Tiny Beautiful Things

I've lost too many patients in the last year. I love them, and I lose them and I feel like I keep losing little pieces of my soul. I don't know how long I can keep doing this. I tell myself my love for them matters, and my care matters even if they die, but I don't know if I still believe it.

That's how I opened my spiritual check-in this year. The rabbi nodded, and then said: “Read Tiny Beautiful Things.” He handed me a copy to browse. “Can I borrow it?” I asked. “No, I need it too often.” I found the advice perplexing and a little out of left field. But, sure, why not.

Reader, it was good advice. Very good advice. Cheryl Strayed knows bad things happen. She knows bad things happen to good people and we have to keep on living and loving, anyway. And she loves us all and calls us Sweet Pea when we're hurt or burning out. This is that book. I cried reading the letters about the ways in which the world was bad to people and was salved by Strayed's radical empathy. I've never read Dear Sugar. I don't know if these letters are representative. What I do know is through them, Strayed (ironically operating under a nom de plume) is not just radically empathetic, but also radically honest. She talks about her own life, her mom's death, the dissolution of her first marriage, the times that she couldn't be the person she wanted to be. She has a way of talking about herself as a means to make other people feel seen and more human.

Reading it was profoundly cathartic. I felt the protective shell I'd built up dissolving. I felt returned to the person I wanted to be. People came to me with the stories of the way the world had been bad to them and I felt ready again to be there with them, holding the badness, and then moving forward.

You can't borrow my copy. I'm going to need it too often.

Dear Sugar offers us ‘Radical Empathy' at a time when we need it most. This collection of letters and advice will make you laugh and weep and feel more connected to the letter writers and to Strayed and to all of humanity. Perhaps none of the letters will resonate with you, make you stop in your tracks (though I bet at least one of them will). But I guarantee this book will make you more connected to the vast world of messed up humans which we live in. And that's beautiful.