Cheryl Strayed - Tiny Beautiful Things : Advice from Dear Sugar

Also by Cheryl Strayed

Brave Enough

Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

Torch

Cheryl Strayed

Tiny Beautiful Things

Cheryl Strayed is the author of the number-one New York Times bestseller Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail, which has sold more than four million copies worldwide and was made into an Oscar-nominated major motion picture. Tiny Beautiful Things was adapted as a play that has been staged in theaters across the country and as a Hulu television series airing in 2023. Cheryl is also the author of Brave Enough, which brings together more than one hundred of her inspiring quotes, and the debut novel Torch. She has hosted two hit podcasts, Sugar Calling and Dear Sugars. She lives in Portland, Oregon.

Cheryl Strayed is available for select speaking engagements. To inquire about a possible appearance, please contact the Penguin Random House Speakers Bureau at speakers@penguinrandomhouse.com or visit www.prhspeakers.com.

Dear Sugar,

My twenty-year marriage fell apart. Whose fault? Mine? My wifes? Societys? I dont know. We were too immature to get married back in the eighties, and we both worked hard to avoid dealing with the unhappiness that was hanging over us.

But thats in the past. Ive had a few relationships in the three years since the split. One casual, one serious, and one current. There was no issue with the casual one: I was up-front about not wanting to settle down so soon. The second one started out casual, and I actually broke it off when she got serious, but I couldnt stay away and promised to consider long-term plans with her. I also told her I loved her after a year of avoiding that word, the definition of which I dont really understand. I balked when it came time to piss or get off the pot and I lost both a lover and a friend in her.

Now Ive again met a woman with whom I click very nicely. We have been dating and being intimate for about four months. Shes going through a bitter divorce and wasnt looking for a commitment. That sounded perfect, but in reality neither of us was interested in dating more than one person, so here we are in an exclusive relationship.

She sounds like shes falling in love with me, though she wont say the word. I am avoiding that word as well, but clearly were both thinking it. Im afraid of saying it out loud, as my experience shows that word love comes loaded with promises and commitments that are highly fragile and easily broken.

My question to you is, when is it right to take that big step and say I love you? And what is this love thing all about?

Best,

Johnny

Dear Johnny,

The last word my mother ever said to me was love. She was so sick and weak and out of her head she couldnt muster the I or the you, but it didnt matter. That puny word has the power to stand on its own.

I wasnt with my mom when she died. No one was. She died alone in a hospital room, and for so many years it felt like three-quarters of my insides were frozen solid because of that. I ran it over and over in my mind, the series of events and choices that kept me from being beside my mom in her last hours, but thinking about it didnt do a thing. Thinking about it was a long dive into a bucket of shit that didnt have a bottom.

I would never be with my mother when she died. She would never be alive again. The last thing that happened between us would always be the last thing. There would be the way I bent to kiss her and the way she said, Please, no, when I got close because she couldnt any longer bear the physical pain of people touching her. There would be the way that I explained Id return in the morning and the way she just barely nodded in response. There would be the way I got my coat and said, I love you, and the way she was silent until I was almost out the door and she called, love. And there would be the way that she was still lying in that bed when I returned the next morning, but dead.

My mothers last word to me clanks inside me like an iron bell that someone beats at dinnertime: love, love, love, love, love.

I suppose you think this has nothing to do with your question, Johnny, but it has everything to do with my answer. It has everything to do with every answer I have ever given to anyone. Its Sugars genesis story. And its the thing my mind kept swirling back to over these five weeks since you wrote to me and said you didnt know the definition of love.

It is not so incomprehensible as you pretend, sweet pea. 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. It can be romantic, platonic, familial, fleeting, everlasting, conditional, unconditional, imbued with sorrow, stoked by sex, sullied by abuse, amplified by kindness, twisted by betrayal, deepened by time, darkened by difficulty, leavened by generosity, nourished by humor, and loaded with promises and commitments that we may or may not want or keep. The best thing you can possibly do with your life is to tackle the motherfucking shit out of love. And, Johnny, on this front, I think you have some work to do.

But before we get to that, I want to say this, darling: I sort of love you.

I love the way you wrote to me with your searching, scared, knuckleheaded, nonchalant, withholding dudelio heart on full display. I love that you compelled me to write dudelio, even thoughon top of the fact that dudelio isnt a wordI am morally opposed to the entire dude and dude-related lexicon. I love how for five long weeks hardly a day has passed that I havent thought: But what about Johnny? What will I tell Johnny? I love that one recent evening when I was lying in bed with Mr. Sugar and he was reading The New Yorker and I was reading Brain, Child, I had to stop and put my magazine on my chest because I was thinking about you and what you asked me and so then Mr. Sugar put his magazine on his chest and asked what I was thinking about and I told him and we had a conversation about your troubles and then we turned off the lights and he fell asleep and I lay there wide awake with my eyes closed writing my answer to you in my head for so long that I realized I wasnt going to fall asleep, so I got up and walked through the house and got a glass of water and sat at the kitchen table in the dark and looked out the window at the wet street and my cat came and jumped up on the table and sat there beside me and after a while I turned to her and said, What will I tell Johnny? and she purred.

I always knew what I would tell you. Not knowing wasnt exactly the problem. What I was mulling over is how Id get at the layers of things your letter implies to me: the questions you didnt ask that stand so brightly behind the questions you did.

You arent afraid of love. Youre afraid of all the junk youve yoked to love. And youve convinced yourself that withholding one tiny word from the woman you think you love will shield you from that junk. But it wont. 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 forthrightto elucidate the nature of our affection when such elucidation would be meaningful or clarifying.

And in your case, it will be. You asked me when is the right time to tell your lover that you love her and the answer is when you think you love her. Thats also the right time to tell her what your love for her means to you. If you continue using avoidance as the main tactic in your romantic relationships with women, youre going to stunt not only your happiness, but your life.