Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar

by Cheryl Strayed

I happen to believe that America is dying of loneliness, that we, as a people, have bought into the false dream of convenience, and turned away from a deep engagement with our internal lives—those fountains of inconvenient feeling—and toward the frantic enticements of what our friends in the Greed Business call the Free Market.

I think I cry because it always strikes me as sacred, all those people going by. People who decided simply to live their truth, even when doing so wasn’t simple. Each and every one of them had the courage to say, This is who I am even if you’ll crucify me for it. Just like Jesus did.

I knew over the course of our friendship she too might have opinions or concerns about me that she’d opt to discuss with someone else in words that would be best for me not to hear. And I knew that was okay, that it was a perfectly natural part of sustaining a true friendship over many years, that it wasn’t a betrayal, but a blessing.

WTF, WTF, WTF? I’m asking this question as it applies to everything every day.

But compassion isn’t about solutions. It’s about giving all the love that you’ve got.

life is long, that people both change and remain the same, that every last one of us will need to fuck up and be forgiven, that we’re all just walking and walking and walking and trying to find our way, that all roads lead eventually to the mountaintop.

all right is almost always where we eventually land, even if we fuck up entirely along the way.

You have to do it yourself, whether you’re rich or poor, out of money or raking it in, the beneficiary of ridiculous fortune or terrible injustice. And you have to do it no matter what is true. No matter what is hard. No matter what unjust, sad, sucky things have befallen you. Self-pity is a dead-end road. You make the choice to drive down it. It’s up to you to decide to stay parked there or to turn around and drive out.

I’d rather be sodomized by a plastic lawn flamingo than vote for a Republican,

We can all have a better life if we make one.

When you feel terrible because someone has gotten something you want, you force yourself to remember how very much you have been given. You remember that there is plenty for all of us. You remember that someone else’s success has absolutely no bearing on your own.

Privilege has a way of fucking with our heads the same way as lack of it does.

“I choose to love this time for once / with all my intelligence.”

My grief is tremendous but my love is bigger.

Letting go of expectation when it comes to one’s children is close to impossible. The entire premise of our love for them has to do with creating, fostering, and nurturing people who will outlive us. To us, they are not so much who they are as who they will become.

It is on that feeling that I have survived. And it will be your salvation too, my dear. When you reach the place that you recognize entirely that you will thrive not in spite of your losses and sorrows, but because of them. That you would not have chosen the things that happened in your life, but you are grateful for them.

You cannot convince people to love you. This is an absolute rule. No one will ever give you love because you want him or her to give it. Real love moves freely in both directions. Don’t waste your time on anything else.

Doing lifts the burden. Even if it’s a small thing.

There is no map. There is only the story you lived through, the story you survived, the story you wrote for yourself, the story you will keep writing.