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

by Cheryl Strayed

Where is the line, Sugar? When you want the life you have to work but it doesn’t, and you aren’t sure it can, and when you want a completely different life, too, which way do you go?

Because wanting to leave is enough. Get a pen. Write that last sentence on your palm—all three of you.

But an ethical and evolved life also entails telling the truth about oneself and living out that truth.

Leaving because you want to doesn’t mean you pack your bags the moment there’s strife or struggle or uncertainty. It means that if you yearn to be free of a particular relationship and you feel that yearning lodged within you more firmly than any of the other competing and contrary yearnings are lodged, your desire to leave is not only valid, but probably the right thing to do. Even if someone you love is hurt by that.

That when it comes down to it, you must trust your truest truth, even though there are other truths running alongside it—such as your love for the partners you want to leave.

But it was the wisest one too. And I wasn’t the only one whose life is better for it. He deserved the love of a woman who didn’t have the word go whispering like a deranged ghost in her ear. To leave him was a kindness of a sort, though it didn’t seem that way at the time.

I didn’t want to stay with my ex-husband, not at my core, even though whole swaths of me did.

The truth that lives there will eventually win out. It’s a god we must obey, a force that brings us all inevitably to our knees. And because of it, I can only ask the three of you the same question: Will you do it later or will you do it now?

I’ll answer the easy question first: Yes, you are obliged to tell the men you’re sleeping with regularly that you’re not sleeping with them exclusively. There are no exceptions to this rule. Ever. For anyone. Under any circumstances. People have the right to know if the people they are fucking are also fucking other people. This is the only way the people fucking people who are fucking other people can make emotionally healthy decisions about their lives. It’s clean. It’s right. It’s honest. And it’s a basic tenet of Sugar’s hard-earned, didn’t-do-it-the-right-way-the-first-time-around Ethical Code to Loving Others as Well as Loving Oneself.

One of the basic principles of every single art form has to do not with what’s there—the music, the words, the movement, the dialogue, the paint—but with what isn’t.

I’ve written often about how we have to reach hard in the direction of the lives we want, even if it’s difficult to do so.

Real change happens on the level of the gesture. It’s one person doing one thing differently than he or she did before.

It’s you and me standing naked before our lovers, even if it makes us feel kind of squirmy in a bad way when we do. The work is there. It’s our task. Doing it will give us strength and clarity. It will bring us closer to who we hope to be.

You have to find a way to inhabit your body while enacting your deepest desires. You have to be brave enough to build the intimacy you deserve. You have to take off all of your clothes and say, “I’m right here.”

That’s the question you need to answer, Wanting. That’s what will bring your deepest desires into your life. Not: Will my old, droopy male contemporaries accept and love the old, droopy me? But rather: What’s on the other side of the tiny gigantic revolution in which I move from loathing to loving my own skin? What fruits would that particular liberation bear?

The culture isn’t going to give you permission to have “robust, adventurous sex” with your droopy and aging body, so you’re going to have to be brave enough to take it for yourself. This will require some courage, Wanting, but courage is a vital piece of any well-lived life.

You’ve earned the right to grow. You’re going to have to carry the water yourself.

The sexiest not-culturally-sanctioned-sexy people I know—the old, the fat, the differently abled, the freshly postpartum—have a wonderful way of being forthright about who they are and I suggest you take their approach. Instead of trying to conceal the aspects of your body that make you feel uncomfortable, how about just coming out with it at the outset—before you get into the bedroom and try to slip unnoticed beneath the sheets while having a panic attack? What would happen if you said to Mister Just-About-to-Do-Me: I feel terribly self-conscious about how droopy my body is and I’m not sure if I even really know how to have good sex anymore, since I was frozen in a boring pattern with my ex for years on end.

In my experience, those sorts of revelations help. They unclench the stronghold of one’s fears. They push the intimacy to a more vulnerable place.

“Naked and smiling” is one male friend’s only requirement for a lover.

Can I convince the person about whom I’m crazy to be crazy about me? The short answer is no. The long answer is no.

There are so many things to be tortured about, sweet pea. So many torturous things in this life. Don’t let a man who doesn’t love you be one of them.

But you know what? His opinion on this matter has no bearing whatsoever. The decision about whether to invite your father isn’t even a tiny bit up to him. Your fiancé’s suggestion tells me that he has neither a clear understanding of your familial history, nor an awareness of your deeply dysfunctional dad. I suggest you have an exhaustive conversation with him on these subjects rather soon. Like now.

Forgiveness means you’ve found a way forward that acknowledges harm done and hurt caused without letting either your anger or your pain rule your life or define your relationship with the one who did you wrong. Sometimes those we forgive change their behavior to the extent that we can eventually be as close to them as we were before (or even closer).

Even if he doesn’t, what’s the best-case scenario? That you spend your wedding day worrying that your father is going to make an ass of himself and humiliate you and enrage your mom and alienate your in-laws, but he doesn’t? Does that sound like fun? Is that what you hoped for? Is that what you want?

That is a magnificent thing, Daughter. It was created entirely by your grit and your grace. It belongs to you. Let it be the thing that guides you when you speak to your father about why he isn’t invited to your wedding. You wrote that not inviting him is the “easiest thing to do,” but I encourage you to make it the hardest thing. Use your decision as an opportunity to have a frank conversation with him about how his behavior affects you and your ability to truly let him back into your life.

You aren’t haunted by your boyfriend’s sexual past. You’re haunted by your own irrational, insecure, jealous feelings, and if you continue to behave in this manner you will eventually push your lover away.

because it’s clear to me that you’re an incredibly good egg. I know it’s a kick in the pants to hear that the problem is you, but it’s also fucking fantastic. You are, after all, the only person you can change.

He wants to tell you about them because he wants to deepen his relationship with you, to share things about himself that he doesn’t share with many others. This is called intimacy. This is called fuck yes. When people do this with us, it’s an honor. And when the people who do this with us also happen to be people with whom we are falling in love, it lets us into an orbit in which there is only admission for two.

Please read the letter you wrote to me out loud to your boyfriend. This will be embarrassing, but do it anyway. Tell him how you feel without making him responsible for your feelings. Ask him what his motivations are for telling you stories of his sexual past. Ask him if he’d like to hear about your own sexual experiences. Then take turns telling each other one story that makes each of you feel a little bit like you’ve been stabbed in the gut. Let yourself be gutted. Let it open you. Start there.

It has not. I have carried the weight of my student loan debt for about half of my life now, but I have not been “defined by my ‘student loan’ identity.” I do not even know what a student loan identity is. Do you? What is a student loan identity?

It’s the threadbare cape you’ve wrapped around yourself composed of self-pitying half truth. And it absolutely will not serve you. You need to stop feeling sorry for yourself. I don’t

Nobody’s going to do your life for you. 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.

There is no why. You don’t have a right to the cards you believe you should have been dealt. You have an obligation to play the hell out of the ones you’re holding. And, dear one, you and I both were granted a mighty generous hand.

They gave me faith in my own abilities. They offered me a unique view of worlds that were both exotic and familiar to me. They kept things in perspective.

They opened my mind to realities I didn’t know existed. They forced me to be resilient, to sacrifice, to see how little I knew, and also how much. They put me in close contact with people who could’ve funded the college educations of ten thousand kids and also with people who would’ve rightly fallen on the floor laughing had I complained to them about how unfair it was that after I got my degree I’d have this student loan I’d be paying off until I was forty-three. They made my life big. They contributed to an education that money can’t buy.

There are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns. That is to say, we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns, the ones we don’t know we don’t know.”

Please forgive your parents. Not for them. For you. You’ve earned the next thing that will happen if you do. You’ve remade yourself already. You and your mom and dad can remake this too—the new era in which they are finally capable of loving the real you. Let them. Love them back. See how that feels.

You’re tough. You’ve had to ask impossible questions, endure humiliations, suffer internal conflicts, and redefine your life in ways that most people don’t and can’t even imagine. But you know what? So have your parents. They had a girl child who became what they didn’t expect. They were cruel and small when you needed them most, but only because they were drowning in their own fear and ignorance. They aren’t drowning anymore. It took them seven years, but they swam to shore. They have arrived at last on your island. Welcome them.

attempt to analyze the situation from the perspective of my “best self”—the one that’s generous, reasonable, forgiving, loving, bighearted, and grateful. I think really hard about what I’ll wish I did a year from now. I map out the consequences of the various actions I could take. I ask what my motivations are, what my desires are, what my fears are, what I have to lose, and what I have to gain. I move toward the light, even if it’s a hard direction in which to move. I trust myself. I keep the faith. I mess up sometimes.

but I believe there is a divine spirit in each of us. I believe there is something bigger than our individual selves that we can touch when we live our lives with integrity, compassion, and love.

Unique as every letter is, the point each writer reaches is the same: I want love and I’m afraid I’ll never get it.

I can only say you are worthy of it and that it’s never too much to ask for it and that it’s not crazy to fear you’ll never have it again, even though your fears are probably wrong. Love is our essential nutrient. Without it, life has little meaning. It’s the best thing we have to give and the most valuable thing we receive. It’s worthy of all the hullabaloo.

himself Grant said, “I pretended to be somebody I wanted to be and I finally became that person. Or he became me. Or we met at some point.”

We have to be whole people to find whole love, even if we have to make it up for a while.

He said, “Don’t get me wrong. I want to hear everything about your life. But I want you to know that you don’t need to tell me this to get me to love you. You don’t have to be broken for me.”

Bring your needy self when you go on that next date with a potential lover, but bring all your other selves too. The strong one. The generous one. The one who became fatherless too young and survived a war and lost one lover to cancer and another to the challenges of a decade together, but came out wiser and more tender for it. Bring the man you aspire to be, the one who already has the love he longs for. Play every piece of yourself and play it with all you’ve got until you’re not playing anymore. That’s what Cary Grant did. The lonely boy who lost his mom in the fog of his father’s deceit found himself in the magic of wanting to be. His name was Archibald Leach.

Fucked-up people will try to tell you otherwise, but boundaries have nothing to do with whether you love someone or not. They are not judgments, punishments, or betrayals. They are a purely peaceable thing: the basic principles you identify for yourself that define the behaviors that you will tolerate from others, as well as the responses you will have to those behaviors.

Boundaries teach people how to treat you, and they teach you how to respect yourself. In a perfect world, our parents model healthy personal boundaries for us. In your world, you must model them for your parents—for whom boundaries have either never been in place or have gone gravely askew.

When you set new boundaries there is often strife and sorrow, but your life will be changed for the better. And maybe—just maybe—the example you set will motivate your parents to make some changes of their own.