Tiny Beautiful Things (25 page)
Read Tiny Beautiful Things Online
Authors: Cheryl Strayed
They made my life big. They contributed to an education that money can’t buy.
Yours,
Sugar
Dear Sugar
,
I dated this girl for a while only to reach the realization she was a self-absorbed crazy. Last year she and her best friend got into an argument and they stopped being friends. My ex’s friend called me up one night and asked me to hang out with her at her house. One thing led to another and I ended up sleeping with her. A few days later, this former best friend of my ex tells me she’s engaged. She wears this weird short-haired wig while she breaks off our friends-with-benefits relationship. The thing is, I connected better with her in the two weeks we hung out than I did with my ex in months. Please help me figure out if I should never talk to either one of them again. I’m not a smart man but I do know what love is
.
Gump
Dear Gump,
I’d rather be sodomized by a plastic lawn flamingo than vote for a Republican, but as I consider your situation, I can’t help but quote the former secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld, who quite wisely said: “There are known knowns. There are things we know we know. We also know there are known
unknowns. That is to say, we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns, the ones we don’t know we don’t know.”
Shall we start with the known knowns, when it comes to your little triangular quagmire, Gump?
a) You found your ex-girlfriend to be crazy and broke up with her.
b) You fucked your ex-girlfriend’s ex–best friend for a fortnight and felt “connected.”
c) In spite of such connection, your ex-girlfriend’s ex–best friend donned a wig and announced that she has no interest in continuing to fuck you, claiming to be on the brink of a (presumably) monogamous and eternal connection to someone else.
Which brings us to the known unknowns:
a) Why the wig? And if the wig, why the unnervingly short hair?
b) Is the ex-girlfriend’s ex–best friend actually engaged to be married or is this simply a grandiose ruse to shake you from her disinterested but chickenshit tail?
c) How can it be that so many people’s ex-girlfriends are crazy? What happens to these women? Do they eventually go on to birth babies and care for their elderly parents and scramble up gigantic pans of eggs on Sunday mornings for oodles of lounge-abouts who later have the nerve to inquire about what’s for dinner, or
is there some corporate Rest Home for Crazy Bitches chain in cities across the land that I am unaware of that houses all these women who used to love men who later claim they were actually crazy bitches?
Lastly, there are the unknown unknowns, the things, Gump, that you don’t know you don’t know.
a) You have nothing for these women.
b) These women have nothing for you.
c) And yet.
d)
And yet!
e) You are loved.
Yours,
Sugar
Dear Sugar
,
I’m transgender. Born female twenty-eight years ago, I knew I was meant to be male for as long as I can remember. I had the usual painful childhood and adolescence in a smallish town because I was different—picked on by other kids, misunderstood by my (otherwise loving) family
.
Seven years ago I told my mom and dad I intended to have a sex change. They were furious and disturbed by my news. They said the worst things you can imagine anyone saying to another human being, especially if that human being is your child. In response, I cut off ties with them and moved to the city where I live now and made a new life living as a man. I have friends and romance in my life. I love my job. I’m happy with who I’ve become and the life I’ve made. It’s like I’ve created an island far away and safe from my past. I like it that way
.
A couple weeks ago, after years of no contact, I got an email from my parents that blew my mind. They apologized for how they’d responded when I told them about my plans for a sex change. They said they were sorry they never understood and now they do—or at least enough that we could have a relationship again. They said they miss me and they love me
.
Sugar, they want me back
.
I cried like crazy and that surprised me. I know this might sound odd, but I believed I didn’t love my parents anymore or at least my love had become abstract, since they had rejected me and because we’ve not been in touch. But when I got that email a lot of emotions that I thought were dead came back to life
.
This scares me. I have made it because I’m tough. I’m an orphan, but I was doing great without my parents. Do I cave and forgive them and get back in touch and even go visit them as they have asked me to do? Or do I email them and say thank you, but letting you back into my life is out of the question, given our past?
Orphan
Dear Orphan,
Please forgive your parents. Not for them. For you. You’ve earned the next thing that will happen if you do. You’ve remade yourself already. You and your mom and dad can remake this too—the new era in which they are finally capable of loving the real you. Let them. Love them back. See how that feels.
What they did to you seven years ago is terrible. They now know that. They’re sorry. They’ve grown and changed and come to understand things that confounded them before. Refusing to accept them for the people they’ve become over these years of your estrangement isn’t all that different from them refusing to accept you for who you are. It’s fear-based and punishing. It’s weak rather than tough.
You’re tough. You’ve had to ask impossible questions, endure humiliations, suffer internal conflicts, and redefine your life in ways that most people don’t and can’t even imagine. But you know what?
So have your parents. They had a girl child who became
what they didn’t expect. They were cruel and small when you needed them most, but only because they were drowning in their own fear and ignorance.
They aren’t drowning anymore. It took them seven years, but they swam to shore. They have arrived at last on your island.
Welcome them.
Yours,
Sugar
YOU DON’T HAVE TO BE BROKEN FOR ME
If love were an animal, what species would it be and could you train it?
Love would be two animals: a hummingbird and a snake. Both are perfectly untrainable.
What’s a weird thing that happened to you?
One time I was hiking up a mountain in New Mexico. It was March, the trail still covered with snow in places. There was no one around but me for hours until I came upon two people—a man and a woman—who had just come upon each other. We were three strangers who met on a mountain in New Mexico. We got to talking and somehow within the first five minutes of knowing each other we figured out that we all had the same birthday, and not only that, we were born in three consecutive years. As we were talking, three feathers blew up to us on the snow. We picked them up.
What do you do when you don’t know what to do about something?
I talk to Mr. Sugar and my friends. I make lists. I attempt to analyze the situation from the perspective of my “best self”—the one that’s generous, reasonable, forgiving, loving, bighearted, and grateful. I think really hard
about what I’ll wish I did a year from now. I map out the consequences of the various actions I could take. I ask what my motivations are, what my desires are, what my fears are, what I have to lose, and what I have to gain. I move toward the light, even if it’s a hard direction in which to move. I trust myself. I keep the faith. I mess up sometimes.
What are your spiritual beliefs?
I do not believe in God as most people conceive of God, but I believe there is a divine spirit in each of us. I believe there is something bigger than our individual selves that we can touch when we live our lives with integrity, compassion, and love.
What would you like to tell us about sex?
Snakes. Hummingbirds. Perhaps a polar bear.
Dear Sugar
,
I am a sixty-four-year-old man who has been single for the past five years. My most recent romantic relationship lasted ten years—eight of which were wonderful. My ex had four adult children and three grandchildren. I liked her children a lot and I loved her grandkids. The year after our relationship ended was the most painful time of my life. (This, even though I’d lost my father in high school, spent a year in Vietnam, and watched another lover die of cancer.)
To survive my heartbreak, I started to do lots of community volunteer work. In the past four years, I’ve been involved with hospice, I’ve served on the board of directors of a nonprofit agency that provides services to survivors of domestic violence and sexual assault, I’ve tutored students at a middle school, and I’ve worked at an AIDS hotline. During this time, I’ve had a few dates with women I’ve met via Internet dating services, and found one good friend among them, but no romance. I’ve had one sexual encounter since my ex and I broke up, which I paid for. It wasn’t very satisfying. I miss sex a lot but I also miss having someone to talk with over a meal or coffee
.
There’s a new volunteer coordinator at the AIDS hotline where I volunteer and she’s wonderful. She is so exciting that I
overcame my fears and asked her out to see a play with me. She said she couldn’t go because she had a friend visiting from out of town. I believed that. I know I should ask her out again since she seemed willing, but one of my fears is that I am old enough to be her father. I don’t want to be a dirty old man!
My counselor said just be light at first—start easy and be funny
. Be Cary Grant!
she said. But I don’t know if I can do that, Sugar
.
I give to lots of people, but I have emotional needs too. I want sex, affection, and emotional closeness. I want someone to care about me. I know people do care about me already, but I want someone special. I want to be loved and to receive love; to have someone there for me. My hunger for this is so great that I fear it’s too much to ask anyone for. I’m afraid that if the volunteer coordinator did go out with me, I’d share all this with her at once, and though she’d be compassionate, she’d be scared off because she’d perceive me as needy. Of course I know that even if the volunteer coordinator and I did start seeing each other, she may not be the person for me or I the person for her
.
But I want to take that chance and see. I don’t want my fear to get in the way. What do you think, Sugar?
Fear of Asking Too Much
Dear Fear of Asking Too Much,
Of course you want someone special to love you. A majority of the people who write to me inquire about how they can get the same thing. Some are “hot, smart, and twenty-five,” others are “forty-two, a bit chubby, but lots of fun,” and others “awesome, but in a muddle.” Many are teens and early twenty-somethings whose hearts have just been seriously broken for
the first time and they are quite convinced they’ll never find a love like that again. A few are seasoned, experienced grown-ups like you whose faith in the prospect is waning. Unique as every letter is, the point each writer reaches is the same:
I want love and I’m afraid I’ll never get it
.