Tiny Beautiful Things (31 page)

I hate to tell you, but my guess is that you’re in the latter group. A large part of your jealousy probably rises out of your outsized sense of entitlement. Privilege has a way of fucking with our heads the same way as lack of it does. There are a lot of people who’d never dream they could be a writer, let alone land, at the age of thirty-one, a six-figure book deal. You are not one of them. And you are not one of them quite possibly because you’ve been given a tremendous amount of things that you did not earn or deserve, but rather that you received for the sole reason that you happen to be born into a family who had the money and wherewithal to fund your education at two colleges to which you feel compelled to attach the word “prestigious.”

What is a prestigious college? What did attending such a school allow you to believe about yourself? What assumptions do you have about the colleges that you would not describe as prestigious? What sorts of people go to prestigious colleges and not prestigious colleges? Do you believe that you had a right to a free “first-rate” education? What do you make of the people who received educations that you would not characterize as first-rate? These are not rhetorical questions. I really do want you to take out a piece of paper and write those questions down and then answer them. I believe your answers will deeply inform your current struggle with jealousy. I am not asking you these questions in order to condemn or judge you. I would ask a similar series of questions of anyone from any sort of background because I believe our early experiences and
beliefs about our place in the world inform who we think we are and what we deserve and by what means it should be given to us.

It is a way of going back to the roots of the problem, as it were. And I imagine you know I’m a big fan of roots.

You might, for example, be interested to know that the word “prestigious” is derived from the Latin
praestigiae
, which means “conjuror’s tricks.” Isn’t that interesting? This word that we use to mean honorable and esteemed has its beginnings in a word that has everything to do with illusion, deception, and trickery. Does that mean anything to you, Awful Jealous Person? Because when I found that out, every tuning fork inside of me went hum. Could it be possible that the reason you feel like you swallowed a spoonful of battery acid every time someone else gets what you want is because a long time ago—way back in your own very beginnings—you were sold a bill of goods about the relationship between money and success, fame and authenticity, legitimacy and adulation?

I think it’s worth investigating. Doing so will make you a happier person and also a better writer, I know without a doubt.

Good luck selling your novel. I sincerely hope you get six figures for it. When you do, write to me and share the wonderful news. I promise to be over the moon for you.

Yours,
Sugar

Dear Sugar
,

I’m a spry forty-seven-year-old feisty broad. For the past three years I’ve been deeply in love with a woman. The timing of our meeting was atrocious. Her father was dying, she was recently downsized, and we were both nurturing recent heartbreaks. But once she quoted John Donne over my naughty bits after making love, I was done for. She pushed me away over and over again, and then started inviting me more frequently into her heart
.

We’ve struggled ever since. Her sex drive has vanished (we’ve done it all—doctors, therapists, reading). She cannot fully commit, and she is consumed by fear (she’s a classic love-avoider)
.

With her I find the highest of highs and the lowest of lows. We’ve broken up and reunited more times than I can count, and we are currently on an absolute restriction from each other for thirty days, which we’ve never managed. We are deeply KNOWN by each other in a spiritual, sacred way I’ve never been known before. Addictive, yes. Hence the break
.

I should say she loves me deeply and, in some ways, when I demanded the full break, she took it harder than me
.

I believe, as a midwestern lesbian, that I will never find this again and thus, I stay and tolerate her “rules,” her angst, her
sexual anorexia despite being a lusty broad. Yes, I’ve tried taking lovers. It simply does not work for me. Though our lovemaking is rare (four to five times per year), when we’ve made love it has been transcendent
.

I’m a quirky unusual complex woman and it is hard to find a match. What the hell? What do YOU think?

Signed,
Should I Stay or Should I Go Now?

Dear Should I Stay or Should I Go Now,

What the hell, indeed. It sounds pretty crazy to me. Breaking up and getting back together more times than you can count? Sexual anorexia and “rules”? Your use of the word “addiction”? All those things unsettle me. But you know what unsettles me the most? This business about your lover being the only one who has “KNOWN” you in a “spiritual, sacred way,” coupled with your conviction that you will “never find this again and thus” you stay.

Find what, pray tell? A sexually and emotionally withholding lover who is terrified of commitment and intimacy? If you and I were sitting at your kitchen table composing your ad for lustybroadslookingforlove.com, is this what you’d ask for?

You would not. I encourage you to contemplate why you’re accepting that now. This relationship isn’t meeting your needs; it’s pushing your buttons. Namely, the big button that says
I’m a forty-seven-year-old midwestern lesbian, so I’d better take what I can get
. You write about your lover’s fear, but it’s your own fear that’s messing with your head. I know it’s hard to be alone, darling. Your anxieties about finding another partner
are understandable, but they can’t be the reason to stay. Desperation is unsustainable. It might have gotten you through until now, but you’re too old and awesome to fake it anymore.

This doesn’t necessarily mean you and your lover are doomed. Good couples sometimes get off to an appalling start. Perhaps the two of you will make it through, but you won’t if you continue as you are. I know your connection feels powerful, rare, and incendiary. I know it seems like this woman is your own personal intimacy messiah. But you’re wrong. True intimacy isn’t a psychodrama. It isn’t the “highest highs and lowest lows.” It isn’t John Donne whispered into your crotch followed by months of not-exactly-agreed-upon celibacy. It’s a tiny bit of those things on occasion with a whole lot of everything else in between. It’s communion and mellow compatibility. It’s friendship and mutual respect. It’s not having to say we must have an “absolute restriction on each other” for thirty days.

That isn’t love, Lusty Broad. It’s a restraining order. You don’t have intimacy with this woman. You have intensity and scarcity. You have emotional turmoil and an overwrought sense of what the two of you together means.

I believe you know that. I could put most of the letters I receive into two piles: those from people who are afraid to do what they know in their hearts they need to do, and those from people who have genuinely lost their way. I’d put your letter in the former pile. I think you wrote to me because you realize you need to make a change, but you’re scared of what that change will mean. I sympathize. Neither of us can know how long it will be before you find love again. But we do know that so long as you stay in a relationship that isn’t meeting your needs, you’re in a relationship that isn’t meeting your needs. It
makes you miserable and it also closes you off to other, potentially more satisfying romantic relationships.

I am not a religious person. I don’t meditate, chant, or pray. But lines from poems I love run through my head and they feel holy to me in a way. There’s a poem by Adrienne Rich I first read twenty years ago called “Splittings” that I thought of when I read your letter. The last two lines of the poem are: “I choose to love this time for once / with all my intelligence.” It seemed such a radical thought when I first read those lines when I was twenty-two—that love could rise from our deepest, most reasoned intentions rather than our strongest shadowy doubts. The number of times
I choose to love this time for once with all my intelligence
has run through my head in the past twenty years cannot be counted. There hasn’t been a day when those lines weren’t present for me in ways both conscious and unconscious. You could say I’m devoted to them, even in times when I’ve failed profoundly to live up to their aspirations.

I suggest that you devote yourself to them too. The question isn’t whether you should stay or go. The question is, How would your life be transformed if you chose to love this time for once with all your intelligence?

I’m not talking to your crotch, sister. I’m looking you in the eye.

Yours,
Sugar

Dear Sugar
,

For many years, to varying degrees, I stole compulsively. For many of the years I stole, I was on a “cocktail” of psychotropic drugs for depression, anxiety, and insomnia. In retrospect, I think the drugs made me powerless to fight against the compulsion to take things. An impulse would arise in my head—say, to take this pair of jeans from my friend, that book from that friend, or the abandoned flower pots that sat on the porch of an empty house. I even once took money out of the wallet of my future mother-in-law. When the ideas arose to take whatever it was, I would try to talk myself out of it, but I couldn’t stop myself ultimately
.

I don’t do it anymore. I’ve been off all the meds for about six years, and I’m able to control the impulse, which, in fact, I rarely have now. I can’t totally blame the meds because before I was taking them I also had the impulse to steal and did on occasion succumb to it. I blame myself. I think, because of my complicated psychology—my abusive childhood (my mother screaming at me from time immemorial that I was a liar, a cheat, and a thief)—I was not only trying to fulfill my mother’s prophecy, but maybe trying to get people to hate and reject me for taking from them, for being a liar and a thief. I have also compulsively told whopping lies to people, over-the-top stories. They seemed to just come out
.

I loathe myself for these acts. I don’t know how to wipe the slate clean. I am terrified that friends and loved ones who I deceived and stole from—whether by taking a material possession or by making up some story—will find out what I did. I am not that person anymore and I haven’t been for years. My greatest wish is to be able to forgive myself; to stop hating myself for these betrayals. I have tried to forgive myself for a long while, but I’m finding I’m no closer. I read a lot about this topic and I am back in therapy after years of being out of it, but I still hate myself for what I’ve done
.

I know I will not take from anyone again in any way. Is that enough? Do I have to admit to those I stole from that I did? Or can I forgive myself without admitting to people how I wronged them? I know they would reject me if I were to admit what I’d done, even though I have not been a liar and a thief for a long, long time. I am so sorry for what I’ve done and would give anything not to have done what I have. Please help, Sugar. I’m tortured
.

Signed,
Desperate

Dear Desperate,

Fifteen years ago I had a yard sale. I’d just moved to the city where I now live and I was literally down to my last twenty cents, so I put nearly everything I owned out on the lawn—my thrift-store dresses and books, my bracelets and knickknacks, my dishes and shoes.

Customers came and went throughout the day, but my primary companions were a group of preadolescent neighborhood boys who flitted in and out looking at my things,
inquiring about how much this and that cost, though they neither had the money to purchase nor an inclination to possess the boring nonboy items I had to sell. Late in the afternoon one of the boys told me that another of the boys had stolen something from me—an empty retro leather camera case that I’d once used as a purse. It was a small thing, a barely-worth-bothering-about item that would’ve sold for something like five bucks, but still I asked the accused boy if he’d taken it.