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

by Cheryl Strayed

  I know you know what it means to transcend. You did it in your own life when you made a whole man out of the fractured boy you once were. But the thing about rising is we have to continue upward; the thing about going beyond is we have to keep going.

  You have only begun to understand what it means to not be like your father. Keep understanding. Do not fail yourself on this front. No matter what happens when it comes to your marriage or your work life or your geographical location, there is no being torn when it comes to your daughter unless you choose to rip the fabric yourself. She wins every time.

  Yours,

  Sugar

  A SHIMMERING SLICE OF YOUR MYSTERIOUS DESTINY

  Dear Sugar,

  I’m getting married in a few months. Why do I feel totally aggressive and angry? How does anyone get through this event?

  Aggressive

  Dear Aggressive,

  My guess is you’re the bride and that you feel aggressive and angry because you’re in wedding planning hell and you’re caught up in all the expectations, outdated fairy tales, overpriced products, and irrational beliefs that one adheres to when one believes it possible to flawlessly orchestrate the behaviors, conversations, drinking habits, and attire of a large group of in-laws, out-laws, friends, strangers, and co-workers while simultaneously having a meaningful and intimate exchange with your sweetheart in front of an audience. It is not.

  Or at least it’s not possible in exactly the way you’re imagining now. I’m quite certain that whatever you’re all worked up about these days—the colors of your napkins, the invitation that should or should not be sent to your mother’s cousin Ray—matters little and whatever will actually happen on that day when you get married will positively blow your mind.

  Your wedding is going to be a kick, honey bun, but only after you accept that it isn’t something to “get through.” Perhaps it might help to stop thinking about it as the perfect “event,” but rather a messy, beautiful, and gloriously unexpected day in your sweet life.

  My own wedding was really something, though for a good stretch it appeared that everything had gone to hell. As our one hundred or so guests arrived, it was pouring rain and we’d made no rain contingency plans for our outdoor wedding. Mr. Sugar realized he’d forgotten his pants sixty miles away, back in the city where we lived, and I realized I’d forgotten the marriage license. My mother-in-law arrived dressed like a sheepherder from biblical times if sheepherders from biblical times wore teal, and one of my old friends pulled me aside to grill me about why I hadn’t chosen her to be a bridesmaid. I couldn’t find the bobby pins I’d brought to pin my veil to my hair and then once other bobby pins had been purchased, in a mad dash relay effort that involved two local drugstores, I and seven of my girlfriends couldn’t get the goddamn veil to stay on my head.

  Many of those things seemed calamitous at the time, but they are now among my most treasured memories of that day. If they hadn’t happened, I’d have never run down the street in the rain holding Mr. Sugar’s hand laughing and crying at the same time because I was going to have to marry him in a dingy library basement instead of on the banks of a beautiful river. I’d have never felt the way it feels when everyone you know volunteers to drive at an illegal speed to retrieve a pair of pants and a piece of paper. I’d have never known what a biblical-times sheepherder might look like in teal, and that important piece of information about my old friend. And I wouldn’t have been so distracted by getting those goddamned bobby pins in my hair that I didn’t realize the rain had stopped and Mr. Sugar had discreetly enlisted our guests to carry one hundred white wooden chairs a quarter mile, from the terrible library basement back to the grassy spot on the banks of the beautiful river, where I had hoped to marry him in the sunlight and did.

  We all get lost in the minutiae, but don’t lose this day. Make a list of everything that needs to be seen to and decided and worried about between now and your wedding day and then circle the things that matter the most to you and do them right. Delegate or decide on the other stuff and refuse to worry anymore.

  Let your wedding be a wonder. Let it be one hell of a good time. Let it be what you can’t yet imagine and wouldn’t orchestrate even if you could. Remember why it is you’ve gone to so much trouble that you’ve been driven to anger and aggression and an advice columnist. You’re getting married! There’s a day ahead that’s a shimmering slice of your mysterious destiny. All you’ve got to do is show up.

  Yours,

  Sugar

  THE ORDINARY MIRACULOUS

  Dear Sugar,

  The general mystery of becoming seems like a key idea in many of your columns, of how you don’t know what something will turn out to be until you’ve lived it. It’s made me want to know more. Will you give us a specific example of how something has played out over years of your life, Sugar?

  Thank you.

  Big Fan

  Dear Big Fan,

  The summer I was eighteen I was driving down a country road with my mother. This was in the rural county where I grew up and all of the roads were country, the houses spread out over miles, hardly any of them in sight of a neighbor. Driving meant going past an endless stream of trees and fields and wildflowers. On this particular afternoon, my mother and I came upon a yard sale at a big house where a very old woman lived alone, her husband dead, her kids grown and gone.

  “Let’s look and see what she has,” my mother said as we passed, so I turned the car around and pulled into the old woman’s driveway and the two of us got out.

  We were the only people there. Even the old woman whose sale it was didn’t come out of the house, only waving to us from a window. It was August, the last stretch of time that I would live with my mother. I’d completed my first year of college by then and I’d returned home for the summer because I’d gotten a job in a nearby town. In a few weeks I’d go back to college and I’d never again live in the place I called home, though I didn’t know that then.

  There was nothing much of interest at the yard sale, I saw, as I made my way among the junk—old cooking pots and worn-out board games; incomplete sets of dishes in faded, unfashionable colors; and appalling polyester pants—but as I turned away, just before I was about to suggest that we should go, something caught my eye.

  It was a red velvet dress trimmed with white lace, fit for a toddler.

  “Look at this,” I said and held it up to my mother, who said, Oh, isn’t that the sweetest thing, and I agreed and then set the dress back down.

  In a month I’d be nineteen. In a year I’d be married. In three years I’d be standing in a meadow not far from that old woman’s yard holding the ashes of my mother’s body in my palms. I was pretty certain at that moment that I would never be a mother myself. Children were cute, but ultimately annoying, I thought then. I wanted more out of life.

  And yet, ridiculously, inexplicably, on that day the month before I turned nineteen, as my mother and I poked among the detritus of someone else’s life, I kept returning to that red velvet dress fit for a toddler. I don’t know why. I cannot explain it even now except to say something about it called powerfully to me. I wanted that dress. I tried to talk myself out of wanting it as I smoothed my hands over the velvet. There was a small square of masking tape near its collar that said $1.

  “You want that dress?” my mother asked, glancing up nonchalantly from her own perusals.

  “Why would I?” I snapped, perturbed with myself more than her.

  “For someday,” said my mother.

  “But I’m not even going to have kids,” I argued.

  “You can put it in a box,” she replied. “Then you’ll have it, no matter what you do.”

  “I don’t have a dollar,” I said with finality.

  “I do,” my mother said and reached for the dress.

  I put it in a box, in a cedar chest that belonged to my mother. I dragged it with me all the way along the scorching trail of my twenties and into my thirties. I had a son and then a daughter.
The red dress was a secret only known by me, buried for years among my mother’s best things. When I finally unearthed it and held it again it was like being slapped and kissed at the same time, like the volume was being turned way up and also way down. The two things that were true about its existence had an opposite effect and were yet the same single fact:

  My mother bought a dress for the granddaughter she’ll never know.

  My mother bought a dress for the granddaughter she’ll never know.

  How beautiful. How ugly.

  How little. How big.

  How painful. How sweet.

  It’s almost never until later that we can draw a line between this and that. There was no force at work other than my own desire that compelled me to want that dress. Its meaning was made only by my mother’s death and my daughter’s birth. And then it meant a lot. The red dress was the material evidence of my loss, but also of the way my mother’s love had carried me forth beyond her, her life extending years into my own in ways I never could have imagined. It was a becoming that I would not have dreamed was mine the moment that red dress caught my eye.

  My daughter doesn’t connect me to my mother more than my son does. My mother lives as brightly in my boy child as she does in my girl. But seeing my daughter in that red dress on the second Christmas of her life gave me something beyond words. The feeling I got was like that original double whammy I’d had when I first pulled that dress from the box of my mother’s best things, only now it was

  My daughter is wearing a dress that her grandmother bought for her at a yard sale.

  My daughter is wearing a dress that her grandmother bought for her at a yard sale.

  It’s so simple it breaks my heart. How unspecial that fact is to so many, how ordinary for a child to wear a dress her grandmother bought her, but how very extraordinary it was to me.

  I suppose this is what I mean when I say we cannot possibly know what will manifest in our lives. We live and have experiences and leave people we love and get left by them. People we thought would be with us forever aren’t and people we didn’t know would come into our lives do. Our work here is to keep faith with that, to put it in a box and wait. To trust that someday we will know what it means, so that when the ordinary miraculous is revealed to us we will be there, standing before the baby girl in the pretty dress, grateful for the smallest things.

  Yours,

  Sugar

  WE CALL THIS A CLUSTERFUCK

  Note: The following two letters are from each of the women involved in the situation detailed in the letters.

  Dear Sugar,

  I recently had sex with a guy who has a complicated history with a friend of mine. I knew sleeping with him would hurt my friend’s feelings, and so I told her I wouldn’t. She didn’t ask me not to sleep with him, but it was implied. She would make references to “his crush on me” and once asked him if we had had a threesome with this other girl. Long story short, I broke my promise. I meant what I said to my friend at the time, Sugar, but I failed.

  The man in question is a good guy. I enjoyed spending time with him and let’s just say my bed has been rather empty of late. My desire outweighed the potential hurt I knew my actions would cause. The guy and my friend have had many conversations since I slept with him, and they appear to have made up, whereas my friendship with her is still on shaky ground. I think it will normalize eventually, but I already feel like our friendship is something that’s not that important to her. I don’t even know if it’s all that important to me either.

  Very recently, my stepdad had a heart attack. It was his second. It made me think about gravity and consequence and trivialities, and that if this one night of problematic sex forever alters or negates all the other ways I’ve been a good friend to her, then so be it. If that’s the case, our friendship wasn’t meant to last, and I have more important things to worry about. But at the same time I can’t help but wonder if I am losing my humanity a little. Because today an ex-friend of mine basically said she hadn’t completely forgiven me for hurting her six years ago. I cheated on her like the dumb twenty-two-year-old I was, and I have apologized a thousand times since then. We weren’t friends for a while, but we became good friends again eventually. Until today, I was operating under the assumption that we were okay. To hear her say she relates to me differently, that she withholds information from me because of how I behaved years ago, makes me profoundly sad and angry. What does it mean if someone forgives you, but never forgets?

  I feel both horrible and stubborn. And I don’t know how much of this anger is due to acknowledging potentially ugly truths about myself—that I value desire at the expense of my friendships; that I can’t seem to learn from past mistakes; that I am a person others deem untrustworthy. The last one stings the worst, and is a doubt I expressed to the guy shortly after our tryst. “She never trusted you,” he said, which was a confirmation of my fears, if not a self-fulfilling prophecy.

  I would probably have done the same thing, given another opportunity. And I don’t know if that should worry me or if it makes me some kind of pleasure addict or just a terrible friend. I don’t regret my recent behavior, but should I? Am I throwing away solid friendships for stupid sexual gratification? Part of me feels selfish even writing to you, because I know you’ll call me honey bun and make me feel better when I don’t deserve it.

  Friend or Foe

  Dear Sugar,

  I have two friends who I love dearly. One is a man I’ve known since we were teenagers. A few years ago, he and I started a brief nonmonogamous romance. He then fell in love with another woman, who he rightly chose over me. Though I knew we were meant to be friends instead of romantic partners, my feelings for him ran deep, so I was crushed. Eventually the pain subsided, and we became closer as friends.

  The other friend is a woman I admire greatly as a writer and as a person. She’s witty, sexy, brilliant. We support each other through romantic traumas and laugh constantly whenever we’re together. She was there to comfort me when my male friend told me he had met someone else. She sat with me as I unabashedly cried in public in the middle of downtown San Francisco.

  Recently, these two friends met and hit it off. He started joking about sleeping with her. (He is single now.) I told my male friend that this idea made me feel uncomfortable, but he dismissed my worries. I didn’t press the issue because my female friend swore that she would never sleep with him. She said this to me repeatedly, emphatically, even when I didn’t ask her. While I was over my attraction to this guy, the history was still a little too fresh, and I wasn’t finished processing the heartbreak. She saw how it was still affecting me. I trusted her.

  But it happened anyway. They slept together. When my male friend told me, I got very upset; I yelled at him for the way he’d dismissed my feelings in the past. We talked on several very long phone calls, and by the end of it I felt heard, valued, and respected. He also forced me to come to terms with my jealousy and lack of claim I have over others’ actions. Since then, I’ve had to do a lot of hard looking at my own insecurity and desire for control.

  Two weeks later, when my female friend apologized for breaking the promise she had made to me, I told her I no longer thought I’d had a right to that promise in the first place, even though it hurt and angered me when she broke it. She had done what she felt was right for her, and now I had to figure out what was right for me: taking time and space. Part of me felt at peace with this conclusion. But by that point, I also felt so emotionally exhausted by the whole situation, and so disgusted with myself, I wasn’t even sure I deserved an apology from anyone.

  Sugar, I’m conflicted. I know what they did wasn’t morally wrong; I’ve felt desire before for the exes of friends, and the friends of exes. These two friends have a relationship that’s independent of me. Still, I was so hurt. And the worst part is, I’m ashamed of my hurt. I’m ashamed of the jealousy I didn’t know was still in me, even eighteen months after the romance ended. I want to be the person who can
gracefully take joy in the fact that two people I love were able to share some sexy fun. I want to believe that the hurt is all in my possessive, competitive little brain, so I can just change myself and get over it. All I do now is beat myself up, for whatever choice I make. My internal compass on this matter is so broken. I need your wise, soothing words.

  Love,

  Triangled

  Dear Women,

  A couple of years ago the baby Sugars got into a vicious fight over the decapitated head of a black-haired plastic princess. My son was all but frothing at the mouth. My daughter screamed so hard for so long I thought the neighbors were going to call the cops. The decapitated head in question was about the size of a gumball, its neck not a proper neck, but rather an opening into which a tiny interchangeable torso was meant to be snapped. This torso was either the ancient female Egyptian my daughter was holding in her hand or the sultry skirted girl pirate my son was holding in his. Hence the uproar.

  Neither of them could be convinced to relinquish their claim on the decapitated head of the black-haired plastic princess, no matter how gently or sternly or maniacally I explained that they could take turns, each of them attaching the head to “their torso” for short periods of time. Likewise, they refused to be consoled by any one of the countless items that clutter the room they share—not the bin of agates or the wooden daggers; not the stuffed kittens or the alphabet flashcards; not the foam swords or the half-trashed markers; not the ballerinas or the Roman warriors or monkeys or fairy statuettes or fake golden coins or movie-inspired action figures or unicorns or race cars or dinosaurs or tiny spiral-bound notebooks or any other damn thing in the whole motherloving universe but the decapitated head of the black-haired plastic princess.