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

by Cheryl Strayed

There was only my expectation that there would be—my mother at eighty-nine, my mother at sixty-three, my mother at forty-six.

To us, they are not so much who they are as who they will become. The entire premise of your healing demands that you do let go of expectation. You must come to understand and accept that your son will always be only the man he actually was: the twenty-two-year-old who made it as far as that red light. The one who loved you deeply.

The kindest and most meaningful thing anyone ever says to me is: Your mother would be proud of you. Finding a way in my grief to become the woman who my mother raised me to be is the most important way I have honored my mother.

Sugar is the temple I built in my obliterated place. I’d give it all back in a snap, but the fact is, my grief taught me things. It showed me shades and hues I couldn’t have otherwise seen. It required me to suffer. It compelled me to reach.

Your grief has taught you too, Living Dead Dad. Your son was your greatest gift in his life and he is your greatest gift in his death too. Receive it. Let your dead boy be your most profound revelation. Create something of him.

Don’t do what you know on a gut level to be the wrong thing to do. Don’t stay when you know you should go or go when you know you should stay. Don’t fight when you should hold steady or hold steady when you should fight. Don’t focus on the short-term fun instead of the long-term fallout. Don’t surrender all your joy for an idea you used to have about yourself that isn’t true anymore. Don’t seek joy at all costs. I know it’s hard to know what to do when you have a conflicting set of emotions and desires, but it’s not as hard as we pretend it is.

This isn’t a spotless life. There is much ahead, my immaculate little peach. And there is no way to say it other than to say it: marriage is indeed this horribly complex thing for which you appear to be ill prepared and about which you seem to be utterly naïve. That’s okay. A lot of people are. You can learn along the way.

She was actually trying to tell you the secret. In allowing you a more intimate view of her much-touted-but-flawed marriage, your sister was attempting to show you what a real perfect couple looks like: happy, humane, and occasionally all fucked up.

two people who’ve kept their love and friendship alive for more than twenty-five years. That you’re doubting this after learning not all of those years were easy tells me there’s something deeper at work here that has nothing to do with their marriage and everything to do with your own insecurities and fears.

Painful as it is, there’s nothing more common in long-term relationships than infidelity in its various versions (cheated, pretty much cheated, cheated a teeny bit but it probably doesn’t quite count, came extremely close to cheating, want to cheat, wondering about what it would be like to cheat, is flirting over email technically even cheating? etc.).

This is scary, but you’ll be okay. Sometimes the thing you fear the most in your relationship turns out to be the thing that brings you and your partner to a deeper place of understanding and intimacy.

A bit of sully in your sweet. Not perfection, but real love. Not what you imagine, but what you’d never dream.

ridiculous from the start! And yet I could not bring myself to send that email. I wanted to be Sugar. I was intrigued. Sparked. Something powerful overrode all the silent exclamation points in my head: my gut. I decided to trust it. I gave Sugar a shot.

This job offer is an opportunity, but not the sort you think it is. It’s an invitation to do the real work. The kind that doesn’t pay a dime, but leaves you with a sturdy shelter by the end. So do it. Forget the man. Forget the money. It’s your own sweet self with whom you must rendezvous.

The standard you should apply in deciding whether or not to have an active relationship with him is the same one you should apply to all the relationships in your life: you will not be mistreated or disrespected or manipulated.

He will be the empty bowl that you’ll have to fill again and again. What will you put inside? Our parents are the primal source. We make our own lives, but our origin stories are theirs. They go back with us to the beginning of time. There is absolutely no way around them. By cutting off ties with your father, you incited a revolution in your life. How now are you going to live?

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. That you have the two empty bowls eternally in your hands, but you also have the capacity to fill them.

You get no points for the living, I tell my students. It isn’t enough to have had an interesting or hilarious or tragic life. Art isn’t anecdote. It’s the consciousness we bring to bear on our lives. For what happened in the story to transcend the limits of the personal, it must be driven by the engine of what the story means.

Your daughter is the most important person in your life and you are one of the two most important people in hers. That’s more than a fact. It’s a truth. And like all truths, it has its own integrity. It’s shiningly clear and resolute.

It’s opting to transcend—to rise above or go beyond the limits of—rather than living inside the same old tale.

Your wedding is going to be a kick, honey bun, but only after you accept that it isn’t something to “get through.” Perhaps it might help to stop thinking about it as the perfect “event,” but rather a messy, beautiful, and gloriously unexpected day in your sweet life.

You’re getting married! There’s a day ahead that’s a shimmering slice of your mysterious destiny. All you’ve got to do is show up.

“You want that dress?” my mother asked, glancing up nonchalantly from her own perusals. “Why would I?” I snapped, perturbed with myself more than her. “For someday,” said my mother. “But I’m not even going to have kids,” I argued. “You can put it in a box,” she replied. “Then you’ll have it, no matter what you do.” “I don’t have a dollar,” I said with finality. “I do,” my mother said and reached for the dress.

My mother bought a dress for the granddaughter she’ll never know. My mother bought a dress for the granddaughter she’ll never know.

It’s almost never until later that we can draw a line between this and that. There was no force at work other than my own desire that compelled me to want that dress. Its meaning was made only by my mother’s death and my daughter’s birth. And then it meant a lot. The red dress was the material evidence of my loss, but also of the way my mother’s love had carried me forth beyond her, her life extending years into my own in ways I never could have imagined. It was a becoming that I would not have dreamed was mine the moment that red dress caught my eye.

I suppose this is what I mean when I say we cannot possibly know what will manifest in our lives. We live and have experiences and leave people we love and get left by them. People we thought would be with us forever aren’t and people we didn’t know would come into our lives do. Our work here is to keep faith with that, to put it in a box and wait.

but rather because I think it’s instructive to contemplate in essential terms our desire to have not only what is ours, but what also belongs to those we love, and not only because we want those things for ourselves, but because we want the other person not to have them.

You are both wrong. You are both right. You both know you can do better than you did. The fact that you failed to do so equals nothing unless you learn something from this. So let’s learn it, sweet peas.

You can be sad a guy you sort of fell for didn’t fall for you. You don’t have to be a good sport. You don’t have to pretend you’re okay with sharing your interesting and beautiful friends with The Foxy Fellow, even if you feel like a puny asshole not being okay with it. You can say no. But the thing is, you have to say it. You have to be the woman who stands up and says

It makes you someone who did what most people would do in this situation at this moment in your life: a woman who took what she wanted instead of what she needed.

What’s at stake here is not only your friendship with Triangled, but also your own integrity. You promised you would not hurt someone you cared for. You hurt her anyway. What do you make of that? What would you like to take forward from this, honey bun? Do you want to throw up your hands and say “Oh well,” or do you dare to allow this experience to alter your view?

We like to pretend that our generous impulses come naturally. But the reality is we often become our kindest, most ethical selves only by seeing what it feels like to be a selfish jackass first.

You know what it feels like to say yes to women you don’t ultimately dig, so how about seeing how it feels to say no? What space is filled up by sex with women you aren’t all that into and what fills that space when you don’t fill it with them?

Given your situation as the primary caregiver of two very young children with little practical support from a partner, it comes as no surprise that you’ve lost it with your beloved kids from time to time.

The best thing you can do for your girls is to forgive yourself for what has passed, accept that your rages helped you to understand you have work to do in order to be the mother your children deserve, and then draw on every resource you can—both internal and external—to become her.

convince their sons not to threaten one another with chairs? When at last it was time to do “rain,” the social worker led us through it and I followed along again as the whole group of us collectively reenacted a storm with our bodies. We began by standing silently with our arms rounded into suns above us, then we rubbed our hands together to create the softest hiss, then we snapped our fingers to simulate the pitter-pat of raindrops, then we clapped our hands, first against each other, and next against our thighs in loud watery smacks. At the height of the storm, we were stomping our feet on the floor in a thunderous roar, until slowly, slowly we worked our way back up again in reverse order—through the smacking and clapping and rubbing ever more softly—until we were standing once more like suns.

of it rose off of us like a cure. I never believed the boys were angry. I believed they were hurt and anger was the safest manifestation of their sorrow. It was the channel down which their impotent male rivers could rage.

“I’m not doing anything wrong,” he yelled as he turned and walked back down the hallway toward me. And I realized he was right. He wasn’t going anywhere and he’d never intended to. He was only doing what he’d learned to do, against all of his most visceral and reasonable impulses. He was taking deep breaths and walking. He was an angry boy controlling his rage. Everything about that boy pacing the hallway tells me a story I need to know: that we do not have the right to feel helpless, Helpless Mom. That we must help ourselves. That after destiny has delivered what it delivers, we are responsible for our lives.

And everything about Brandon’s mother tells me a story too. We are so far from her, aren’t we? In so many ways, you and I and all the basically good moms we know are not even on the same planet as that woman. She failed and she failed and she failed. But so have I. And so have you.

helpless to? I don’t know, but I do know one thing. When it comes to our children, we do not have the luxury of despair. If we rise, they will rise with us every time, no matter how many times we’ve fallen before.

You are not a terrible person for wanting to break up with someone you love. You don’t need a reason to leave. Wanting to leave is enough. Leaving doesn’t mean you’re incapable of real love or that you’ll never love anyone else again. It doesn’t mean you’re morally bankrupt or psychologically demented or a nymphomaniac. It means you wish to change the terms of one particular relationship. That’s all. Be brave enough to break your own heart.

There are some things you can’t understand yet. Your life will be a great and continuous unfolding. It’s good you’ve worked hard to resolve childhood issues while in your twenties, but understand that what you resolve will need to be resolved again. And again. You will come to know things that can only be known with the wisdom of age and the grace of years. Most of those things will have to do with forgiveness.

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.

Most things will be okay eventually, but not everything will be. Sometimes you’ll put up a good fight and lose. Sometimes you’ll hold on really hard and realize there is no choice but to let go. Acceptance is a small, quiet room.

She’ll offer you one of the balloons, but you won’t take it because you believe you no longer have a right to such tiny beautiful things. You’re wrong. You do.

Your mother will be dead by spring. That coat will be the last gift she gave you. You will regret the small thing you didn’t say for the rest of your life. Say thank you.

Pretty quickly, I realized the worst role of all was to be one of the bystanders. In that role, it was almost impossible not to freak out. I learned then what I have learned in many other ways over the course of my life: that when we’re in the presence of someone else’s pain, the burden of not-doing is so much greater than the burden of doing. Doing lifts the burden. Even if it’s a small thing. Like writing a letter.

but I liked the sound of it because I sensed it meant something like whisper, and what I have needed more than anything for the past many months is for someone to whisper to me very gently on a regular basis that, as awful as things are now, someday it will be okay.

How in darkness, we are waiting. How it is in the times that we must search hardest for the light that we are most profoundly transformed.

Like someone had me. Like for the tiniest glimmer of a moment I was held by a force more powerful than the force I could muster on my own.