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 that 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 knick-knacks, my dishes and shoes.
Customers came and went throughout the day, but my primary companions were a group of pre-adolescent 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 non-boy 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.
“No!” he yelled and stormed off.
The next day he returned wearing a big gray hoodie. He lurked near the table where I’d set my things to sell and, when he believed I wasn’t looking, he pulled the camera case from beneath his jacket and placed it where it had been sitting the day before.
“Your thing is back,” he said to me nonchalantly a while later, pointing to the camera case as if he’d played no part in its reappearance.
“Good,” I said. “Why did you steal it?” I asked, but again he denied that he had.
It was a sunny fall day. A few of the boys sat with me on the porch steps, telling me bits about their lives. The boy who’d stolen my camera case pulled up his sleeve and flexed his arm so he could show me his bicep. He insisted in a tone more belligerent than any of the others that the cluster of fake gold chains he wore around his neck were real.
“Why’d you steal my camera case?” I asked again after a while, but he again denied that he had, though he altered his story this time to explain that he’d only taken it temporarily because he was going to his house to get his money and then he’d opted not to purchase it after all.
We talked some more about other things and soon it was just the two of us. He told me about the father he rarely saw and his much older siblings; about what kind of hot car he was going to buy the instant he turned sixteen.
“Why’d you steal my camera case?” I asked once more and this time he didn’t deny it.
Instead, he looked down at the ground and said very quietly but very clearly, “Because I was lonely.”
There are only a few times anyone has been as self-aware and nakedly honest as that boy was with me in that moment. When he said what he said I almost fell off the steps. He took my empty retro leather camera case that I’d once used as a purse because he was lonely. That’s why.
I’ve thought about that boy so many times in these last fifteen years, perhaps because when he told me what he did about himself, he told me something about myself too. I used to steal things like you, Desperate. I had the inexplicable urge to take what didn’t belong to me. I simply couldn’t resist. I took a compact of blue eye shadow from my great aunt in Philadelphia, a pretty sweater from a school friend, bars of soap in fancy wrappers from near-stranger’s bathrooms, and a figurine of a white dog with his head askew, among other things.
By the time I met the lonely boy at my yard sale, I hadn’t stolen for years, but like you, the things I’d taken haunted me. I’d meant no harm, but I had the horrible feeling that I’d caused it. And worse still, the intermittent urge to steal hadn’t entirely left me, though I’d kept myself from acting on it since I was eighteen.
I didn’t know why I stole things and I still can’t properly say, though because I was lonely seems about the rightest thing I’d ever heard.
I think you were lonely, too, sweet pea. And lonely isn’t a crime. Maybe what happened in those years you were stealing and lying is you had a mother-sized hole to fill inside of you and so you stuffed a bunch of things into it that didn’t belong to you and said a lot of things that weren’t true because on some subconscious level you thought doing so would make the hole disappear. But it didn’t. You came to understand that. You found a way to begin to heal yourself.
You need to heal better. Forgiveness is the next step, as you so acutely know. I don’t think your path to wholeness is walking backward on the trail. The people you stole from don’t need you to fess up, darling. They need you to stop tormenting yourself over all those things you took that don’t matter very much anymore. I’m not sure why you haven’t been able to do that so far, but I imagine it has something to do with the story you’ve told yourself about yourself.
The narratives we create in order to justify our actions and choices become in so many ways who we are. They are the things we say back to ourselves to explain our complicated lives. Perhaps the reason you’ve not yet been able to forgive yourself is that you’re still invested in your self-loathing. Perhaps not forgiving yourself is the flip side of your steal-this-now cycle. Would you be a better or worse person if you forgave yourself for the bad things you did? If you perpetually condemn yourself for being a liar and thief, does that make you good?
I don’t like the thief part of my narrative either. I struggled mightily with whether or not I should write about it here—it’s the first time I’ve written about it, ever. I made Mr. Sugar repeatedly tell me that it was okay, and even though he assured me it was, I’m scared. I’ve written about all sorts of other “bad things” I’ve done—promiscuous sex, drugs—but this seems worse, because unlike those other things, telling you that I used to steal things doesn’t jibe with the person I want you to perceive me as being.
But it is the person I am. And I’ve forgiven myself for that.
Years after I stopped stealing things I was sitting alone by a river. As I sat looking at the water I found myself thinking about all the things I’d taken that didn’t belong to me and before I even knew what I was doing I began picking a blade of grass for each one and then dropping it into the water. I am forgiven, I thought as I let go of the blade that stood in for the blue eye shadow. I am forgiven, I thought for each of those fancy soaps. I am forgiven, for the dog figurine and the pretty sweater, and so on until I’d let all the bad things I’d done float right on down the river and I’d said I am forgiven so many times it felt like I really was.
That doesn’t mean I never grappled with it again. Forgiveness doesn’t just sit there like a pretty boy in a bar. Forgiveness is the old fat guy you have to haul up the hill. You have to say I am forgiven again and again until it becomes the story you believe about yourself. Every last one of us has the capacity to do that, you included, Desperate. I hope you will.
I don’t know what ever came of that lonely boy at my yard sale. I hope he’s made right whatever was wrong inside of him. That camera case he stole from me was still sitting on the table when I closed down my sale. “You want this?” I asked, holding it out to him.
He took it from me and smiled.
Yours,
Sugar
41 responses
Jennifer Egan’s “A Visit from the Goon Squad” has a good shoplifting sequence – good in the sense of thoughtful, not salacious – definitely recommended.
Well, this hit me like the ol’ ton o’ bricks upside the head, as I am, like many others I’d wager, of the same cloth as Desperate. Self-loathing, loneliness, fear–all have been constant creatures inside my head, and it has taken years of therapy for me to give myself permission to forgive and move on. The desire to take what’s not mine lives within me to this day, and I’m now in my mid-60’s. It’s not a daily battle to eschew thievery, but the small demon does dance every so often. Simple rituals like your blades of grass one do help considerably, as does making the conscious choice to be grateful for all the wonders of this life. Thankfulness is a huge corrective.
That camera case ending makes me very happy.
Funny – I thought of Goon Squad, too. Sugar, this is amazing as always and reaches me at a time when I am trying to forgive myself for stealing from myself in certain ways… Thank you.
I spent the second half of my twenties fighting a massive campaign against guilt, forgiving myself (or starting to) and redefining how I related to others, especially my Mom. She had guilt artificially sequenced into her DNA as a child, and we were well down that generational path again, so that battle was hard on both of us. But we made it through.
The biggest lesson I learned (and am learning – I wonder if it ever gets to truly be a past tense concept?) was/is to differentiate between remorse and guilt. Learning to recognize an error and wanting to change a behavior or not repeat a mistake is a completely different thing from the self-flagellation that is guilt. It’s a semantic trick, I suppose, but one that made a world of difference for me.
Also, the paragraph beginning, “Years after I stopped stealing things I was sitting alone by a river,” is kind of magic.
Thanks, Sug, for sharing and for being you.
Gorgeous bravery, as always.
Thank you for teaching me every week how my heart works.
Grateful, as always.
M
Being honest never felt so fucking good. Thank you for making,for a moment, me feel a little less lonely.
Desperate, Sugar, you aren’t alone. I too had issues when I was younger, surrounded by people and feeling alone, stealing things that didn’t belong to me. I used to go with the “getting attention” rationale, but that always felt like a diagnosis, like an excuse for medicine or therapy – a red flag, not the achievement of understanding. That crossroads is a critical one and those of us, the lonely dozen, can come upon it very swiftly.
I threw myself to gravel of the latter one day, and found a few things lying about the dust, that I had lost. There was a dusty coin. Dull silver, representing money I’d stolen from a friend. I could have cared less for the value of the money. I loved the person, couldn’t bear the thought of losing someone who was so interesting to me. Stealing from them kept the damage, hurt with me, and attached me to them at the same time.
There was the broken corner of a record. Swept free, rounded at the edge, a piece off the first track, representing the script that run in my mind, that little background track that plays and repeats and like the tick of your favorite clock, passes in and out of your consciousness. My script reminded me that I was lonely. It picked up, as avalanches do, a vocabulary, a gravity or a momentum of its own. As I grew older, my expertise with torture grew, and in direct correlation with the vocabulary of my little broken record.
You stop the record, though. Every time it comes up, every time you hear it play, you stop it, and you etch a new message in the wax. “We’re lonely because Mom and Dad didn’t want us” becomes “We’re lonely, but the sun is out, and I can see it.” You write a new script every time it plays, and soon enough, your music picks you up.
The worst damage we do, we do to ourselves. It is the worst sort of wound, because unlike the wounds we receive from others, there is no history behind the wounds we inflict in the name of loneliness. We do our damage in the very moment we act contrary to our nature. Don’t bother repenting for your transgressions. You aren’t the only one that screwed up.
Take the time to understand what happened to you, remember the event that caused you to decide you were incomplete. Find the wound you received. The journey to this will introduce you to some of the most important people you will ever know. Start with the act itself. Most damage is reflective of the source.
We’ll be waiting, down the path to the right. Bring coffee. We have cream, and the perfect amount of Sugar.
This is one of my favorite Sugar’s in a while, although I like them all. It’s about forgiveness… essentially, and that is a concept I can’t grasp — self-forgiveness that is. It IS ugly, like an old man, not like a beautiful boy at all. Seems I’ve been doing a little soul searching lately myself in hopes of knowing the forgiveness I so desperately seek. But, to think it needs to come from me is, maybe, too much.
Thank you for this Sugar.
I am going to sit in my yard this afternoon, pluck blades of grass, let them go in the wind and forgive myself. And probably cry those complicated tears of healing. Love you Sugar for awakening a new emotion in me with every post. Emotions that I don’t think I have or can deal with, but yet there they are in your writing, embracing me and telling me that I am OK.
Of the many striking things about this week’s letter and response, what stands out to me most is what a gift you gave that boy, Sugar, by repeatedly asking him why he had stolen your camera case. He obviously knew you weren’t uncomfortable or threatened by his presence, and rather than assuming that he was a jerk, or shaming him, you kept tugging at that thread until he was able to tell you — and himself — the truth.
Here is the oddest thing about self-forgiveness that I have experienced. I am only speaking for myself and what I have observed but I would love to know if others have felt this.
Sometimes we refuse to forgive ourselves because we think it means letting ourselves off the hook, that it is telling ourselves that our behaviors were OK. At least, that was the case for me. When I got more able to forgive myself I was also more able to truly take responsibility for my actions and also change the behaviors I wanted to end.
Often, when I couldn’t forgive myself I couldn’t look for too long at what I had done. It was too painful and I felt so much shame. I ran away from it, averted my eyes, and pushed it into a dark corner of my mind. At some later point it returned, the actions continued and so did the emotional avoidance.
When I forgave myself the action I had taken became less like the end of the world and more like a bad choice that I could learn from. Once that behavior did not mean I was forever destined to be a horrible person but that I was someone who wanted to make different choices I could sit with what I did….without it suffocating or erasing me. And I could sit with the feelings of the person(s) I had hurt, acknowledge their emotions and apologize. Not apologize in order to get the whole thing over with as quickly as possible but apologize from the heart and sit with my intention to choose differently the next time.
That, in turn, made it easier to ask for help in changing my behavior. It no longer needed to be something that I hid or pretended wasn’t a part of me. I could show it to other people and that also helped so much.
(I am talking about anger management issues if anyone is wondering.)
So generous of you to give him the camera case. What a nice ending to this column!
Lovely… Who doesn’t need to a hear a few words about self-forgiveness? Thank you.
Sugar I like this one a lot.
Your responses often seem so perfect, worldly wisdom to aspire to, that they seem almost unreal. In the sense that it feels a privilege to read them.
This one is different and I like it even more for it, these imperfections resonated with me.
I’ve a supply of things that I am yet to forgive myself for. The lonely morning cringe.
Love T
The funny thing about this world is that it knows when the right time is to give you the answers to your questions. Reading this felt like salvation. Thank you, Sugar. I look forward to meeting you in real life and giving you a big hug, just because.
Dear Sugar–this one was like sunlight for me–it brought about an enormous epiphany about a childhood event and person in my life. “Because she was lonely”: illumination. I understand someone in my life, someone so close to me and so misunderstood, much better now. Thank you. Something that made me feel so frightened and confused has been laid to rest now. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
THIS RIGHT HERE:
“Why’d you steal my camera case?†I asked once more and this time he didn’t deny it.
Instead, he looked down at the ground and said very quietly but very clearly, “Because I was lonely.â€
DAMN. Always awesome, Sugar.
Your story is beautifully told.
Lovely column, Sugar.
“…because unlike those other things, telling you that I used to steal things doesn’t jive with the person I want you to perceive me as being.” i think you mean “jibe.”
reading sugar. crying alone in the waiting area at h&r block. dude receptionist just walked over and offered me a donut and coffee.
I’m not sure the stealing impulse comes so much from wanting to fill the hole inside you as it does from wanting to make someone else’s hole match yours. When you’re hurting, there’s a tendency to believe that you are alone in your hurt– that no one has ever felt what you are feeling, that no one else understands. Being lonely does, I think, hint at the root of that impulse to steal from other people, especially those you love. But I think it may have much more to do with evening the playing field. The idea that once that other person is missing something that belongs to them, they will be able to feel a tiny fraction of the loss that plagues you each and every day.
Sometimes I think that Sugar would be a scary therapist. Scary because she so readily opens that creaky, terrifying door behind which can be revealed one’s true self in all of its glory.
Wow.. thank you for sharing, I know that wasn’t easy. The image of people walking around with holes in themselves is such a poignant one. Someone has depicted it somewhere, but I can’t find it. The depiction I had seen not only showed people with holes in themselves filled with material things, but also filled with pets, other people, etc. It’s accurate to a fault.
And as much as I can say I feel for people (like myself) with a tortured childhood, I think we’re all better for it. More than I have sympathy for ourselves, I fear the people who have yet to learn the lessons we were graced with early.
So thank you for sharing. <3
I’m a 53 year old married woman with a 16 year old son. I am crying like a baby after reading this. I have a lot of work to do.
Thank you.
I’m glad to see others beat me to the punch to recommend GOON SQUAD. In truth, I’m not sure the insight in that novel (although I adore it) is as full or direct as the insight right here in this column. But Egan does something similar to what Sugar has done by admitting her own past thefts: she gives us a character (Sasha) with whom the reader identifies–LIKES–and in that way makes it clear that we are all so much harder on ourselves than we would be on somebody else. “Desperate” can’t forgive herself; for years Sugar couldn’t forgive herself; Sasha in GOON SQUAD has a very hard time liking herself. But those of us fortunate enough to read this column or that novel can easily see that all of these women are intensely human and not any less deserving of love for having made mistakes.
Maybe if we really love Sugar (as so many people do), we will have to love our own fucked-up past selves some too.
That kid was very fortunate to encounter someone who didn’t flinch in Sugar. I hope he’s okay somewhere.
Dear Sugar,
I find that I am afraid to read what you write. You never fail to challenge me. I am changed whether I’m laughing or crying or loving fiercely. Thank you.
Desperate — thank YOU for opening a scary door so that the rest of us could follow you through.
oodles of love,
Kim
Dear Sugar,
I love reading your answers and have noticed that when you call people “Sweetpea” and “Darling” and other terms of endearment, I feel good just reading them, even though they are addressed to another person. Then I think how good it must make that person feel, too. You are medicine for them and those words are healing.
I do that often with my students who need those words. Really, everyone needs those words – thank you for putting them in your answers. They are important!
Sue
I was twelve. Our school’s marching band was making a bus trip to Aurora, Illinois. After a couple hours drive we pulled over for a break. Thirty kids jumped out of the bus and invaded a funky truck stop. I lost myself in the crowd, filched a porno magazine and stuffed it into my waist band. I merged with all the cymbal players and tuba kids when we jammed back through the door. A hand reached out from behind the crowd and lifted me by the collar of my coat. At that moment,with my feet dangling in the air,I was turned around to face the store’s proprietor. When that hand grabbed my collar an icicle of pure terror stabbed through my guts. I was as terrified as I’ve ever been in my life.
I wasn’t cured of stealing. That took a little longer.
Do something concrete (non-symbolic) to help you forgive yourself. For example, calculate the value of all of the items you took and donate that amount to a worthwhile charity – one that speaks to you personally. Then take the items you took (if you still have them) and give them to your local thrift shop (or leave them anonymously in your friend’s homes in out of the way places to be found later). As regards the lying – make a decision to be truthful even in areas that are difficult or embarassing (not direct confessions of past sins, but truth telling from this point on). The actions will give something to refer to mentally when the urge to self-flagellate takes over.
“Forgiveness doesn’t just sit there like a pretty boy in a bar. Forgiveness is the old fat guy you have to haul up the hill. You have to say I am forgiven again and again until it becomes the story you believe about yourself.”
This is one of the most powerful set of remarks about forgiveness I have ever read. I want to re-write my own story, because I’ve only ever met the pretty boy in the bar and then wonder why it feels like he always breaks my heart. I printed this paragraph out and stuck it above my desk. Thank you, Sugar, for this and for everything.
Sugar, there is so much truth in your words and the comments below them that I come here between new posts just to find serenity, to return to myself.
Thank you always!
I also had a stealing issue when i was a kid, i think i had a problem with attachment and just wanted to keep something forever. The worst thing i ever stole was a sapphire engagement ring
(i just wanted to add that it was returned!!)
Sugar –
I had never read your column (or this site, to be honest), until I followed a link to this particular column. I am writing to tell you, “Thank You.” A few years ago I was struggling through a difficult period in my life (of which loneliness was a major part), and as a result I treated some good friends of mine very badly. I lost those friendships. I have spent years not forgiving myself for my actions, in a dark form of self-loathing. Reading your column has given me inspiration to do exactly as you ask, and start the process of forgiving myself. I won’t forget how I acted, because my actions came from the darkest points of my self, but I can now think of a better way to live by improving my behavior and not acting that way from now on, though as you have indicated forgiving myself may be a difficult struggle. So, again, I thank you.
It’s all well and good to forgive yourself, but it takes another level of courage altogether to look someone else in the eye and apologize for wrong-doing. “Desperate” says that if the people she wronged knew what she had done, then they wouldn’t love her anymore. That’s a pretty heavy burden to carry around. We all have stuff that we don’t want to own up to (me included), but surely some of those relationships can stand a little more honesty.
“I was lonely.” So precious!! What a precious little boy!!
Dear Desperate-
Your friends already know, and they still love you. In spite of your “grand stories” or because of them, they still love you. In spite of your stealing, or because they know about it and understand it (and take precautions that you don’t know about to prevent the worst of it), they still love you. But don’t eat yourself up about it, because they already know.
I had a friend in high school who was a compulsive liar. We all knew it, but she made up the craziest stories and it was just so much fun to see what she’d think up next. We got really good at “believing” her, too. I think she really thought we didn’t know, and that we’d hate her if we found out.
One time, a group of friends outside of out circle (the “cool” bastards) made up a really mean scenario where they “caught” her in a lie, because they set her up. She moved schools pretty soon after that. I wish they hadn’t done it, because I really enjoyed having her around.
~Ariel
This is the first one you wrote that made me cry, Sugar. I’d forgotten about a time in my childhood when I stole. The specificity of your descriptions of what you stole brought me back to the hungry, near-erotic, mournful relationship with the tiny things I stole- a classmate’s Chinese coins, a rabbit’s foot, an interesting looking pack of gum, a tube of lipstick from an outdoor vendor. Thank you for opening that part of me to light and tears.
If its any consolation, if anyone in my life told me they stole something from me years ago, i really couldn’t be bothered. its eating you up more than its damaging them; forgive yourself and move on.
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