Self-Discovery
Wild is a film about Cheryl Strayed discovering herself after the death of her mother and the destruction of her marriage after her infidelity. She hikes 1,100 miles of the Pacific Crest Trail with the intention of working through the things that have happened in her life that got her to where she is. She desires to find herself in the midst of the lonely wild. In the grueling walk through nature she hopes to be brought back to the civilization of her humanity.
Loss
Loss is a major theme in this film. Cheryl has recently watched as her mother, seemingly healthy, is diagnosed with a life-threatening disease that takes her life. Her mother is someone who has loved her deeply and wholly her entire life. She has endured the brutality of a violently abusive husband for years and gained the strength to leave him and begin to reclaim her life, and just in the midst of it she is told she has one year to live. Cheryl must then process the loss of her mother along the journey of the PCT.
Nature and Connection to People
Cheryl's journey through nature eventually brings her back into civilization on The Bridge of the Gods crossing the Columbia River. But her desire to go into nature and find a connection to herself shows the necessity to detach from the things that we have plugged our selves into that are making us smaller and our pain bigger. For Cheryl to go into nature meant that she would actually have to deal with her pain rather than running from it with sexual encounters and drugs. And in the middle of nature, alone with her thoughts she reconnected to people in ways that she was missing in her life. All of this leads her back to being able to re-enter society and live a healthy, full life despite the pain she's experienced.
