Dear Sugar and the Flow
Dear Sugar column #64, Tiny Beautiful Things (Cheryl Strayed) was sent to me as a struggling post-college grad by one of my English major friends - the impact nearly 20 years later
By Juyun
“Your life will be a great and continuous unfolding,” Strayed writes, and oh, how it has been.
My first job literally had me crying in my car eating greasy Taiwanese take out over a breakup and feeling sorry for myself.
Was this what my lofty UC Berkeley English degree had been reduced to?
A $30K a year sales job where I literally went door-to-door selling copiers and at the same time, their complete antithesis - online repository software for businesses on the cutting edge of getting rid of their copiers.
Almost 2 decades later, in my current role, I’ve had the opportunity to re-engage with points of my identity while sharing this on-stage with advertising industry professionals, in a way I never dreamed I’d be able to (that English degree came in handy).
I’ve come to think of this ebb and flow of life as a river - sometimes a cascade of momentum, joy, energy, pushing you effortlessly along to bask in the gratitude and beauty of life and other times, merely a trickle that forces you to follow the wet river stones of clues, so to speak, on how to get back to the flow. But always, my path has been mine, and the real trouble isn’t in these moments of dry riverbed - but when the question of “will we get back to the river” is driven by doubt in myself.