Mm.Did you ever think to yourself, like, in your teenage years, "Oh, I could potentially do another career," or was something in your heart always writer?

You know, what I thought is that I absolutely had to do another career.

When I was growing up, I didn't have any idea that I could actually make a living off of writing books.

And I don't know exactly how to explain that except to say that, that even though I loved literature, I, I felt that the people who made those books were people who were so distant from who I was.

Many of them, you know, many of those books that I was assigned in high school just like you, you know, they were by dead white men essentially.

They were created somewhere in a land in a time far off.

And so I never imagined that I would grow up and, and be able to make my living that way.

Mm-hmm

Mm-hmm.

And I think that that was one of the most kind of moving things for me to realize on my Pacific Crest Trail hike, which I wrote about in Wild, and to talk to so many other adventurers and hikers since then, is that, you know, it really isn't about being an expert or a champion or the best or a gold medalist.

Though, of course, I do talk on my podcast to a lot of pe- people who have done those things.

But really, at the end of the day, we're always, um, you know, up against ourselves, and I think when we do something hard with our bodies, like join cross-country when you're, like, a 14-year-old who's very insecure and wasn't necessarily the fittest person, I started running and, and I learned something that I think only the body can teach us, and it was something I learned years later on the Pacific Crest Trail, and that was that simple, essential truth that we can do the impossible.

You know, we can keep going even when it hurts, and we can do it on our own steam with our own bodies.

And so when we teach our bodies to be strong, inevitably that spills over into the rest of us, our spirits, our hearts, our minds, and that has been a lesson I've had to, you know, learn, draw upon over and over again throughout my life.

Do you think you would have been able to do the Pacific Crest Trail if you hadn't done that cross-country stuff?

stuff?You know, probably not.

Mm

... because it did exactly what I was just saying.

It opened up a conversation between us that wasn't about the fairy tale, that was actually about human sexuality.

[laughs] And you know, his wounds and my wounds and our hopes and expectations and aspirations as a couple.

You know, the questionYou know, at that time when, when he, you know, he basically had a one-night stand, and, you know, it wasn't, i- his problem wasn't like, "Well, I'm not sure I'm, if I'm in love with you, Cheryl.

I'm not sure if I wanna be partners with you." That wasn't his question.

His question was really ...

"And I'm longing for a journey to help me see the road ahead clearly." Seems like someone's pretty excited about this next act, huh?

I'll take a bullet for the country.

Sarah, I listen to your podcast and I know this about you.

And, you know, you and I are sisters in that way.

I have always been wildly ambitious and also condemned for it because you're not allowed to be that if you're a girl or a woman.

And certainly you weren't in my generation.

So as a young writer, I mean, I grew up in poverty.

I grew up without anyone talking to me about college or being like, you could be great things.

And I wonder when you knew that you were wise and when the world told you that they agreed.

Sure

... who they love like that.

And so I thought, okay, I'll, I'll show the world how much this means by ruining my life.

Now of course, I didn't know this consciously.

I look back now and I think that's what I was doing.

And then pretty quickly, I mean, that's what led to my hike on the Pacific Crest Trail, is I realized really just what you said is, like, actually, how do I honor my mom? Is it to ruin my life or is it to thrive? Is it to be the woman she raised me to be? Is it to, to, to make good on her best intentions and all the sacrifices she made in raising me and my siblings? And I knew the answer right away.

As soon as that question came into my head I was like, okay, Cheryl, it is time to ... reverse course and find your footing again.

Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

...

in the face of the monumental suffering that you're experiencing.

And yet, what I have found, and I wanna say, Erica, even though I haven't written about this publicly or talked about this a lot, I have had experiences that are like yours, not with a child, but with other family members.

And there is this terrible, terrible powerless one feels when, when you watch somebody you love so dearly, um, suffering, and you don't know how to help them.

And what I figured out, this, this love yourself (laughs) thing, it actually finds its way back to the question you're asking me, which is how to love your son.

And what I mean by this is, I think when we're in pain, we can get very often caught up in this sense, this, this kind of powerless cycle of, "What do I do to change him? What do I do to help him? What do I do to support him?" And all of those things are so much outside of our control, but what is inside of our control is to say, "How do I make myself strong-"

(laughs)

Okay.

Every summer, uh, for the last couple summers, I've taught a writing workshop in Chamonix, France.

And we went almost three years ago, and Carver and Bobby were at the time eight and nine, and we arrive in Chamonix in the French Alps.

And so you, it's this little village with these high snowy peaks, and in the summertime the sky is full of, uh, paragliders.

They call them parapentes in French.

And my kids, even though they were eight and nine, immediately said, "Mom, we're going to do that." And I said, "No, you are absolutely not going to do that." They keep at us all week, "We wanna go, we wanna go." Finally, I say to them, "You know, you can't go.

You're too young." And so of course my s- daughter marches over to the fellow who's, like, selling the parapente rides, and he says, "Oh, eight.

Yeah, I was gonna say he did.