Dear Sugar Review

I didn’t want to post this on my book review site because I wanted to talk more personally about the advice I read in the book. Dear Sugar is a book with advice columns from the same woman, Cheryl Strayed, who wrote Wild. I found the book really easy to read and get into. It reminded me of reading the Chicken Soup for the Soul books, except more honest.

Trusting yourself means living out what you already know to be true.

I don’t even know truly what that means to me, it just stuck out to me and I had to write it down. To me it means following your gut, sticking to what you know to be true, believing in the power of your own intuition and instincts. There are so many things in the world trying to convince us not to, but we need to listen to that little voice and find the ability to live true to ourselves.

Another thing that resonated me was Sugar’s realization that she didn’t need to be broken for a man to love her. It reminded me so much of when I first started my current relationship. I was in such a vulnerable and broken place. I knew I left my other relationship for the right reason. For the first time in my life I was certain that I was done. I felt like the door had closed on me and I locked it (with a clarity I have now that didn’t because at the time it felt like even after all the shit I went through I still got the door shut on me and it felt unjust it felt like I deserved to slam it and be the one to close it, but I realize now that no matter why it closed, I got to lock it and walk away and that is the best actually). I felt so irrevocably lost and broken, so done with love and everything. I thought maybe I was totally messed up, incapable of feeling and deep into hurting myself emotionally (it felt like the last years had been a roller coaster of ups and downs that had just numbed me to the reality, it had cut my friendships, isolated me and I had no idea what I would do). I needed to get out to just completely leave and get out of there. I found it lethargic and it provided me with this complete outlet to sort my life out which was still messy as hell and totally complicated. I jumped into this fling which I had no clue would become anything (although I am a pretty in depth monogamous person so this ‘fling’ idea was already going to be another emotional battle, but I denied that and totally didn’t think about it – oh except when I went walking and cried in the rain). I jumped head first into this relationship and poured my heart out on the daily about all the horrible stuff and the stuff I hadn’t told anyone. I seemed like a crazy person, not only because I let it all go, but it made me seem like a mad woman to have endured it so long. I was even told this. It was true, but at the time I had been blinded by home, naivety, and ‘love’ (although what it was was just a warped up twisted distant twice removed cousin of love who no one can let out of the basement because it is so toxic). I had no clue who I was, and yet I found someone who could deal with it, could see me at my very lost and broken self and accepted it, even loved it.

Now here’s where I get back to the post and off this giant tangent, did I feel like I needed to be broken in order to be loved? While I never would have believe it before, I believed it then. Why? Because I thought that being vulnerable was attractive? No clue. But it was so much a part of me that I couldn’t not be broken and smashed. I couldn’t separate this temporary, which didn’t feel like it at the time, and my strong little flicker of self who was just being given the freedom to grow for the first time in five years. I poured myself into thinking I was broken, because it seemed to me that is what you do. Until I believed it so much I pretty much thought, I have so much baggage it’s probably going to take a ridiculously long time to undo this.

I don’t remember a lot of when I healed, when I moved on. I still have baggage, while a ton less, I just left it behind when I left my relationship and that train wreck behind. So this whole tangent doesn’t really provide that much substance to the actual story or the question, but it’s what I thought of when I read that one story.