them all the time.

They're like a medium for emotions that kids don't want our direct emotion.

They can't give it back to us, but we just stand around the dog and we're like, look at me loving the dog.

Are you receiving the transmittal through you?

And maybe that's like a biological evolutionary, they con us because they know we need a transition animal.

Yeah.

Many years ago, when my kids were little and still in that phase where they they wanted to like snuggle in bed and be all like lovey dovey, my friend Natalie had two teenagers and she had this little dog that she just loved.

She said, oh, I'm so bonded to this dog.

And she said, you know, I had to get him because then I would have at least one person in my family who loved me.

Yeah.

And, you know,

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 all that.

Exactly.

So now I understand what she was talking about because my kids are in the, you know, just more likes, they want to socially distance more likes

like when the pandemic came they were at this age i was like they're we're being told to socially distance from everyone and they were forced to be like not socially distance with the with the two people they most wanted to socially distance that's interesting me and my aunt that's so freaking true yeah poor teenagers during the pandemic

i know 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

light for all of us.

It's helped all of us a lot.

Yeah.

So after your mama died, you were only 22.

That's right.

And she was only 45.

And she was only 45.

You were both seniors in college, right?

Yes, we were.

We were.

So one of the things I heard you say that I thought was so fascinating is you spiraled for a while after that

in 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.

That just rang a bell in me.

Can you talk to us about what you meant by that in that time?

Yeah.

So,

you know, 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.

You know, she was really, in so many ways

my hero.

You know, 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, you know, 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,

you know, she was, they wanted her to give her the baby and they would raise it as their own and pretend it was their own.

So, you know, her choices were really limited.

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 a younger brother.

And, you know, 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, you know, 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.

And, you know, 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 like how recent

this, any understanding of, you know 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 like 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.

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 I think of, even though there were many hardships in my childhood, I do think, wow, what a glorious, glorious, you know, 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 up 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 this kind of 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.

She was like a perfectly healthy woman who wasn't a smoker, who was told she had advanced stage lung cancer and died.

And

I,

the only words I have for it, and they're 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, ever, but in life to the people who to her children, to the people who loved her, she was extraordinary.

And I didn't have anything as a young woman, but my, my own life, my own body, my own trajectory.

You know, 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, you know, that this, that this decision to say, okay, I'm going to turn away from that ambitious girl I'd been and become somebody who is 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.

I love that.

Does that make sense?

It makes

utterly perfect sense to me.

I mean, it floored me.

It's like, oh my gosh, you 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

you're

born into last name.

You chose it.

Why did you choose Strayed?

Yeah.

Well, it's complicated, I think, for a lot of us who have,

you know, who carry our fathers' names and who

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, you know, my childhood.

Nyland, my name was Cheryl Nyland.

I mean, we're sort of leaving ahead, but you know, I got married super crazily young.

And we wanted to be like this, my, my ex-husband and I were like, these feminists and we're like, we're going to take on each other's names, which is, which was, of course, then I had this like long, complicated, hyphenated name that nobody could ever say.

Cheryl Nyland Lidding, Cheryl Nyland Lidding.

And my ex-husband also took on my name, which of course then he was like.

congratulated for being this amazing man you know 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 like 25,

what it was really a simple thing, Abby, is I got, you know, we were doing like do-it-yourself divorce, because like we had no kids, we had two cats and, you know, nothing, like maybe a, like, I don't know, like some towels.

Yeah.

I don't even think we had a couch.

I bet.

Okay.

So we're doing this like do-it-yourself divorce.

And you fill out the form and it literally says, my name after the divorce will be, and you know, you could have written like mickey mouse in there and i was really struck by that line and of course by as someone who cares an awful lot about words

and you know 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 straight and I saw the definition of it.

And I just, it was like a punch to the gut because I knew this is me, this is me.

And straight, you know, it has layers of definitions and meanings, but you know, 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, straight 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.

That's right.

People just feel really threatened and addled and bewildered by people choosing their own names.

Yeah.

I think it's cool.

Badass.

That's amazing.

Thank you.

I've been Cheryl Strade longer than I've been any other name, and it feels like my heritage.

I read something where you were talking about how so many people think of Strade as kind of an escape, but you think of it more as

seeking and finding ourselves.

Was that related to your hike?

Yeah.

One of the most interesting things

that I've come to understand about human experience is so many things

that seem like one thing are actually at core the other.

So, you know, like when you go on the kind of journey that I went on in my 1100 mile hike on the Pacific Crest Trail, very often that's kind of framed as escape.

You know, you're escaping, you're running away from your, and, and I always think it's, we're stepping into.

And I even came to understand, honestly, my, my foray

into using heroin as that way.

In so many ways,

what was compelling to me about heroin, and I know anyone who

has any experience with drugs, you know, understands this.

And it's like you use it and you think, I 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.

So even I, when I stepped into heroin, I was like, okay, this is the escape.

And really what I was looking for and 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, like 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.

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, was hiking the trail something that you thought would be

a positive, huge action to show your loss?

Was it constructive, huge act instead of destructive, huge act?

And how does one decide?

Because most people are like, okay, I 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, I'm going to go hike 1100 miles.

Glennon, I sometimes, 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, you know, we talk about the bottom place, which I think is the glorious place of beginnings.

Because the only place to go when you hit the bottom is up.

When I teach writing workshops, if I say, let's write, you know, write about that hardest moment, it's always the thing that also brought people their greatest strength, and courage, and beauty.

And 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 come of me?

What has happened to me?

Who am I?

And the awakening I had was, it's really connected with this destruction.

It was like, I love my mother world, so I'm going to destroy myself.

And then I realized that the exact opposite thing was true.

This is what I 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.

I,

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.

I would 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.

It's not a like, go find that great person.

It's It's dig it back up.

You know,

you buried it inside of you.

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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?

Like, what am I, what, what am I hoping to get out of hiking thousands of miles?

Yeah, and just tell us so we don't have to do it.

Okay.

Yeah.

I was going to say, first of all, Abby, like, I want to know when you're going to do it because like, I don't want you to, you know, like, I have always wanted to, I've always wanted to like you got to do it you got to make a plan okay even though it's like 10 years from now also I hope are you planning to bring have you met Glennon yeah exactly

exactly I just feel like time apart is important for

literally

and last week she just said for the first time in our marriage that maybe she could go camping for one night because Cheryl working on it I went hiking with my son yeah and we hiked and hiked and hiked for hours and hours and hours I felt very strayed.

And you thought of me.

And I thought

I saw the PCT.

I didn't want it.

No, you did.

You hiked a little portion of the PCT.

You saw it.

A little portion.

Yeah.

Okay.

Anyway, I also learned some great lessons, but I assume that you maybe learned more.

I mean, I was on it for 12 minutes.

I'm proud of you.

I'm really proud of you.

But Abby, maybe you and I.

I've always wanted to hike to AT too.

Maybe we'll go together.

That would be amazing.

And then we write a memoir called Really Wild.

Oh, yes.

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, this kind of like the humility and the,

I guess, strength

that acceptance demands, it was something I had to do every day: 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 at myself for being here

because

I was 26.

And I was, one of the things I kept thinking about is I was, 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 like 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, like, the only way we ever get anywhere is one step at a time.

Even if we want to, you know, tell ourselves otherwise, it's not true.

Yeah.

It 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

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 can, we should do easier things or like we could do a few less hard things.

It's like we can do this hard thing that's been placed upon us.

I would say that the that like if there was just one core kind of sentence I would use to describe Wild, like what message people are like, what message would you take from it?

You know, 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, like I

thought, I can't live without my mother.

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 to, you know, we can bear the unbearable.

It's just different language for a very similar idea.

And I think it's one that it's incredibly important for all of us to remember every day, because very often our first response is, I can't.

Yeah.

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.

Yeah.

And therefore you can.

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.

Yeah, absolutely.

And I think it's also about rejecting that kind of dichotomy, like the ways that we think about what what courage looks like or strength looks like.

You know, it's like when people say, I could never do that.

And it's like, well, you, you actually could.

You know, 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 or 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 you can, 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 that's really, we can do hard things even if we don't like doing them.

Yeah.

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.

So good.

So good.

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.

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, 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, 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.

I just finished graduate school.

And I was just like, okay, I'm going to just finish this book.

I was like 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 write, like try to write.

And I got into this like really deep shame cycle.

And I realized like, I can't do this.

And maybe actually, not only have I been lying to everyone else when I keep saying, yes, I'm going to, 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 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.

Yes.

And, you know, which it seems like a reverse, it seems like, you know, 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 under 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.

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 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.

And it's 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.

And like the idea of being amazing is what keeps us from doing the daily mediocre shit.

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.

I think that that's so beautifully put.

Well, you have a different, 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 she just kept going to get to the greatness 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 you're quote this whole concept is just revolutionary for me right now in just being a person like i just did soccer really well and now i'm a parent which is the most humbling mediocre it is situation

you know abby you know i'm curious i mean my assumption is too like this this shift that we're talking about it's like in some ways if if you don't have that surrender to your own mediocrity moment very often what's driving you to greatness is outside of you yes 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.

It might be failure.

It might be.

And so like 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.

That's right.

It just does.

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.

I do think it's so important what you said about the, 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 have been amazing.

Whereas if I do it and it's not amazing, I can't hold on to that,

you know, myth that if I had done it, it would have been amazing.

That's right.

So it's really so courageous.

It keeps you out of of the arena in a way if you're working on a book you're still on that little safe shelf of like um you know it has the potential right whenever i get the questions sometimes people will say well how do you write a best-selling 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 best-selling book you you sit down and you write a book that is in your heart and in your mind and your soul.

And then come what may.

It's

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.

You know, Abby, I haven't yet fangirled all over you, but like, I mean, that is so thrilling that you have those medals.

Like, and there's 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.

Come what may.

Yeah.

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Cheryl, one of the last things your mom said to you was, you are a seeker.

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 speaks so much about the complications in relationship and between mother and daughter and like how much you put on what your mom thinks of you.

And

tell us about first of all, why it pissed you off, you think?

Yeah.

Well, it's interesting because it's, 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're developmentally doing that, you you know, that social distancing.

Like your actual job, you know, 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.

Like I wanted to define myself.

So there was first this instant recoil of like, oh, you can't say who I am or what I am.

She said that to me in the context of I had told her I wanted to join there.

There was in the hospice where she was dying, there was this,

like, i saw this sign for this grief support group and i told her i was gonna go to it and there was something about it that um

that embarrassed me too that like she could see in me that kind of longing i had to sort of join you know join the world or find others or like find find things you know

i think it was 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.

Longing is embarrassing when you're young.

Yeah.

Anyone seeing your longing or you're reaching or you're needing or you're, it's like, that's only when you're young will that stop for you?

No, I think at some point we can.

I'm not going to

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.

Yeah, you don't want to ever admit you don't have everything you need.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yep.

So now, though, how do you feel about the word seeker and what is that to you oh i think that's what would be one of the words i would use to define myself yeah it's beautiful i mean it's interesting ghana that you're asking about this because i i would use that word to define myself that that is pretty moving to me to think like you know my mom said that to me all these all those years ago and that's what i've spent my life doing

and yeah i think i'm very much a seeker and i think in my work as dear sugar one of the things things i knew when i first took on the sugar column now like gosh 12 years ago or so um was that i wanted to seek 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 i would seek with them the ways that to see more clearly their conundrum or their sorrow or their suffering or their 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 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, you know, 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.

So what do you find yourself seeking now?

What are you seeking?

Oh my goodness.

Well, you know,

that's such a great question.

The last couple years of my life, the last basically since the pandemic hit,

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, you know, in the New York Times and elsewhere, about like struggles that teens have had during this time.

And I've been right there in the thick of it.

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 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?

Those are questions I've been asking myself a lot.

And so

the way it's 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, but I've gotten a little complacent about that.

You know, 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.

Putting one foot in front of the other.

Which leads to my next question: Do you still hike now that you have a family?

Of course, I hike.

I mean, we're going to hike the AT together, Abby.

That's right.

Reese, get ready to reverse your role.

That's right.

Reese is like, damn it to hell.

That was hard.

Just playing her.

Yeah.

So much.

I love to hike.

It's still my favorite thing to do and my family loves to hike too i i

the my kids know every mother's day and on my birthday they have to go on a hike with me but i've also like made them hike before the pandemic in 2017 we went to new zealand and we hiked the milford track and the root root burn track new zealand has amazing hiking trails um and yeah i'd love to hike so much yes wow How sweet.

I used to go hiking with your mom and your mom is fucking Cheryl Strabe.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And you're like,

they're like, when when can we stop?

She's like, just another 400 miles kid.

Well, that is such an awkward thing when I, when I have been hiking and then I meet people on the trail and I just always try not to really like say

who I am because people are so disappointed.

They're like, you're Cheryl Stray?

I'm like, yeah, I'm just an old middle-aged mom trying to hike.

along the trail.

Okay, that's so good.

That's amazing.

But so, yeah, I'm like, yeah, I'm Cheryl Stray, motherfucker.

I'm not allowed to say that on this podcast.

That's right.

We've been disappointed that it took this long.

Okay, okay.

Yeah, I'm Cheryl Stray, motherfucker.

Or as Liz Gilbert would say to me, you're Cheryl fucking stray.

Yeah.

Yes.

Yeah.

I love Liz.

I loved your episodes with her.

Isn't she the cute?

Freaking.

She's the actual best.

She is.

We're lucky to have her.

We really are.

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?

Walking, I mean, I know this is different than a hike, but I think of myself as a 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 after one.

Like you always feel a little bit better.

Yes.

It's this part, it actually is part of my creative life.

It's part of my sort of psychological well-being life and part of my spiritual life.

To 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, I...

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.

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, you know, I feel like all of 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 think I believe in the divinity that is in all of us.

And my portal to that divinity is absolutely through my writing.

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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?

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.

And 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.

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 it like, you know, seek beauty, put yourself in the way of beauty, and your life will be better for it.

And I think about that all the time every day.

You know, 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, 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.

So for our next great thing, this is just a little helpful thing we like to give people at the end of an episode so that they can, you know, if they just don't 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

leave us.

Did you say how we banish them?

We can't banish them.

You're right.

What the hell is the ITS?

Okay, the it's.

The it's.

It's your inner terrible someone.

I know all three of you have one inside of you.

We all do.

Okay, so here's, here's

my best advice.

Triplet it.

You have like triplets.

Okay.

You have a lot of it's.

Yeah.

We all do.

Let's put them into one big monster it's 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, like 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 um is to remember that that's that that is not something that we necessarily need to reject like 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 some in some way falling down at the job of being like an enlightened healthy whole person and you know the shift in me um really in my own life is when i realized no, no, hello, it's 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 like 99.9% of the time dead wrong.

You're not going to be the thing that rules me.

And we all have a friend like that who's always wrong.

Yeah.

Yeah.

For me, the key, Glennon, was not to work against it.

It's kind of like when I was, you know, a lot of people asked 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, like 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?

My answer to that is absolutely no.

So, harnessing your it's 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, that bigger, I guess what I think of it as that bigger self within me to guide my life.

And it's can, you know, trail along behind me, you know, yammering away, saying all those negative things, but they're not going to be the things I believe.

It reminds 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 that grandiosity is just the flip side of the it's right that's right those that's right two highs and lows of telling us who we are what those because really what the voice inside the wise one you're talking about is always saying is just one more step that's right the wise voice isn't the grandiose one the wise one is just say is it's a very humble very grounded and very, I think, generous and loving voice.

When I was on the Pacific Crest Trail, that thing that I said about deciding fear wasn't going to be my ruler, and that's what allowed me to go.

And, you know, 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, like out loud, say, I am not afraid.

I am not afraid.

I'm not afraid.

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 it's and then that grandiose voice like for me to say I'm not afraid while I'm afraid like but what happens when you you know 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 like doing hard things is not about it being easy.

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.

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 yeah 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 that's right

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.

Well, lucky for us, we are going to continue this conversation.

We're going to be right back in a couple days with an incredible episode where Cheryl turns into sugar.

That's right.

Do not forget, do not miss this next one.

But thank you so much, Cheryl Strade.

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.

Bye.

Bye.

I give you Tish Melton and Brandy Carlisle.

I walked through fire, I came out the other side.

I chased desire,

I made sure I got what's mine.

And I continue

to believe

that I'm the one for me.

And because I'm mine,

I walk the line.

Cause we're adventurers and heartbreaks on map.

A final destination

we lack.

We've stopped asking directions

to places they've never been.

And to be loved, we need to be known.

We'll finally find our way back home.

And through the joy and pain

that our lives

bring,

we can do a heart pain.

I hit rock bottom, it felt like a brand new start.

I'm not the problem,

sometimes things fall apart.

And I continue to believe

the best

people are free.

And it took some time,

but I'm finally fine.

Cause we're adventurers and heartbreaks on that.

A final destination

we lack.

We stopped asking directions

to places they've never been.

And to be loved, we need to be known.

We'll finally find our way back home.

And through the joy and pain

that our lives

bring,

we can do a hard pain.

Cause we're adventurers and heartbreaks on that.

We might get lost, but we're okay with that.

We've stopped asking directions

to places they've never been.

And to be loved, we need to be known.

We'll finally find our way back home.

And through the joy and pain

that our lives bring,

we can do hard things.

Yeah, we can do hard things.

Yeah, we

can do hard

things.

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