‘The Sugar Jar’ reminds us there’s plenty of sweetness to go around – Black Girl Nerds

With each new year, we set new goals and make plans to promote change in our lives. One of the ways most of us do that is by reading new books—books that help and guide us in what we want to achieve.

There’s certainly enough sweetness to go around, and in her debut book, The Sugar Jar: Create boundaries, embrace self-healing and enjoy the sweet things in life, wellness expert Yasmine Cheyenne helps readers think about their own sugar reserves. Sugar is “all the sweet parts of you – your time, your energy, your attention, your money, your expertise/education, and every part of you that can be given or exchanged.”

Paying attention to your own sugar bowl means thinking carefully about where the sugar goes and how you can better guard it to enjoy life.

While working as a victim advocate in the United States Air Force and caring for her daughter, Cheyenne “felt like sugar being taken recklessly from a jar and spilled everywhere.” She realized that her pain stemmed from her inability to create boundaries, leaving her metaphorical sugar bowl “all open” for the taking.

Cheyenne’s guiding metaphor, the sugar bowl, is immediately understandable. Some pots may have cracks. Other jars may not have lids and are therefore susceptible to anyone just helping themselves. Often you try to refill your pot through self-care, but because there is no protection, you have no control over how much of your vital life force is drained.

Cheyenne shows how a lack of boundaries can keep you from understanding and pursuing what really matters to you, and she offers plenty of questions to turn useless observations into deeper reflection and action.

Setting boundaries can mean letting go of harmful relationships or setting guidelines for the behaviors you tolerate from others, but she cautions readers not to let boundaries become “barriers” that limit themselves. For example, you may be deeply hurt in a relationship and then vow never to date again.

Several chapters are devoted to how aspects of our identity – race, class and family structure – influence our sugar bowls. In the “Black Healing” chapter, Cheyenne offers specific insights for Black readers, noting that the wellness room is often unwelcoming to us. In the chapter “Healing as the Parent and as the Child,” she acknowledges that, in a sense, parents constantly monitor their children’s sugar bowls, which can be a unique and exhausting task.