#dear sugar

[melodysbookhaven]

“Most things will be okay eventually, but not everything will be. Sometimes you'll put up a good fight and lose. Sometimes you'll hold on really hard and realize there is no choice but to let go. Acceptance is a small, quiet room.”

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

#cheryl strayed #tiny beautiful things #bookblr #bookish #book quotes #quotes #books #bookstagram #booktok #book tumblr #reading #book club #book lover #dear sugar

[noodledesk]

When I was done writing it, I understood that things happened just as they were meant to. That I couldn’t have written my book before I did. I simply wasn’t capable of doing so, either as a writer or a person. To get to the point I had to get to write my first book, I had to do everything I did in my twenties. I had to write a lot of sentences that never turned into anything and stories that never miraculously formed a novel. I had to read voraciously and compose exhaustive entries in my journals. I had to waste time and grieve my mother and come to terms with my childhood and have stupid and sweet and scandalous sexual relationships and grow up. In short, I had to gain the self-knowledge that Flannery O’Connor mentions in that quote I wrote on my chalkboard. And once I got there I had to make a hard stop at self-knowledge’s first product: humility.

Sugar, Write Like A Motherfucker

#dear sugar #rumpus #advice #writing #inspo #morningread

[ofpineapplesandpeaches]

Practice saying the word “love” to the people you love so when it matters the most to say it, you will.

- Cheryl Strayed

#cheryl strayed #dear sugar #tiny beautiful things #love

[trvlytylar]

“the best thing you can do with your life is tackle the mother fucking shit out of love.”

#trvlytylar #tiny little things #dear sugar

[justalittlegreen]

THE ORDINARY MIRACULOUS

Dear Sugar,

I printed out your column, “The Future Has An Ancient Heart,” and put it up on my wall so I can read it often. Many aspects of that column move me, but I think most of all, it’s this idea that (as you wrote) we “cannot possibly know what it is we’ve yet to make manifest in our lives.” The general mystery of becoming seems like a key idea in many of your columns. It’s made me want to know more. Will you give us a specific example of how something like this has played out in your life, Sugar?

Thank you. Big Fan

Dear Big Fan,

The summer I was 18 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 I 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 19. 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 19, 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 still 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 nonchalantly, glancing up 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 two abortions and then I had two babies. 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 punched in the face 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. It’s 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.

I don’t think my daughter connects me to my mother any 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 meant when I wrote what I did, sweet pea, about how it is 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

#cheryl strayed #dear sugar #therumpus #writer #inspiring #inspirational #personal growth #advice #family #motherhood #journey #ordinarymiraculous #cheryl #strayed #THE FUTURE HAS AN ANCIENT HEART

[ewbanh]

#dear sugar #ghost ships

[waterbabym]

Cheryl Strayed

#cheryl strayed #dear sugar #note to self #advice

[small-strong-bookish-butch]

“I'd revealed a truth [my kids] were ready to know. Not about Christianity, but about the human condition: that suffering is part of life.

I know that. You know that. I don't know why we forget it when something truly awful happens to us, but we do. We wonder Why me? and How can this be? and What terrible God would do this? and The very fact that this has been done to me is proof that there is no God! We act as if we don't know that awful things happen to all sorts of people every second of every day and the only thing that's changed about the world or the existence or nonexistence of God or the color of the sky is that the awful thing is happening to us.

When I learned my mom was going to die of cancer at the age of forty five, I felt the same way. I didn't even believe in God, but I still felt that he owed me something. I had the gall to think How dare he? I couldn't help myself. I'm a selfish brute. I wanted what I wanted and I expected it to be given to me by a God in whom I had no faith. Because mercy had always more or less been granted me, I assumed it always would be.

But it wasn't.

It wasn't granted to my friend whose eighteen-year-old daughter was killed by a drunk driver either. Nor was it granted to my other friend who learned her baby is going to die of a genetic disorder in the not-distant future. Nor was it granted to my former student whose mother was murdered by her father before he killed himself. It was not granted to all those people who were in the wrong place at the wrong time when they came up against the wrong virus or military operation or famine or carcinogenic or genetic mutation or natural disaster or maniac.

Countless people have been devastated for reasons that cannot be explained or justified in spiritual terms. To do as you are doing in asking: If there were a God, why would he let my little girl have to have possibly life-threatening surgery?— understandable as that question is— creates a false hierarchy of the blessed and the damned. To use our individual good or bad luck as a litmus test to determine whether or not God exists constructs an illogical dichotomy that reduces our capacity for true compassion. It implies a pious quid pro quo that defies history, reality, ethics, and reason. It fails to acknowledge that the other half of rising- the very half that makes rising necessary is having first been nailed to the cross.”

—The Human Scale, from Tiny Beautiful Things by Dear Sugar/Cheryl Strayed

#dear sugar #cheryl strayed #christianity #cultural christianity #catholic #tiny beautiful things #this is a good point #i think about this a lot #morality #currently reading #words

[stroke-the-furry-wall]

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.

#dear sugar

[callmewinged]

"The future has an ancient heart." ~ Carlo Levi

#literary quotes #dear sugar #Carlo Levi

[melodysbookhaven]

“You will learn a lot about yourself if you stretch in the direction of goodness, of bigness, of kindness, of forgiveness, of emotional bravery. Be a warrior for love.”

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

#cheryl strayed #dear sugar #tiny beautiful things #bookblr #bookish #book quotes #books #quotes #bookstagram #booktok #book tumblr #reading #book club #book lover

[ostensiblynone]

Walk out the front door tomorrow and make your rounds at the various semi-swanky restaurants in the city where you now reside for no other reason than you have a temporary, free place to live. Wear something nice. Arrive between the hours of 2:30 and 4:30. Ask to see the manager. Say, “Hello, my name is Playing Grown-Up and I would like to apply for a job.” Repeat until you find one. You will then have a purpose. Your purpose will be to work maniacally for hours on end either washing dishes, tossing salads, burning your fingers on the grill, bringing people their food and beverages, or clearing their dirty glasses and plates away. This will destroy your spirit, but it will be good for your soul. You’ll make money. You’ll meet interesting, bitter, amazing, alcoholic and beautiful people. Some of them will help you understand what it is you want to do with your life. These people will still be your friends in thirty years.

—Dear Sugar, The Rumpus Advice Column #32

#dear sugar #cheryl strayed

[noodledesk]

I’d lowered myself to the notion that the absolute only thing that mattered was getting that extra beating heart out of my chest. Which meant I had to write my book. My very possibly mediocre book. My very possibly never-going-to-be-published book. My absolutely no-where-in-league-with-the-writers-I’d-admired-so-much-that-I-practically-memorized-their-sentences book. It was only then, when I humbly surrendered, that I was able to do the work I needed to do.

Sugar, Write Like A Motherfucker

#dear sugar #rumpus #advice #writing #quotes #morningread

[melindacopp]

If you could give advice to a twenty-something version of yourself, what would you say? I wrote about Cheryl Strayed's deep well of wisdom and what it's taken to dig my own in my newsletter.

#amreading #bookblr #tiny beautiful things #cheryl strayed #personal essay #dear sugar

[black-salt-cage]

Welcome Home icons

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#💙 sugar life posting 🌙 #I'm gonna be making stimboards for this so I thought y'all would like the icons I'll be using for them in a set! #icons #icon #icon sets #horror #ARGs #ARG horror #Welcome Home #Welcome Home Puppet Show #alternate reality games #Julie Joyful #Poppy Partridge #Eddie Dear #Wally Darling #Frank Frankly #Howdy Pillar #Sally Starlet #Barnaby B. Beagle

[angelinefairydoll]

♡Feels Like Sugar In Me♡

#vintage #hello kitty #dear daniel #sanrio #lizzy grant aesthetic #cinnamon girl #say yes to heaven #feels like sugar in me #happiness is a butterfly #put me in a movie #nymph aesthetic #pink coquette #coquette aesthetic #coquette #dollette aesthetic #dollette #nicole dollanganger aesthetic #angel aesthetic #angelcore #angels forever #gloomy coquette #gloomy dollette