The drugs and desperation and depression have muddled your head. It seems impossible now, but you aren’t thinking clearly. As the poet Rilke says, “You must change your life.” You can find a way to overcome these difficulties, and you must. But you don’t have the luxury of despair. You listed the three options you think you have, but really they all say the same thing: that you believe you’re fucked before you begin. I hope you can suggest some other options, because I don’t see any of the above working out. This would almost surely ruin what’s left of my business. Go to AA/ NA meetings in this small town.Find a way to go into rehab and lose the house and business.Continue like I have been, knowing there is a good chance that it will kill me.I’ve begun to have suicidal thoughts that I’m sure are related to the meds as much as anything else. I’ve tried everything I can think of to stop taking the drugs, from prayer to cold turkey, but nothing has worked. I feel totally alone except for my children. I can’t depend on my wife for financial support (she doesn’t have a job), and I don’t have any other family nearby.
When the economy went bad, so did my business, and we lost our health insurance, so checking into rehab is impossible. Then I crash and have to beg or borrow from others to make it to the next appointment. I take a month’s supply in about seven to ten days. Several years ago I had an accident that damaged my spine, and now I’m hopelessly addicted to the very strong pain medications that were prescribed to me.
Neither of us is happy, but we stay together for the kids.
Now we simply cohabit peacefully, like siblings. The first half of my marriage was a utopia, but my wife and I have grown apart over the last ten years. I’ve been married for more than twenty years and have four children.
DEAR SUGAR RUMPUS PROFESSIONAL
I am a professional in real estate, and I own my own business. The whole county has fewer than thirty thousand people. Our town has a population of about six thousand. Through the Internet and columns like yours, I’ve discovered that my life has been sheltered from views and lifestyles in other areas of the country. I was raised in a conservative, Christian part of the South. The columns below are reprinted with her permission. In 2012 Cheryl Strayed announced that she was Sugar. Sugar is a pseudonym, but her writing reveals her to be a woman of compassion, wit, and wisdom. A journal of culture (not pop culture but the other kind), The Rumpus is edited by Stephen Elliott, whose work has appeared in The Sun. The show taught me what all good storytelling sets out to prove: "We are more alike, my friends, than we are unalike," in the words of Maya Angelou.“Dear Sugar” is an advice column that appears regularly in the online magazine The Rumpus. I may only be 22, but I know for a fact that it's rare to feel undeniably accepted and understood by people who are strangers to you-and that's exactly how I felt about not only Strayed, Almond, and whatever guest they'd invite on the show, but also every other person out there who listened in with me each week for the past two years of my life. It's now been over a week since the show has come to what I would classify as an intensely bittersweet end, but it's really just hitting me how much I'll miss it. What they really offered people was a fresh-eyed, compassionate vantage point on the aspect of the letter-writers' lives that most resonated with them. To say they gave "advice" would be the understatement of the century. And slowly, through generous and insistent discourse, they'd expose someone's singular struggle as being plainly, universally, and stunningly human.
If you're unfamiliar with how each episode of Dear Sugars used to unfold, it always went something like this: Each week, Strayed or Almond would read off a letter sent in by an unnamed writer from around the world. In 2014, both authors revealed their true identities, and began filling the digital airwaves with what could only be described as unabashed empathy on heart-wrenching topics from female ambition to body weight, romance to sibling rivalry. Two years later, he passed the incognito baton to none other than Strayed. It all started in 2008, when author Steve Almond started anonymously writing a weekly advice column called "Dear Sugar" for The Rumpus. By the time I queued up the first episode of Dear Sugars, the project already had a long and legendary history.
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