Cheryl Strayed

This bestselling book from the author of Wild collects the best of The Rumpus's Dear Sugar advice columns plus never-before-published pieces. "Wise and compassionate" (New York Times Book Review), and rich with humor and insight—and absolute honesty—this book is a balm for everything life throws our way. Life can be hard: your lover cheats on you; you lose a family member; you can’t pay the bills—and it can be great: you’ve had the hottest sex of your life; you get that plum job; you muster the courage to write your novel. Sugar—the once-anonymous online columnist at The Rumpus, now revealed as Cheryl Strayed, author of the bestselling memoir Wild—is the person thousands turn to for advice.

Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar

Tiny Beautiful Things

Syrina

 I know because I've lived on a few planets that aren't Planet Earth myself.

When we have the guts to look directly into the mirror and say Mary Worth thirteen times without pause and see-thrillingly, terrifyingly that it was never her we had to fear. It was always only us.

Jean-Paul Sartre famously said that "hell is other people”, which is true enough, but truer still is hell is other beople's boyfriends (or girlfriends, as the case may be).

I no more wanted to be spanked than I wanted to fuck a kangaroo. 

I know it’s not easy being an artist. I know the Gulf between creation and commerce is so tremendously wide that it’s sometimes impossible not to feel annihilated by it. A lot of artists give up because it’s just too damn hard to go on making art in a culture that buy and large does not support its artist. But the people who don’t give up are the people who find a way to believe in abundance rather than scarcity. They’ve taken into their hearts the idea that there is enough for all of us, that success will manifest itself in different ways for different sorts of artists, but keeping the faith is more important than cashing the check, that being genuinely happy for someone else who got some thing you hope to get makes you genuinely happier too.

 We like to pretend that our generous impulses come naturally. But the reality is we often become our kindest, most ethical selves only by seeing what it feels like to be a selfish jackass first. 

Macy HB

There’s a line by the Italian writer Carlo Levi that I think is apt here; “The future has an ancient heart”. I love it because it expresses with such grace and economy what is certainly true – that who we become is born of who we most primitively are; that we both know and cannot possibly know what it is we've yet to make manifest in our lives.

You have to pay your own electric bill. You have to be kind. You have to give it all you got. You have to find people who love you truly and love them back with the same truth. But that's all. 

Also, because it's harder to be magnanimous when you're in your twenties, I think, and so that's why Id like to remind you of it. You're generally less humble in that decade than you’ll ever be and this lack of humility is oddly mixed with insecurity and fear. You will learn a lot about yourself if you stretch in the direction of goodness, of bigness, of kindness, of forgiveness, of emotional bravery.

I’ll never know, and neither will you of the life you don’t choose. We’ll only know that whatever that sister life was, it was important and beautiful and not ours. It was the ghost ship that didn’t carry us. There’s nothing to do but salute it from the shore.

Tiny Beautiful Things quotes

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