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

by Cheryl Strayed

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.