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

by Cheryl Strayed

INTRODUCTION

Tiny Beautiful Things is the book I wrote by accident. When I took on the unpaid gig of writing the Dear Sugar advice column for The Rumpus, I’d recently completed the first draft of my second book, Wild. I said yes to Dear Sugar I thought it would be a fun thing to do on the side in between writing books. It didn’t take long to see that I’d been entirely wrong. It was a fun thing, but also so much more than that. This work that began as a lark has come to be some of the most meaningful work of my life. The thing I love the most about writing Dear Sugar is how deeply it connects me to others and how truly it reminds me—and I believe the readers as well—that in love, in loss, in hardship, and in triumph, we are not alone.

The best thing you can possibly do with your life is to tackle the motherfucking shit out of love.

So many of us believe we can protect ourselves by running away from love, but we’re wrong. Avoidance hardly ever works—and it certainly never works if you want to live a bold, big, brave life (and who doesn’t?!). The only way to get that life is to run, leap, and yes, tackle love! It’s worth it, even if you get bruised from time to time.

We are obligated to the people we care about and who we allow to care about us, whether we say we love them or not. Our main obligation is to be forthright—to elucidate the nature of our affection when such elucidation would be meaningful or clarifying.

Honesty is the most generous form of love. Transparency is an act of radical kindness. A lot of what’s written and said about romantic love casts it as a game that requires one to be strategic and withholding, but that’s wrong. People don’t like to be played. They like to know where they stand with their intimate partners—and I daresay, they have a right to know.

Nobody will protect you from your suffering. You can’t cry it away or eat it away or starve it away or walk it away or punch it away or even therapy it away. It’s just there, and you have to survive it. You have to endure it. You have to live through it and love it and move on and be better for it and run as far as you can in the direction of your best and happiest dreams across the bridge that was built by your own desire to heal.

Like a lot of passages in this book, I cried when I wrote this one. Writing Dear Sugar puts me in touch with other people’s pain and it also brings me back to my own. I tell stories from my life while giving advice because stories are what have helped me when I’ve struggled and this story—about how, in the end, we must save ourselves—is one that’s deeply personal to me. I’ve had to save myself many times, but perhaps never more acutely than when I was 26 and decided to hike 1100 miles of the Pacific Crest Trail—a journey I wrote about in my memoir, Wild. That experience taught me so many things, but perhaps the most powerful lesson was emotional self-reliance. It’s so important to reach out for help when we need it, to connect with others who can offer us solace or guidance or support, but it will be your own strength and courage that will save you. A lot of people can extend their hands, but nobody but you can swim to shore.

Trust yourself. It’s Sugar’s golden rule. Trusting yourself means living out what you already know to be true.

One of the things that struck me over and over again as I wrote the columns in this book is how often people already knew what they should do as they sought my advice. The trouble is, they were afraid to admit to that, to listen to the deepest, truest voice inside of them and act on it. I relate! Trusting yourself can be scary and, if you’ve spent your life relying other people to set your course, it can even feel like the wrong thing to do. But it isn’t. Whenever I’ve trusted myself and moved in the direction of my truest desires, I’ve done the right thing, even if it was hard to do. Whenever I haven’t, there was a price to pay for it.

The unifying theme is resilience and faith. The unifying theme is being a warrior and a motherfucker. It is not fragility. It’s strength. It’s nerve. And “if your Nerve, deny you—,” as Emily Dickinson wrote, “go above your Nerve.” Writing is hard for every last one of us—straight white men included. Coal mining is harder. Do you think miners stand around all day talking about how hard it is to mine for coal? They do not. They simply dig.

It was so fun to write these lines! Perhaps because it’s advice I needed to hear too. The number of times I’ve had to remind myself to keep digging as a writer cannot be counted—in fact I still have to do it every day. As I cheered on this young writer, I was aware that I was cheering on every person who has ever doubted their ability to create. I’m going to guess that even Emily Dickinson struggled to write every now and then.

The story of human intimacy is one of constantly allowing ourselves to see those we love most deeply in a new, more fractured light. Look hard. Risk that.

This is the truest thing I know about love in all of its varieties: courage + vulnerability = magic.

You have to pay your own electric bill. You have to be kind. You have to give it all you got. You have to find people who love you truly and love them back with the same truth. But that’s all.

This is an essential recipe for wellness. To be self-sufficient, to treat others with an open-heart, to commit to doing the best you can do in all of your endeavors, to find community, kinship, and love. That’s a life! A happy one.

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.

This is one of the most painful lessons I’ve learned in my life, and also one of the most important ones. The first time I truly realized that you cannot convince people to love you is when I was a child and I realized that my father wasn’t going to be the kind of father every child deserves. He wasn’t going to love me and my siblings the way we all want fathers to love their children. To accept that as true—and to understand it was not my fault and there was nothing I could do to change it or make him love me better—was a powerfully life-altering experience. As painful as it was, it was also liberating. When you let go of the people who don’t love you well, you open yourself up to finding the people who will. You are so worthy of that love.

Say thank you.

It means a lot to me that the last line of Tiny Beautiful Things is an expression of gratitude. I think of it as a thank you to all the readers and letter writers who shared their hearts with me in the Dear Sugar column and it’s also as an acknowledgment of everything my mother gave me. She died long before I wrote this book, but she lives in every word of it.