Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

Gretchen Rubin's The Happiness Project in two thousand and nine.

Cheryl Strayed's Wild in twenty twelve.

Shonda Rhimes' Year of Yes in twenty fifteen.

It's exactly like watching tech companies scramble to reverse engineer the iPhone after Apple launched it in two thousand and seven.

And how long that's been the case, that, like, you have a place where your stuff is and you go back there.

Well, and it really dictates the amount of stuff you can have if you're carrying it all.

Makes me think about Wilde.

the Reese Witherspoon movie in the book by somebody whose name I cannot remember.

Cheryl Strayed.

It's a crucial distinction.

When you look at the memoirs and the spiritual titles on the list, massive cultural touchstones like Michelle Obama's Becoming, Cheryl Strayed's Wild, or Martha Beck's The Way of Integrity.

Oh, yeah, those were huge.

They all share this fundamental assumption that your life can change.

You don't just meditate for five minutes and suddenly your trauma is gone.

No.

You have to hike the Pacific Crest Trail until your toenails literally fall off, like in Wild, to figure out who you are.

Exactly, and that expectation of hard work applies to the fourth value too, which is that style is allowed to be ambitious.

So I have a full stack of my favorite, probably because I'm writing my own memoir, but I'm a writer at heart.

But yeah, I have a whole stack of memoirs like Cheryl Strayed, Wild, Glass Castle.

I also really love Dani Shapiro.

She's written a ton of memoirs.

So that's another huge part of my PCT experience, right? I know it- Cheryl Strayed has gotten a lot of, like, negative pushback on, like, PCT hikers and, like, almost, like, overpopularizing it.

I'm a ch- I call myself a wild child.

Um, I am a child of the book Wild.

That was my first introduction to the Pacific Crest Trail, and I saw so many similarities in between Cheryl's journey and mine, specifically the mother reference.

Um, her- she talks about her mother being diagno- diagnosed with cancer, her having to take care of her for the six months.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But yeah, Wild definitely had a big impact on me.

While it can be, you know something so different than the past version of you.

Think of the book Wild by Cheryl Strayed.

So if you've read the book Wild or you want to know a little bit about it, Cheryl Strayed lost her mom, got really into drugs, and then went on this crazy hiking trip of her life where she hiked all the way from Mexico to Canada.

She was unprepared, and she did that in her early 20s.

She actually didn't write the book Wild until much later, into her 40s.

And it became this global phenomenon.

They made a movie with Reese Witherspoon in it.