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

by Cheryl Strayed

I’ve long believed literature’s greatest superpower is how it makes us feel less alone.

It has always been about believing that when we dare to tell the truth about who we are and what we want and how exactly we’re afraid or sad or lost or uncertain that transformation is possible, that light can be found, that courage and compassion can be mustered.

Love is the feeling we have for those we care deeply about and hold in high regard. It can be light as the hug we give a friend or heavy as the sacrifices we make for our children.

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

You aren’t afraid of love. You’re afraid of all the junk you’ve yoked to love. And you’ve convinced yourself that withholding one tiny word from the woman you think you love will shield you from that junk. But it won’t.

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.

You mustn’t live with people who wish to annihilate you. Even if you love them. Even if they are your mom and dad. You’re an adult now. Figure out how to pay the rent. Your psychological well-being is more important than free access to a car.

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.

We learn from experience, but no need to keep learning the same things from the same experiences over and over again, right?

Be brave enough to break your own heart.

Don’t lament so much about how your career is going to turn out. You don’t have a career. You have a life. Do the work. Keep the faith. Be true blue.

Your assumptions about the lives of others are in direct relation to your naïve pomposity. Many people you believe to be rich are not rich. Many people you think have it easy worked hard for what they got. Many people who seem to be gliding right along have suffered and are suffering.

The useless days will add up to something. The shitty waitressing jobs. The hours writing in your journal. The long meandering walks. The hours reading poetry and story collections and novels and dead people’s diaries and wondering about sex and God and whether you should shave under your arms or not. These things are your becoming.

Float down the channel of your curiosity, of your creativity, of your fears, of your ambitions, of your power, of your desires, of your dreams.

Take out a notebook, and at the top of a blank page, write the word curiosity. On the next page, write creativity. On the next, fears and so on, page by page, through ambitions, power, desires, dreams, and other words you might wish to add, and then go back and fill each of those pages with lists of your own. Write down all the things that you’re curious about, all the things you want to create, that you fear, that feel like your power, and keep writing until you’ve filled up all your blank pages with everything inside of you.

The regret you describe in your letter is all about inertia—about what you haven’t done, rather than what you have. Holding on to your regret will only keep you where you are, floating among the meaningless things that will eventually drown you.

We stand on the shoulders of those who came before us, even if their mission failed. Those who come after us will stand on our shoulders, even if our mission fails too. We need you standing there, Despairing. We need your strong shoulders even when you feel weak. The meaning of your work isn’t measured by who won or lost. It’s measured by the world-altering power of your countless good deeds.

The truest story is always the widest one. It’s the one that folds in the highs alongside the lows, the losses alongside the gains. It looks forward and back. It runs in a jagged line rather than a straight one.