10:34pm

Don’t lament so much about how your career is going to turn out. You don’t have a career. You have a life. Do the work. Keep the faith. Be true blue. You are a writer because you write. Keep writing, and quit your bitching. Your book has a birthday. You just don’t know what it is yet.

You cannot convince people to love you. This is an absolute rule. No one will ever give you love simply because you want him or her to give it. Real love moves freely in both directions. Don’t waste your time on anything else.

Most things will be OK eventually, but not everything. 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.


One hot afternoon, during the era in which you’ll have gotten yourself tangled up in heroin, you will be riding the bus and thinking what a worthless piece of crap you are when a little girl will get on holding the strings of two purple balloons. She’ll offer you one of the balloons, but you won’t take it, because you believe you not longer have the right to such tiny, beautiful things. You’ll be wrong. You do.

---Dear Sugar//CHERYL STRAYED