Eat Pray Love Made Me Do It (10 page)

—

Nicole Massaro

I
tapped the button to buy the
Eat Pray Love
audiobook and left my phone on the kitchen counter while it downloaded. I knew I would need a positive distraction very soon. With a heavy heart, I walked into the next room and told my partner of five years that I was leaving for good. I'd been hoping that he would catch up with me one day and help me live out all my aspirations, but in my heart, I knew he wasn't that guy. So did he, really. We'd been best friends, inseparable for years, but that was where it ended. We cried together for a long time. Finally, I pulled out of the driveway, car already packed, and pressed Play. Liz Gilbert started talking as I began my journey to a new life in a new city, alone.

It felt like an ocean existed between my new home and everyone I had decided to leave behind. I was in a strange place with a broken heart, and, in
Eat Pray Love
, so was Liz. Listening to her tell her story meant that someone was there in spirit
sharing my thoughts and feelings (and bread and cheese). By the time I finished the book, I knew great things were waiting for me if I only just reached for them.

Thanks to
Eat Pray Love
, I stopped saying no. Saying yes meant opening myself up to people and possibilities. At first, going outside my comfort zone was terrifying. My ego was bruised a time or two. Mostly, though, there was a beautiful payoff in the form of a great new friend or a challenge to meet.

So, I learned to let myself be a beginner. I started running, eventually finishing two half marathons, and then allowed myself to stop running when I grew tired of it. I tried yoga, grew to love it, and now regularly practice in ninety-degree rooms. I kayaked (badly), camped, hiked and explored. I crocheted. I'm learning to teach English as a foreign language.

What's more, I learned to let myself be a stranger at home and abroad. I traveled to places I'd never been, jumped from bridges and swam in clear oceans. I went to parties in town where I didn't know anyone. I fell in love.

I allowed myself to indulge in things that interested me and brought me joy, instead of running in place waiting for something amazing to happen. And, wouldn't you know, while I was actually
living
my life, amazing things happened!

These days, I like to think of
Eat Pray Love
as a door that opened at just the right time, inviting and inspiring me to discover my true self. It's a journey that takes courage (and sometimes bread and cheese), and it probably never ends, but it is infinitely rewarding.

—

Regan Spencer

E
at Pray Love
taught me how to live when I most wanted to die. It helped save my life.

A year ago, I was self-destructing, crumbling in the clutches of anorexia and addiction. To make matters worse, I was in such denial I couldn't even recognize all the ways my life was imploding. I was twenty-four and exhausted from propping up a facade that would convince myself and everyone else I was fine. I wasn't fine. Anorexia is a compulsive, addictive disorder in which you impose rigid rules about food and your body in order to feel in control, and—this is key—you cannot stop on your own.

A week before my twenty-fifth birthday, on my way to my job that I hated, that fact hit me like a brick wall: I couldn't stop my behavior. No matter how hard I tried (and I had tried); no matter how many different doctors and therapists I saw; no matter who loved me (and I had a good man, my partner of five years,
waiting for me at home), I couldn't stop starving myself. What's more, I realized I had been getting high almost daily for years to ignore this fact. And I wasn't just physically starved; I could suddenly feel in my heart and soul the devastating, petrifying emptiness I had been running from.

Eat Pray Love
found its way into my life just before this. I say “found its way” because I really didn't seek it out; in fact, I was avoiding it. I was cynical, rebellious and arrogant. I hated trends, and when I first heard about the book's bestseller status and movie deal, I wrote it off as a girly fad. One night at a friend's apartment, someone put the movie on. Despite my determination to hate it, Elizabeth's story spoke to something deep inside me. Her speech about being the “permeable membrane” shook me to my core. I couldn't get it out of my head. I had a sneaky feeling this book could change my life, but I was too high-and-mighty to buy it. In true addict fashion, I secretly found the audiobook online, and I was hooked.

Eating disorders are addictive processes, though this was never mentioned to me during my first attempt at recovery three years ago. I had just admitted for the first time that I had a problem, and I found a program that I thought would address it. This would have been great, except the program only addressed my eating habits and body image issues; my history of pills, pot and partying were barely mentioned. After the allotted ten weeks at the center, I had gained a few pounds but still had all the same behaviors—except now I was more aware of them, which meant I felt crazier than ever. I couldn't go back to the denial I clung to during my adolescence, when I refused to even consider that anorexia could be the cause of my low body weight and paralyzing fear of food, but I had no idea how to move forward
with this knowledge. I was stuck, hating my life, feeling inept at my job and miserable in my long-term relationship. I heard all that in
Eat Pray Love
; I heard about my own life as I listened to Elizabeth's words. I heard about my love of school, writing, yoga, meditation, men. I even heard about my trip to Russia when I was sixteen!

I started having an intense urge to travel, and somehow I knew that this wasn't just about going on some trip. I needed to get out of my life and out of myself. I needed to change. But that was easier said than done. As unhappy as I was, I was also committed to the life I was living, and I didn't want to give it up.

My boyfriend and I had recently moved to a cute mountain home, adopted a dog and told ourselves our life was perfect, even though the reality was far from it. I was baffled and terrified; I would wake up hysterical, wanting to die; stare at the refrigerator, shaking with fear; and hide in my office, sobbing uncontrollably. I would go to bed vowing that I wouldn't get high tomorrow, and soon after waking, I'd find myself sitting with my pipe in my hand and my heart on the floor. But that's addiction for you.

During this time, I clung to
Eat Pray Love
like a life preserver. I didn't know what else to do, so I just started trying things in the book, like meditating with the Gurugita. I began praying to a God that Elizabeth helped me wrap my head around. Every day, I stared at the Buddhist saying posted on my wall, “When the student is ready, the teacher will appear,” and thought, “Okay, God, I'm ready. I don't know what I need, but I know I need it.”

Then, I collapsed. Denial of my situation had become harder and harder, and I began to see I wasn't the only one hurt by my
self-destruction. My boyfriend was bewildered and heartbroken; he wanted to help but was as powerless as I was over my addiction. We loved each other deeply, but my addiction had left enormous pain in its wake. I had to leave so we could both heal ourselves. I still didn't know how to move forward. I just knew I was
done
with life as it was. I was emotionally, spiritually and physically spent. That's when I sat down in the middle of the road, just like Elizabeth, and said, “I cannot go any farther. I need help.”

A week later, my very own copy of
Eat Pray Love
in hand (yes, I finally went out and bought the book), I was on my way to a second try at rehab. It was a veritable sanctuary in the woods on Vancouver Island in Canada, and I spent several months there. Intellectually, I chose that particular program because it treats eating disorders and substance addiction as a singular, multifaceted disease, which somehow I knew I needed. Emotionally and spiritually, I was drawn to the island, the trees and the kind nature of Canadians. Having grown up just below the border of British Columbia, I spent a lot of time on the island as a child. Entering treatment there felt like coming home.

When I first arrived, the center took all of my personal effects besides clothing. After about two months, I had begun to open up, was making progress and had integrated into my recovery some of the spiritual tools I had learned from
Eat Pray Love
. I asked to have my book back, and when it was returned to me, I opened to where I left off on the plane—Elizabeth's description of the
kundalini shakti
.

The timing was miraculous. The very next day I was to participate in a sweat lodge—a cleansing and rebirthing fire ceremony. After years of practicing yoga, I vaguely understood the
kundalini shakti
as an enlightening energy that rises up through the spine, depicted by blue light in the third eye; Elizabeth describes how it burns away everything standing between the self and the divine.

During the ceremony, with Elizabeth's words in my head, I prayed harder than I even believed possible and entered a trance, aware only of a blue light in my mind's eye and a feeling of love that enveloped all my cells. When I stepped out of the lodge four hours later, I felt like a phoenix rising from the ashes: the legacy of anorexia, addiction and anguish that I had been shouldering had burned up and fallen away. I was ready for a new beginning.

For most of my life, I was incapable of feeding myself, had no real notion of a higher power and operated entirely from a place of ego and fear. Elizabeth's story taught me that in order to radically change my life, I had to leave everything familiar behind. I had to face and forgive the darkest parts of me. I had to cross over. Elizabeth Gilbert's courage made me brave enough to leave my home, job, partner and country behind to save my life and go to rehab, where I literally learned how to eat, pray and love.

Today, I'm thriving. I celebrated one year of being clean and sober shortly before my twenty-sixth birthday, surrounded by extraordinary love and friendship. I'm learning to love myself, with the help of other recovering addicts, alcoholics and anorexics, and every day I gain a little more freedom from the chains of anorexia. I know I'm one of the lucky ones. I also know I have a lifetime of work ahead of me to stay on this path, and I'm grateful to the universe every day for the opportunity to do just that.

Thank God—and
Eat Pray Love
—for that.

—

Chelsey Everest

W
hen I was growing up, my mother had a special, go-to piece of advice for me, one that she rarely suggested to my sisters because with them, it never worked. As an answer to almost all of my anxieties, she told me to “write it down.”

“Write it down” cured high-pitched lunchroom fights with girls at school and assuaged my father's temper after he'd sent me to my room. It quieted me down when I was bored and performing improv for my mother's forced entertainment in the middle of a grocery store aisle.

I would write whatever served my purpose at the time: a letter, a journal entry, a short story, a prayer. I wrote and illustrated my first book when I was five, a completely plagiarized, crayon version of Eric Carle's
A House for Hermit Crab.

There wasn't much that I couldn't figure out on paper until I turned nineteen and my doctor told me that I was “mildly
depressed.” I wasn't certain how one measured the extremity of depression or how many degrees separated mildly depressed from clinically depressed from certifiably insane, but I did know that what I'd been feeling was hardly mild. For about a year, I'd found life to be pretty much insufferable. There had been definite factors: I'd just left for college at Boston University, about two hours south of my hometown in southern Maine, and the homesickness was crippling me. The city campus sprawled across the historic Back Bay, bumping up against the Charles River where the crew teams rowed in the fall and spring, and people were everywhere, clambering off the T or filling the crosswalks of Commonwealth Ave. I barely noticed. I had three roommates sharing my penthouse dorm on the eighteenth floor of Warren Towers, overlooking Fenway's Green Monster and the backed-up traffic on the Mass Pike. Every minute I was surrounded by people, constantly elbow-to-elbow with a hundred strangers, and I'd never felt so alone.

There was also the matter of a cheating high school boyfriend who, shortly after I left, started sleeping with a girl my younger sister knew. She was short and spray-tanned and lied when I messaged her from Boston to ask if they'd been fooling around. After that, every girl looked like a liar. Walking to my eight a.m. lectures, I'd scoff at the girls in high heels, their hair and makeup so perfect that it looked like an entire team had flown in to prep them for class while I donned the same pair of bookstore sweatpants I'd been wearing all week.

I willed my jealousy into loathing, my insecurity into spite. I developed a peculiar brand of hypochondria where a common cold quickly escalated to AIDS; I experienced most of my panic attacks on the elevator up to the eighteenth floor. My anxiety
approached in sharply increasing waves, growing to sound-crushing breakers in the matter of a minute. It was a high-pitched wail, a banshee in a bloodstained nightgown with the lungs of a siren.

My depression was different. It was monotone; a sad little crumple of dirty laundry with a face made out of denim pockets. When I tried to explain my depression to my parents, I could never muster the intensity to convey exactly how deep I'd sunk inside of myself. To them, it just didn't make sense. It wasn't like I'd experienced some trauma as a child; there was no repressed memory with an uncle or a babysitter, no younger me witnessing a horrific act of violence that robbed me of my older self's happiness. My life had been sunshine and barbecues, two little sisters who followed me everywhere. There were no issues that couldn't be solved by writing it down. But there was no writing down depression. The sickness infected my words, left me sounding wounded and numb. Depression became my ball and chain. All I could do was limp along.

So when my doctor told me I was depressed, I decided it was time to take action. I asked her to prescribe me medication. I didn't tell my mother at first; I knew she'd get a wrinkle in her forehead and ask me if I knew the side effects, the risk of dependency, the chance that I'd begin ideating suicide or lose my sense of humor or become indifferent to life altogether. It wasn't worth explaining that all of those thoughts had already surfaced on their own. All I wanted were answers; I wanted the misery to be chemical. I wanted medicine to prove that sadness went away.

That summer, after transferring back home to my state school and filling my first prescription of Paxil, I came upon Elizabeth Gilbert's
Eat Pray Love
while on a shopping trip with my mom.
“Medicating the symptom of any illness without exploring its root cause is just a classically hare-brained Western way to think that anyone could truly get better,” Gilbert wrote, considering in hindsight her choice to take antidepressants. She'd experienced a nasty divorce, followed by an even more intense affair, and felt herself slipping away from the world in the same slow-motion way that a book falls out of your hands in the moments before you nod off. I knew, because I was feeling that, too. Gilbert sought help in a number of different places and expressed her belief that medication should always be paired with therapy. I loved the idea of therapy, but with a new school only a couple months away, I decided to wait until I could see someone regularly on campus. In the meantime, I read.

Delving into Gilbert's memoir depressurized my mind; it provided me with sweet relief from the trappings of an anxious heart. I'd waitress in the mornings at a diner on the harbor and spend the afternoons dozing on my mother's porch swing, reading
Eat Pray Love
until the Maine mosquitoes reminded me to go inside. Gilbert's search for wellness became my search for wellness, and by immersing myself in her journey, I started to consider the root causes of my depression. I followed her to Italy and allowed myself to feel full and content even as anxiety replaced my appetite; I joined her in India and copied Buddhist mantras onto Post-its that covered the wall above my bed; and I landed with her in Indonesia and finally, for the first time in a year, allowed myself to wonder about love and why it hurts women so deeply. Scraps of napkin and dozens of dog-eared corners fattened my paperback until it was wider than its binding. I would pore over that book with an intent patience until, hours later, I'd look up from the swing and the sky would be tie-dyed
purple, my heart beating slowly and my breath coming steadily. This, I know now, was the closest I'd ever come to actually meditating.

After that summer, whenever I found myself in need of guidance, I'd turn time and again to women's memoirs. Slowly I began to see patterns in the way that these writers, and women everywhere, dealt with issues of mental health and sexuality. I would think back on the girls from the lunchroom and the girls from BU in their high heels, and I'd feel a prickling along my arms, a hotness in my chest. In those moments, I felt—was it possible?—compassion. It took a few years (and still, it's rarely easy), but eventually I got to a place where I could begin, again, to write it down. When I turned twenty-five, I enrolled in an MFA program and knew before arriving to my first residency that I would study creative nonfiction and memoir. Now, I facilitate a writing workshop for women. We focus specifically on what has silenced us: what in our lives has left us voiceless, monotone, shrieking or quiet. I urge them to read books by women who have experienced their same pain and come out the other side. I remind them that we all share in suffering. And when one of the writers asks me how I found the courage to write my own difficult stories down, I tell her right away:
Eat Pray Love
made me do it.