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

by Cheryl Strayed

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

Withholding distorts reality. It makes the people who do the withholding ugly and small-hearted. It makes the people from whom things are withheld crazy and desperate and incapable of knowing what they actually feel.

You’re gay? So the fuck what?

it was less psychologically damaging if a parent said directly to the child You are a worthless piece of shit than it was for a parent to say Your mother/father is a worthless piece of shit.

It’s how apathetic your partners are, how indifferent they are to their ambitions, whether they be income-earning or not.

it seems clear that your partners have used home and the security of your relationships as a place to retreat and wallow, to sink into rather than rise out of their insecurities and doubts.

Your ultimatum is simple. It’s fair. And it’s stating your own intentions, not what you hope theirs will be. It’s: I won’t live like this anymore. I won’t carry our financial burdens beyond my desires or capabilities. I won’t enable your inertia. I won’t, even though I love you. I won’t, because I love you. Because doing so is ruining us.

Sometimes the greatest truth isn’t in the confession, but rather in the lesson learned.

Most people don’t cheat because they’re cheaters. They cheat because they are people.

It’s that the work you do each day matters. Even if it’s work that seems invisible. Even if it’s work that doesn’t lead to the outcome you hoped for. Even if others attempt to undo your work.

How has your sense of despair contributed to your desire to positively impact your community? How have you countered ugliness by bringing beauty and hope to others through your work? In what ways has your rage, sorrow, and fear illuminated the path forward as you make change in the world? How might you embrace the less-desirable feelings you have about the meaning of your work so they can serve rather than stop you?

Your sense of despair about the meaning of your work sustains itself only if you believe the narrowest version of the story—the one that assumes your contribution to the greater good can be measured by only one result. But it can’t. You know that. Social change doesn’t work that way.

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.