“One of the beautiful and sometimes profoundly painful realities in life is that we’re on our own,” says Cheryl Strayed. “We need to know how to trust and rely on ourselves, to walk through the fire alone. Yet we walk through that fire with more strength and power when we understand that everyone’s had to do it.” In her best-selling memoir Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail (2012), Strayed chronicles how she discovered this truth for herself on a solo 1,100-mile trek from the Mojave Desert to Washington State after the death of her mother. In Wild and her other work, she explores coming to terms with the inevitable transitions and losses that life brings—what we need to hold on to and what we must let go of as we seek a path forward. 

Strayed’s books have sold more than five million copies worldwide. In addition to Wild, she has written the nonfiction books Brave Enough (2015) and Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar (2012), and a novel, Torch (2006). Wild, a film based on Strayed’s memoir, was released in 2014, and Tiny Beautiful Things has been adapted for the stage and television. Strayed began writing an advice column called Dear Sugar for The Rumpus in 2010, hosted the podcast Sugar Calling, and cohosted the Dear Sugars podcast. Her work has been published by the New York Times, the Washington Post Magazine, The Sun, and Vogue, among others. 

From her home in Portland, Oregon, Strayed talked with me about navigating change, learning from her ancestors, and how we can find strength in the balance between individual agency and interdependence. 

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You’re in a between-state at the moment because your youngest child has gone off to college. How are you finding the transition to an empty nest? The thing I’ve been feeling the most is how very life-changing it is. I’ve invested so much in being a mother, and of course, I’ll continue to be a mother forever, yet my job was to raise my children so that I could and would let them go. This is the way it’s supposed to be, it’s one of the most common human experiences, but I feel like this can’t be the way it is. 

There are two other times that life as I knew it ended: when my mother died and when my son was born. One of the first thoughts I had when my mother died was, “My life is over.” Yet what I knew as soon as I had that thought was that my life was over only in one way, that I would have to go on. When my son was born, it was a different kind of world-ending, a joyous one, though also shocking in its totality.

In Tibetan Buddhist belief, the dead often don’t accept that the life they’ve known has come to an end. They hover about in bardo, unable to go forward to their next existence. How much do you struggle in the face of major transitions like the ones you’re describing? I was full of pride and joy when my kids graduated from high school, but it also pained my heart. I kept saying to them, “Your childhood is over, your childhood is over!” Transitions are about profound letting go. And they’re also about profound stepping into, because when the world as you know it ends, you’re still here in the living. Your work is to make a new world, and to find yourself in that new world, even as you still carry those old worlds inside you. With my children, it means accepting the reality that my life isn’t centered on sacrificing for them anymore. I’m feeling excited about my new life, as a writer who works at her best through attention, silence, solitude, contemplation, not having to figure out dinner for anyone.

Surrendering to reality is the balm not just for watching my children walk away into the world but also for the heartache of losing my mom when I was in college and she was 45. When she died, I felt like this is not how it’s supposed to be. I’m not supposed to lose my mom this young, and she’s not supposed to lose her life this young. I understand now that the work of accepting reality is saying, “Well, actually this is the way it was supposed to be.” I will never have my mother again, and I can and will live in the world without her. Any expectation that her life would be longer was simply an expectation. 

A while back, I got very ill and almost died. I remember thinking, “I can’t die because I have two young children, and I’m only in my 40s.” But in the Tibetan way of looking at things, there’s no such thing as “before your time.” You die whenever your time comes. Even though I still felt afraid, remembering this made it easier for me to accept what was happening. My son said to me one day when he was a little boy, “You know, people die at all ages. Sometimes they’re 2, and sometimes they’re 12.” It was his simple assessment of reality, which runs counter to our fierce belief and expectation that everyone should live to old age. When I realized it was that belief and expectation that was causing me so much pain, and I could accept the reality of my mom’s life being 45 years—just breathe that in and breathe that out—it was very, very healing. 

In your recent short memoir Two Women Walk into a Bar, you write about your obsession with Ancestry.com and how exploring your family tree “eased an ancient ache” related in part to your mother’s death. You say that it was as if knowing the names of your ancestors “would repair some of the familial threads that had been severed” when you lost your mother. The bardo teachings are very much about the relationship between who we are now and what’s come before. How has learning about your ancestors affected you? What’s been incredibly moving is the discovery that every person on our family tree was poor and living hand-to-mouth. My hardworking ancestors were chambermaids and housekeepers, miners and factory workers. I grew up poor myself: I was always broke and waiting tables, doing working-class jobs just like my mother, just like all the women before me, even after I finished college. Then Wild was a success, bringing me financial security for the first time in my life. On my 44th birthday, about six months after the book came out, I paid off my student loans and bought a piano for my kids, because all through my childhood, I wanted piano lessons. That same week, I started a college fund for my kids. It was a tumultuous time, brilliantly fun and exciting, and—oh my god!—all my dreams had come true.

Was it also challenging in some ways? What was stressful was that I felt like an imposter, as a lot of women do. Like, “Why did I get this and other people didn’t?” It was Elizabeth Gilbert who helped me see things differently. She’d had similar feelings when Eat, Pray, Love was a huge success, and she said, “Cheryl, you’re the first woman in your lineage to have financial security, that you earned yourself. You get to stand in that kind of power, and you are standing on the shoulders of all your women ancestors. You earned this.” 

Your work is to make a new world, and to find yourself in that new world, even as you still carry those old worlds inside you.

I realized then that I’ve been able to do what my female ancestors never had the privilege or freedom to do. I don’t know if there are any writers or artists among my ancestors, but I’d guess there were. And I’d guess that was stomped out of them. I’m the first one to make the class and culture leap, to get a college education and then have the luxury of a job in which I work with my mind. My ability to make that leap isn’t only a testament to my ambition and strong spirit but also to my being the beneficiary of all the struggle and suffering and hard work in my ancestral line. 

Not only are we linked to our ancestors but we’re also part of a web of interdependence with the people we’re traveling together with now through the bardo of life. This is exemplified by your Dear Sugar column, where so many people feel seen by you and helped by your advice. What are your thoughts on how we’re connected to each other? One way that I passionately believe we’re connected and need each other is story. The Tibetan Book of the Dead was written centuries ago but is still true for us today. The Greek tragedies, the stories of human struggle, the most ancient words we have, tell the essential narratives of love and loss, suffering and triumph, rage and forgiveness, all the things we’re always speaking about in new ways. We’re connected to each other and need each other in the form of stories that tell us we’re not alone.

When you started writing Wild, did you feel like it was this kind of story? For a long time, I didn’t even think I should write the book because I wasn’t interested in writing about, “Oh, I took such an amazing trip. Come, pull up a chair and listen.” Or in writing about my grief over the loss of my mother as if it were the greatest grief of all time and I was so exceptional. I didn’t start writing Wild until I had something to say that wasn’t just about me saving myself but about the ways in which we save ourselves. There’s a scene in the book where it’s Day One of my hike and I can’t lift my pack. On that day I realized, “Here I am in this situation, that every living person, at one time or another, finds themselves in, which is that the one thing they absolutely cannot do is the one thing they absolutely must do.” 

In practical terms, that moment was about lifting the pack I couldn’t lift, but in a deeper way it was about living in the world without my mom when I thought that I couldn’t and wouldn’t, when I thought the world had ended. Writing that scene, I understood, “Oh, this is what the book is about.” It’s the deep intimacy of your personal story matched with universality—the balance between the individual courage we must summon and our collective connectedness.

The bardo teachings are about making the most of our lives by living and dying without regret. Do you have regrets, or feel like you will? In Two Women Walk into a Bar, which is about saying goodbye to my mother-in-law, I write about the regrets my mother-in-law had before she died. Her regrets at the end were about feeling unresolved with her life, because of the silence and secrets and repression that were put on her generationally and culturally, in a family that carried a lot of shame. Her idea of the way to be was to not tell the story, to keep secrets, whereas my idea is to dig for the story and tell it. 

I’ve lived my life by the value of story being a powerful healing force on this earth, second only to love. That’s why, when my end comes, I won’t have regrets. The only thing I’ll want is to gather around me the people I love and tell them how grateful I am to have them in my life. To tell them “I love you” one more time. 

One thing we often regret is not having lived the life we wanted to live, not having been our authentic selves. Sometimes we never figure out who we are, and other times, we know who we are but hide it. Have you always known who you are? I’ve always had a sense of knowing myself. There’s a narrow distance between who I am on the inside and what I appear to be on the outside. The times in my life when there was distance between what I was living and what I was feeling were always incredibly painful. One thing I notice in the Dear Sugar column is that often people’s deepest struggles are centered on experiencing a profound contradiction between what they feel on the inside and what they’re living on the outside. They’re like, “I don’t want to be in this job.” Or, “I don’t want to be in this marriage.” The closer you can get to having your insides match your outsides, what you’re doing in your life, the happier you’ll be. 

You wrote in Wild about how your mother told you to “put yourself in the way of beauty.” What does that mean for you? The first thing is to remember that I almost always have the power to seek out beauty. Putting yourself in the way of beauty is about the part of life that’s up to you. There are things you can only do yourself, choices only you can make. There will always be times that are difficult, or painful, or ugly, and your job—during those times, especially, but every day—is to go out and find the thing that makes you smile, or laugh, or shimmer inside, or feel like there’s something you can take solace in on this day. There’s always a sunrise and a sunset, my mother used to say, and whether or not we’re there for it is up to us. Keeping her words in mind is a reminder for me of our capacity to be agents in our lives, even in the hardest times, to move in the direction of peace and truth and beauty.