http://therumpus.net/2011/08/dear-sugar-the-rumpus-advice-column-82-the-god-of-doing-it-anyway/

I don’t think you know this yet, sweet pea, but I’m pretty certain you aren’t writing to me to ask if it’s okay that you write about your passion for Jesus Christ and whether the generally heathen lit world will accept you into the fold. You’re writing to me for the same reason Elissa Bassist did last year, though you use different language. You’re asking me if it’s okay to be you. You want me to give you permission to write your truth with honesty and heart because doing so scares the living crap out of you. I’m here not only to give you permission, but also to say that you must. There is no other way.
I know because I’m right there beside you, walking down the same path. And so is every other writer on the planet, every other artist, every other person who ever felt outside of who they thought other people believed they should be.
In life, we have to make ourselves. In art, we have to make that self over and over again and present it to the world. We have to put it up on the wall or down on the page or project it on a screen or allow it to resound or glide or crackle across the room. And each time we do that, we must endure the sense that perhaps all has failed, that no one wants this, that we are too much that.

This is the reason I laughed when I came to the line in your letter that wonders if you should prepare yourself “to start out without an audience and with a handicap.” Yes, darling, you should. We all start out without an audience and with a handicap. And many of us end up that way too. But the whole deal with making art is you have to be brave. Which is different from not being afraid. You have to dare to inhabit the alternate universe of your original mind and create something for us from that and then stand by and hear what we have to say. The other side of fearlessness is fear. The other side of strength is fragility. The other side of power is faith.
You think writing this column doesn’t terrify me? You think I don’t have a constant loop of horrible words running through my head about all the things one could mock and condemn about my writing and life? You think I’m not self-conscious about my passions and obsessions? Every time I write about my mother, there’s a little voice in my head that says, Oh for the fucking love of God, would you please shut up about this! We know you loved her. We know she died too young. How many times can you hash this over? Enough!
And yet, at least so far, there seems to be no limit to the number of times I can hash this over when it comes to my mother—(look: here she is! even now!).
I had to struggle to be okay with this, to do what I call trusting the heat, to write what must be written in the way only I can write it. And everything about what you’re asking me has entirely to do with that, Paradoxed. Your Jesus is my mother is someone else’s turtle. Show us his light. Do it so righteously that we can’t help but look. Don’t worry. Don’t apologize. Don’t cower behind the defeated security of there is no “room for someone like me.” There isn’t room for any one of us. It’s up to you to make a place for yourself in the world. So get to work. I went to graduate school with a small group of very talented writers. We wrote in a range of styles about a variety of subjects and we spent a lot of time discussing whose style and subject was most interesting or valid or important or artistic or financially rewarded or culturally sanctioned or critically condemned. I felt delicately crushed by many of these conversations, but now I see that they were good for me. They complicated my path, but they clarified the way. You could say those contrary, brilliant people baptized me. They pushed me to answer the question at the core of your question, Paradoxed—is it okay to be me?—and they compelled me to assert that the answer was yes often enough that I went ahead and became her: the writer of plainspoken prose who would not shut up about her grief.
Many of my grad school mates went ahead and became who they had to be too, as all of the writers I most admire do. They wrote about turtles if they were obsessed with turtles. They put their faith in the magic of heat. They worshipped the god of doing it anyway, even while their doubts and fears ran constantly alongside them. The thing that is so apparent and so very cool is that, regardless of our differences, we are the same. The thread that connects our work is that we did the work we had to do. Our writing rose out of necessity and desire and whatever it was that wouldn’t let us go.
And that’s a stronger thread than any of those things we argued back in the day.
I hope you’ll grab hold of that thread too, sweet pea. It’s yours to for the taking, but only if you have the guts to give us everything you’ve got. Doing that is more vital, more real, more sacred than anything.

SUZ SAYS: March 29th, 2015 at 11:22 pm I remember reading this post a couple of years ago and thinking to myself how lucky I was to be in a relationship with someone in which our communication was so good that if/when extra-relationship attractions came along we would be so ready to talk it through. We got engaged almost exactly a year ago and our wedding is in three months. Well, it was going to be anyway. My girlfriend cheated on me, with a friend/work acquaintance who lived far away. They talk regularly and had developed a writers’ friendship outside work. We saw this woman together a few months back when she was crushed by a breakup and I invited her to come visit our sweet little home. I voiced my suspicions about this person and her general personality that made me uncomfortable (fake was, bad boundaries, minor manipulations) but told my partner I trusted her. And then at then end of this woman’s visit, my partner cheated on me when they were at a sort of work retreat. I am devastated. And not sleeping. At about 2:46 am this morning I remembered this post and I looked it up. It reminded me how hard I’ve worked to live my life as a compassionate person with an open heart. It doesn’t comes easily to this Scorpio, let me tell you. My girlfriend/fiancé was the first person I have ever fully trusted, my family included, for most of my life anyway, which is a longer story. I love the shit out of my girlfriend. I spent the last few days in a cabin, hoping to clear my head, and Cheryl’s advice hit me so hard. I came back home today and yelled and cried and punched the sofa where that woman’s shitty perfume somehow still hangs. I cancelled the wedding. That I am sure about. But tonight my former fiancé-now-girlfriend opened up in a way I’d never seen her do before. She told me some challenging things about her past, her way of lying to hide the uglier parts of herself. She’d never lied to me before, and for some reason that’s the only thing I wholeheartedly believe out of her mouth today. I was shocked to find that I didn’t want to leave her completely. Shocked. I know I’d be fine without her–sad for a long time, but ultimately fine. I do fine on my own. But the truth is, while I think she is as fucking stupid as Mr Sugar was, I also the she is every bit as sorry. And she is saying all the right things about how she plans to regain my trust, even nothing can right the wrong. I got up and made a sandwich. I thought, ‘I should make her a sandwich, too.’ And I took out more bread. And I then I put the bread away and cried. And then I took out the bread slices out again and knew that if I could just make her that fucking sandwich that I wouldn’t leave her today. Maybe tomorrow, but not today. This is all to say that love is way more complicated than I ever dreamed and might include being willing to make yourself vulnerable to something truly terrifying. The easy thing for me would be to walk away and toss a match over my shoulder at the far end of the bridge. I am very skilled at that. Yet, here I am. Alone in my house while my former fiancé is sad and remorseful at a hotel. But with every bit of me, I am here.

http://therumpus.net/2011/08/dear-sugar-the-rumpus-advice-column-81-a-bit-of-sully-in-your-sweet/#comment-802664

9. Small things such as this have saved me: how much I love my mother—even after all these years. How powerfully I carry her within me. My grief is tremendous but my love is bigger. So is yours. You are not grieving your son’s death because his death was ugly and unfair. You’re grieving it because you loved him truly. The beauty in that is greater than the bitterness of his death.

http://therumpus.net/2011/07/dear-sugar-the-rumpus-advice-column-78-the-obliterated-place/

14. The word obliterate comes from the Latin obliterare. Ob means against; literare means letter or script. A literal translation is being against the letters. It was impossible for you to write me a letter, so you made me a list instead. It is impossible for you to go on as you were before, so you must go on as you never have.
15. It’s wrong that this is required of you. It’s wrong that your son died. It will always be wrong.
17. You have the power to withstand this sorrow. We all do, though we all claim not to. We say, “I couldn’t go on,” instead of saying we hope we won’t have to. That’s what you’re saying in your letter to me, Living Dead Dad. You’ve made it so fucking long without your sweet boy and now you can’t take it anymore. But you can. You must.
18. More will be revealed. Your son hasn’t yet taught you everything he has to teach you. He taught you how to love like you’ve never loved before. He taught you how to suffer like you’ve never suffered before. Perhaps the next thing he has to teach you is acceptance. And the thing after that, forgiveness.
24. You go on by doing the best you can, you go on by being generous, you go on by being true, you go on by offering comfort to others who can’t go on, you go on by allowing the unbearable days to pass and allowing the pleasure in other days, you go on by finding a channel for your love and another for your rage.
25. Letting go of expectation when it comes to one’s children is close to impossible. The entire premise of our love for them has to do with creating and fostering and nurturing people who will outlive us. To us, they are not so much who they are as who they will become.
26. The entire premise of your healing demands that you do let go of expectation. You must come to understand and accept that your son will always be only the man he actually was: the 22 year-old who made it as far as that red light. The one who loved you deeply. The one who long ago forgave you for asking why he didn’t like girls. The one who would want you to welcome his boyfriend’s new boyfriend into your life. The one who would want you to find joy and peace. The one who would want you to be the man he didn’t get to be.
27. To be anything else dishonors him.
28. The kindest and most meaningful thing anyone ever says to me is: your mother would be proud of you. Finding a way in my grief to become the woman who my mother raised me to be is the most important way I have honored my mother. It has been the greatest salve to my sorrow. The strange and painful truth is that I’m a better person because I lost my mom young. When you say you experience my writing as sacred what you are touching is the divine place within me that is my mother. Sugar is the temple I built in my obliterated place. I’d give it all back in a snap, but the fact is, my grief taught me things. It showed me shades and hues I couldn’t have otherwise seen. It required me to suffer. It compelled me to reach.
29. Your grief has taught you too, Living Dead Dad. Your son was your greatest gift in his life and he is your greatest gift in his death too. Receive it. Let your dead boy be your most profound revelation. Create something of him.

BARBARA SAYS: February 20th, 2012 at 7:08 am Dear Living Dead Dad – 1. I do not know what it is like to loose a child. I lost two children through miscarriage, but that is not the same as losing a living child. I grieve for all the times that never were. I have no times to remember, because they never were, except in my dreams and hopes.I grieve for them to this day, although it has been over twenty years. 2. Nobody’s grief is the same as anothers. No matter how similar the circumstances all grief is personal and unique. We can feel empathy but still never know exactly how another feels. 3. I lost the man I loved for more than 35 years to alcoholism. He struggled for many years to overcome it, but in the end this disease defeated him.He was a kind, talented and sweet man who never understood how much he was loved by others, how much he was loved by me. Thank God he never got in a car and killed anyone else because that is a grief I do not think I could have born. 4. When this man died I thought I would die also. Grief was a black field of quicksand in which I was drowning. Because he and I had never married and had not been in close contact at the time of his death I felt I had no right to my grief. That made it worse. 5. I sought help. The help helped a little. People helped some. Time helped more. 6. Now I am in a relationship with a wonderful man. He is capable of giving me all the love that my alcoholic friend could not. My relationship with him is everything I hoped my former relationship would be, but wasn’t. I am very happy. I still grieve. 7. Grief never goes away. But it changes with time. Grief broke me open, created room for more love, made me appreciate love more deeply…..I still grieve. 8. I can only imagine what it is like to loose a living child. I can only imagine the depths of your grief. You can only imagine the depths of mine. 9. I do not know you, but I hold you in my heart. I pray your broken heart remains open. Do not allow your pain to close you down. 10. You will grieve for the rest of your life. I hope you find a way to turn your grief into a gift – to use your grief to love more fully and completely than you ever loved before. In doing this you honor your son. 11. I pray you find peace. Love, A Fellow Traveler Through Life and the Living Death of Grief http://therumpus.net/2011/07/dear-sugar-the-rumpus-advice-column-78-the-obliterated-place/#comment-285489

There’s a part, I think, in many of us that feels that to ever let go of the devastation is a betrayal; that it might, in some way, show we didn’t really care that much. That’s a feeling to resist, or to let pass if it can’t be resisted. I don’t think grief can be sustained at the same pitch forever without severely damaging us. It is normal for that grief to be transmuted – by *love* – into something we can hold tight to us without bleeding too dreadfully. There will always be spikes of pain, of course. My father had a friend, an older woman, who had, in a year’s time, lost her husband, her son, and her livelihood. She told him that decades later there were still times all she could do was to howl into the wind. And there is so much emotional change to work through. My father wrote a letter after my brother died in which he said that you expect parents to die, and when your brother dies, you learn you too can die, but that when you lose a child, your dreams die. I think being able to allow a new dream, a way to honor your son, any growth in the blasted center of your life, hurts just unbearably, but is one way you find yourself able to take your son with you — in your heart, and who you are, and the choices that you make, the ways you honor him, as you have in the list you’ve written right here. I can tell your son was a man worth loving.

http://therumpus.net/2011/07/dear-sugar-the-rumpus-advice-column-78-the-obliterated-place/#comment-168560