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

by Cheryl Strayed

  “Do we get to keep these? Do we get to keep these?” they clamored in a great, desperate joyous girl chorus.

  “Yes,” I said. “Open them.”

  I asked them each to write down three true things about themselves and one lie, and then we read them out loud, going around in the circle, guessing which one was the lie, and by the time we were about halfway around the room they all loved me intensely.

  Not me. But who I was. Not who I was, but how I held them: with unconditional positive regard.

  I had never been the recipient of so much desire. If I had a flower clip in my hair, they wanted to remove the flower clip and put it in their own hair. If I had a pen, they asked if I would give it to them. If I had a sandwich, they wondered if they could have a bite. If I had a purse, they wanted to see what was inside. And most of all they wanted to tell me everything. Everything. Every last thing about their lives. And they did.

  Ghastly, horrible, shocking, sad, merciless things. Things that would compel me to squint my eyes as I listened, as if by squinting I could protect myself by hearing it less distinctly. Things that would make me close the door of my office after they left and cry my heart out. Endless stories of abuse and betrayal and absence and devastation and the sort of sorrow that spirals so tightly into an impossible clusterfuck of eternal despair that it doesn’t even look like a spiral anymore.

  One of the girls was truly beautiful. She resembled a young Elizabeth Taylor without the curvy hips. Flawlessly luminescent skin. Water-blue eyes. Long shimmering black hair. A D-cup rack and the rest of her model-thin. She’d just turned thirteen when I met her. She’d already fucked five guys and blown ten. She’d lost her virginity at eleven to her mother’s ex-boyfriend, who was now in jail for stealing a TV. Her current lover was thirty-two. He picked her up most days on the edge of the school parking lot. I convinced her to let me take her to Planned Parenthood so she could get a Depo-Provera shot, but when we got there, she did not get the shot. She refused to let the female doctor give her a pelvic exam and the doctor would not give her the shot without one. She cried and cried and cried. She cried with such sharp fear and pain that it was like someone had walked into the room and pressed a hot iron against her gorgeous ass. I said a million consoling, inspiring, empowering things. The female doctor spoke in comforting yet commanding tones. But that girl who had fucked five guys and blown ten by the time she turned thirteen would not recline for three minutes on the examining table in a well-lit room in the company of two women with good intentions.

  One girl wore an enormous hooded sweatshirt that went down to her knees with the hood pulled up over her head no matter the temperature. Across her face hung a dense curtain of punk-rock-colored hair. It looked like she had two backs of her head and no face. To get around, she tilted her head discreetly in various ways and peeked out the bottom of her hair curtain. She refused to speak for weeks. She was the last person who asked if she could have my pen. Getting to know her was like trying to ingratiate oneself with a feral cat. Nearly impossible. One step forward and a thousand steps back. But when I did—when I tamed her, when she parted her hair and I saw her pale and fragile and acne-covered face—she told me that she slept most nights in a falling-down wooden shed near the alley behind the apartment building where she lived with her mom. She did this because she couldn’t take staying inside, where her mother ranted and raved, alcoholic and mentally ill and off her meds and occasionally physically violent. She pulled the sleeves of her hoodie up and showed me the slashes on her arms where she’d repeatedly cut herself with a razor blade because it felt so good.

  One girl told me that when her mom’s boyfriend got mad he dragged her into the backyard and turned on the hose and held her face up to the ice-cold running water until she almost drowned and then he locked her outside for two hours. It was November. Forty-some degrees. It wasn’t the first time he’d done this. Or the last.

  I told the girls that these sorts of things were not okay. That they were unacceptable. Illegal. That I would call someone and that someone would intervene and this would stop. I called the police. I called the state’s child protection services. I called them every day and no one did one thing. Not one person. Not one thing. Ever. No matter how many times that man almost drowned that little girl with a garden hose in the backyard or how many times the thirty-two-year-old picked up the thirteen-year-old with the great rack in the school parking lot or how many times the hooded girl with no face slept in the falling-down woodshed in the alley while her mother raged.

  I had not lived a sheltered life. I’d had my share of hardships and sorrows. I thought I knew how the world worked, but this I could not believe. I thought that if it was known that bad things were happening to children, those bad things would be stopped. But that is not the sort of society we live in, I realized. There is no such society.

  One day when I called child protective services I asked the woman who answered the phone to explain to me exactly why no one was protecting the children and she told me that there was no funding for teenagers who were not in imminent danger because the state was broke and so the thing the child protective services did was make priorities. They intervened quickly with kids under the age of twelve, but for those over twelve they wrote reports when people called and put the reports in a file and put the child’s name on a long list of children who someone would someday perhaps check up on when there was time and money, if there ever was time and money. The good thing about teens, she told me confidentially, was that if it got bad enough at home they usually ran away and there was more funding for runaways.

  I hung up the phone feeling like my sternum had cracked open. Before I could even take a breath, in walked the girl whose mother’s boyfriend repeatedly almost drowned her with the garden hose in the backyard. She sat down in the chair near my desk where all the girls sat narrating their horrible stories and she told me another horrible story and I told her something different this time.

  I told her it was not okay, that it was unacceptable, that it was illegal and that I would call and report this latest horrible thing. But I did not tell her it would stop. I did not promise that anyone would intervene. I told her it would likely go on and she’d have to survive it. That she’d have to find a way within herself to not only escape the shit, but to transcend it, and if she wasn’t able to do that, then her whole life would be shit, forever and ever and ever. I told her that escaping the shit would be hard, but that if she wanted to not make her mother’s life her destiny, she had to be the one to make it happen. She had to do more than hold on. She had to reach. She had to want it more than she’d ever wanted anything. She had to grab like a drowning girl for every good thing that came her way and she had to swim like fuck away from every bad thing. She had to count the years and let them roll by, to grow up and then run as far as she could in the direction of her best and happiest dreams across the bridge that was built by her own desire to heal.

  She seemed to listen, in that desultory and dismissive way that teens do. I said it to every girl who came into my office and sat in the horrible-story chair. It became my gospel. It became the thing I said most because it was the thing that was most true.

  It is also the most true for you, Stuck, and for anyone who has ever had anything truly horrible happen to them.

  You will never stop loving your daughter. You will never forget her. You will always know her name. But she will always be dead. Nobody can intervene and make that right and nobody will. Nobody can take it back with silence or push it away with words. 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. Therapists and friends and other people who live on Planet My Baby Died ca
n help you along the way, but the healing—the genuine healing, the actual real deal down-on-your-knees-in-the-mud change—is entirely and absolutely up to you.

  That job at the middle school was the best job I ever had, but I only stayed for a year. It was a heavy gig and I was a writer and so I left it for less emotionally taxing forms of employment so I could write. One day six years after I quit, I ate lunch at a Taco Bell not far from the school where I’d worked with the girls. Just as I was gathering my things to leave, a woman in a Taco Bell uniform approached and said my name. It was the faceless girl who’d lived in the falling-down shed. Her hair was pulled back into a ponytail now. She was grown up. She was twenty and I was thirty-five.

  “Is that you?” I exclaimed and we embraced.

  We talked about how she was soon to be promoted to assistant manager at the Taco Bell, about which of the girls from our group she was still in touch with and what they were doing, about how I’d taken her rock climbing and to the ballet and to a poetry reading at an independent bookstore and how she hadn’t done any of those things again.

  “I never forgot you, even after all these years,” she told me.

  “I’m so proud of you,” I said, squeezing her shoulder.

  “I made it,” she said. “Didn’t I?”

  “You did,” I said. “You absolutely did.”

  I never forgot her either. Her name was Desiré.

  Yours,

  Sugar

  THAT ECSTATIC PARADE

  Dear Sugar,

  I’m a twenty-one-year-old guy. I’m in college right now. Though I work full-time to pay for some of my bills, I’m still dependent on my parents for room and board. I also use their car. I have no problem with living with my parents—at least I wouldn’t if I wasn’t gay. My parents are fundamentalist Christians. They believe that being a homosexual is a “sin” that someone struggles with similar to alcoholism or drug addiction and that gays should repent and see Jesus.

  My parents know I’m gay but they don’t acknowledge it. They believe I’ve repented and found Jesus. When I was seventeen, my mom threatened to kick me out of the house because she didn’t want “my diseased behavior under her roof.” In order for me to stay at my parents’ house I had to go to Christian counseling to undo my gay-ness. I went, but it did absolutely nothing for me. It only confused me more. I don’t hate my parents, but I strongly dislike them for their treatment of me. They think I’m straight, but they don’t trust me. My mom constantly checks on me, often barging into my room seemingly in hopes of catching me doing something. If I go out, I have to tell my parents exactly who I’m with or I won’t be able to use their car. They refuse to leave the Internet connected if I’m at home alone, and they hide the modem when they go to bed because they are afraid that I’ll look at “sinful” material that will pull me back into the “gay lifestyle.”

  Though I act straight around my parents and sister, I am out to friends and co-workers and also to my brother (who accepts me unconditionally). It’s a huge strain to live a double life. I’ve had two gay relationships. My parents know my current boyfriend is gay and they treat him like he’s going to reinfect me with his gay-ness.

  I would move out, but I can’t find any available rooms within my budget. One option that has arisen recently is that a good friend asked if I wanted to move to the Pacific Northwest with her—I live on the East Coast—and I’m seriously considering it. The thing is, I don’t want to run away from my problems and I really like the guy I’m in a relationship with, but right now I feel like I’m stuck in a situation that is hopeless. I feel suffocated by the expectations of those on both sides of my double life. One side would damn me to hell if they found out I was gay. The other side wants me to cut myself off from my family.

  Is there any advice you could offer that could help?

  Suffocated

  Dear Suffocated,

  Yes. There is something I can offer that will help. I can tell you to get yourself out of that house. 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.

  It’s miserable that your parents are ill-informed bigots. I’m sorry they’ve made you suffer so, sweet pea. There is nothing correct about their ideas regarding homosexuality (or alcoholism or drug addiction, for that matter). We are all entitled to our opinions and religious beliefs, but we are not entitled to make shit up and then use the shit we made up to oppress other people. This is what your parents are doing to you. And by choosing to pretend you’re straight in order to placate them, you’re also doing it to yourself.

  You must stop. Stopping is not running away from your problems. It’s solving them. In your question you write that you feel “suffocated by the expectations of those on both sides,” but there are not two sides. There is only one and you’re it. The real you. The authentic you. The gay you.

  Be him.

  Even if you aren’t ready to come out to your parents yet, I implore you to remove yourself from their company. Pack up your things and go. To the Pacific Northwest, across town, to your wacky cousin’s basement in Tuscaloosa, it doesn’t matter. Just stop living with the people who sent you to reeducation camp because they equate your (normal, healthy) sexuality with a disease.

  This doesn’t mean you have to break all ties with them. There is a middle path, but it goes in only one direction: toward the light. Your light. The one that goes blink, blink, blink inside your chest when you know what you’re doing is right. Listen to it. Trust it. Let it make you stronger than you are.

  Your lunatic parents are going to figure out you’re gay whether you tell them or not. In fact, they know already. They aren’t banishing you from the Internet so you won’t watch Scooby Doo, doll. I encourage you to leave your parents’ home not so you can make some giant I’m gay! pronouncement to them, but so you can live your life with dignity among people who accept you while you sort out your relationship with them from an emotionally safe distance. Sooner or later—whether they learn it from you or discern it on their own—your folks are going to have to grapple with the reality that you are a homo beyond (their) God’s reach. It seems that the best-case scenario when this happens is that you will lose their approval. The worst-case scenario is that they will disown you. Perhaps permanently. Which would mean that their love for you hinges entirely on:

  Nothing. Because you are their beloved son and their primary obligation to you as your parents is to nurture you and foster your growth, even if you turn out to be someone they didn’t precisely imagine. √ NO

  Your agreement to refrain from touching other men’s man parts. √ YES

  Wow. Really? Isn’t that so sad and crazy? I know I’m being a bit glib about it, but only because if I look at it stone cold serious it smashes my heart into smithereens. More importantly, I’m trying to make a point: love based on conditions such as those set forth by your parents is ugly, skimpy, diseased love. Yes, diseased. And it’s a kind of love that will kill you if you let it.

  So don’t. There is a world of people out here who will love you for who you are. A whole, vibrant, fucked-up, happy, conflicted, joyous, and depressed mass of people who will say, You’re gay? So the fuck what? We want you to be among us. That’s the message of the It Gets Better Project. Hold on, it says, and stick it out, because guess what? It gets better.

  And true as that is and moved as I’ve been by many of the videos made by gay, lesbian, bi, and trans people telling their stories, I think there’s an important piece missing in that message. All those people in the wonderful videos? It didn’t just get better for them. They made it better. Each and every one of those people rose at a moment in their lives—one that is very much like this moment in your life, Suffocated—and at that moment they chose to tell the truth about themselves instead of staying “safe” inside the lie. They realized that, in fact, the lie wasn’
t safe. That it threatened their existence more profoundly than the truth did.

  That’s when it started to get better for those folks. When they had the courage to say, This is who I am even if you’ll crucify me for it.

  Some of those people lost jobs because they said that. Some lost family and friends. Some even lost their lives. But in saying that, they gained themselves. It’s a sentence that lives in each one of us, I believe—the one in which we assert that we will be who it is we are, regardless—but sadly it has to live especially strong in you, Suffocated. I hope you’ll find it within you. Not just the sentence, but also all the beauty and nerve that has gotten you this far, so that when you say it, you’ll say it loud and true.

  Have you ever been to a LGBT Pride parade? Every year I take the baby Sugars to the one in our city and every year I cry while watching it. There are the drag queens riding in Corvettes. There are the queer cops and firefighters all spiffed out in their uniforms. There are the lesbians on bicycles pulling their kids on tag-alongs and trailers. There are the gay samba dancers in thongs and feathers. There are the drummers and politicians and the odd people who are really into retro automobiles. There are choirs and brass bands and battalions of people riding horses. There are real estate agents and clowns, schoolteachers and Republicans. And they all go marching by us while my kids laugh and I weep.

  My kids never understand why I’m crying. The parade seems like a party to them, and when I try to explain that the party is an explosion of love that has its roots in hate, I only confuse them more, so together we just stand on the sidelines, laughing and crying, watching that ecstatic parade.