Eat Pray Love Made Me Do It (15 page)

—

Robin Murphy

I
n May 2010, I found myself on the bathroom floor, literally and figuratively. Bereft and bewildered, my soul reached to the Divine for help. The Divine answered me with a book called
Eat Pray Love
.

After the dissolution of my romantic dreams, I had taken to my bed like a fictional Victorian woman. And I began to read this book where a wonderful friend named Liz shared her story. As if we were there together with a glass of wine, she comforted and encouraged me. Her emotional experiences echoed mine up until the point she went from wallowing to wandering. I was inspired. That would be my answer: I could wander as well.

So I began to plan the Tour de Fifty. In honor of my fiftieth birthday, I would have an adventure of my own. I couldn't manage a European trip like Liz, but the following summer I would travel across the United States, by myself, in my faithful PT
Cruiser, Ruby. I would fix the broken pieces of my soul and decide, as all good bathroom floor club members know, What's next?

I had some trepidation about traveling by myself, but mostly I was excited. After raising four children, teaching hundreds more and caregiving for a chronically ill spouse, what might it be like to do only what I wanted to do? To eat when I wanted and what I wanted? To stop when I wanted for the reasons only I wanted? To see the things that interested only me? Would I even know what I, and only I, wanted? It was profound to think about.

I also felt guilty for leaving my youngest child alone with her father for an entire summer but fought through that feeling because I was desperate for change and growth. I may have been running from my pain but I knew that if I didn't run, I would die.

The reactions I received when I announced my plan varied. Some thought I was crazy for being a woman alone on the road. Others were proud and supportive. I was told I was “brave” and “courageous” and “strong,” and I owned those words as part of my new identity. I prepared and packed but chose to leave much of the trip to chance, embracing the motto, “It's not the destination, but the journey.”

During my first two weeks on the road, I traveled from Kansas City through Memphis, Tennessee, to Asheville, North Carolina, and then on to Virginia Beach. I had never seen that part of the country and was shocked when I fell in love with the Great Smoky Mountains. It was like coming home to a place I had never been before. As I drove through those spectacular
mountains, I felt my heart crack open. I rolled down the windows and let the wind fly through my hair, my bare feet on the pedals and music loud as can be. I had never felt this free in my life.

I camped alone by Grandfather Mountain and hiked to the top in a raging thunderstorm. I saw the full moon rise above the Smokies. I ate local food and drank local beer and talked to locals. I visited beautiful friends and inspiring historic sites and the magnificent ocean. I listened to music and myself. I cried and laughed and learned.

I kept a blog of the trip, and this was part of the first entry: “What I am most happy with so far is my ability to really be in the moment. To be aware of the beauty around me and feel my soul settle into my body and begin to learn to slow down and stay there and be present. That is the first gift of this journey.”

•   •   •

A
fter leaving the Smokies, I drove through Kentucky, Maryland, Delaware, New Jersey and New York. Along the way, I accumulated a renewed sense of wonder, some radical fearlessness and strong personal boundaries. And I discovered that the best way I could care for my sacred self was to travel as much as possible.

Now, every summer I travel on my own. I've driven to Montana, Wyoming, Washington, Oregon, Idaho, California, Utah, Colorado. I've returned again to the East Coast. I've gone north to Chicago and south to Austin, all on my own with my sturdy Ruby. I've discovered house-sitting is a great way to explore a particular area in a more long-term fashion and just returned from three weeks in a tree house hidden in the Tennessee
mountains, living by streams and lakes and waterfalls. Today I booked my travel plans to England, Scotland and Wales.

My life is now a prayer of gratitude. I know that no matter what happens, Nature is always there, supporting and inspiring me, and when I return to Her, I find the Divine. Reading Liz's story changed my story.

—

Kitty Taylor

E
lizabeth Gilbert didn't want to be married anymore.

Neither did I.

Between 2006 and 2007, I started
Eat Pray Love
four different times. I couldn't make it through sixteen pages without tears; sometimes it was only ten. I was married and miserable, made more miserable by being twenty-six and barely one year into vows I had written.

I promise to share my life with you,

And to honor your life as my own.

But I hid in fear and sadness.

Knowing your kind heart, I will follow you.

And believing in our marriage, I will grow with you.

But we did not partner as husband and wife.

Trusting you as you are,

I will love you always.

But he had an addiction and I had an affair, though both are now behind us.

•   •   •

P
et sitting became my refuge during this time. Friends taking long weekend getaways and others attending academic conferences gave me the safe space to be alone and honest with myself and my furry company about where I was and where I wasn't.

One year after first hinting at my husband about my uncertainty over our marriage, I was still married and still struggling between truth and expectation. Thankfully, I had been gifted an entire glorious week in which I headed to someone else's home after work and slept alongside dogs that did not link me with another person the way our Lucy did. A curvy and joyful chocolate Labrador retriever, she stole our hearts when my husband and I moved into our first shared space. She had been the community dog, cared for by everyone on our road, but declared herself ours when she jumped into our truck as we packed for vacation. She moved with us to the cabin on the mountain where we were engaged and joined us on our honeymoon when we traveled to the North Carolina coast in perfect October weather. She loved the sand and feared the waves. She moved with us again to the home on the hill that I would eventually leave and
where she would stay. She loved vanilla ice cream, taking up space on the couch and being scratched behind her ears.

Happy moments were the hardest to reconcile.

It was that one whole week alone and my first full reading of “one woman's search for everything” that invited me to fully grieve the truth of my marriage. I had believed that my heartache equaled doubt, that my tears meant reconsideration. When I finally made it to
attraversiamo
, I understood, gratefully, that just because a decision made me sad did not mean it was the wrong decision.

I could be sad.

I SHOULD be sad.

I was in this, too.

Sitting on the porch of that refuge with the book in one hand and a telephone in the other, I said it. Out loud. To him.

“I can't do this anymore. I want a divorce.”

And I cried for the sadness as much as I cried for the relief.

Another year went by. I experienced the joy of living alone for the first time while also falling deeply in love with Eve. Genesis Eve. Mother of all the Living Eve. Paradise Lost Eve. Lover Eve. Sister Eve. My Eve. She, too, had made a decision that was both painful and liberating. I was thankful for her willingness to defy a rule for experience, for story, for possibility.

I packed as much of my life as I could fit into a 2001 Chevrolet Tracker and moved to Nashville, Tennessee, where I knew no one, to pursue the Master of Theological Studies program at Vanderbilt Divinity School. For three months, I slept on an air mattress, and for the first few weeks, I often cried myself to sleep. I made my two closest friends over cigarettes. One was a smoker; the other was kind enough to step away from
orientation with me while I puffed apart from the crowd. I spent two years talking about religion and spirituality over bagels and coffee or cheeseburgers and red wine. I studied theology and people among Christian pastors-in-the-making, agnostic seekers of social justice, a Muslim drawn to chaplaincy and a vegan Jew. I converted to Catholicism, clinging to the hope that it, somehow, would be the fix to my on-again, off-again volatile and emotionally destructive relationship with the man who had shared my extramarital affair. As a Catholic woman, I wondered and wrote about Eve and Mary as mothers connected by the loss of a child. I served as a chaplain intern for children and adults at Vanderbilt during the same semester that I took one course on HaShoah, the Holocaust, and another titled “Death and Dying,” where I sat beside two close friends who were falling in love. Their marriage is now recognized in all fifty states. I became an ally.

I studied biblical Hebrew and learned to say “
Adonai
” when a text read the name of God too sacred to be spoken by humans.

Adonai
, a prayer in itself.

Add on I.

Another way of saying, “Please help.”

I did a lot of that, too.

Almost anyone who goes through divinity school will tell you that it is simultaneously the best of times and the worst of times, a tale of the city where you begin to seriously doubt anything you've ever believed because you actually begin to study it, and a tale of the eternal city where, if it exists, you will share in joy among people from every tradition and no tradition because what is after this life is big enough for everything. Or maybe it's the tale of three cities, or four or five depending on your karma,
and you'll come back to a new city, in a new form, because you're still learning. No one actually knows.

In the midst of this cycle of doubt and belief, something that I was coming to know quite intimately, I surrendered to Communion because it was beautiful, but I longed to take in the bread and wine from a table blessed by a woman. There is no body so broken as that which, in its essence, bleeds. And of course, that blessing is impossible in Roman Catholicism, which refuses to welcome women into the priesthood even as it exalts Mother Mary—or at least a version of her.

So I served it myself. I served Communion. A year after graduation, I was working as a full-time chaplain resident in a hospital run by a Catholic health care company, and every other Sunday I spent a few minutes preparing Styrofoam-esque wafers and cafeteria grape juice and praying over nourishment that would serve patients and families and nurses and techs who were tired and seeking comfort. I thanked anyone or anything who might be listening for giving us a place to gather, so we could embrace a short and sacred moment of peace. In a building where people died every day, we needed it more than we needed tradition.

I certainly needed it. When I responded to my first code blue on my first weekend alone and watched a doctor tell a man that his wife's heart just couldn't take it anymore, I needed it. When I held and rocked and cooed over a stillborn baby, I needed it. When I met a newly diagnosed, terminally ill man whose wedding plans had to be moved to the hospital chapel, I needed it. When I admitted to my chaplain peers that I was as close as I'd ever been to being hit by a man, I needed it. When I built a relationship with one long-term patient carrying a boy and a girl in
her womb and housed in the high-risk pregnancy ward, I needed it. When I received the emergency page that one of her newborn twins was dying, I needed it. When I was asked to speak at the funeral, I needed it. When I realized that speaking meant leading the funeral home and graveside services, I needed it.

I needed to exchange the rules, the expectations, the marriage, for everything.

I still do.

•   •   •

T
he last thing I did to surprise myself was sign up for six weeks of burlesque classes. In 2014, just two months before I left (or knew that I was leaving) Nashville and four months after the heartbreak that sparked my deepest and most frightening depression, I learned the first pieces of shimmies and shakes and watched my body move. Along with my Delinquent Debutantes sisters, I danced in front of a full-length mirror and found myself loving the way the curves of my body swayed in rhythm. I looked at myself as a creation capable of embracing who I was and where I was going. In those rare and unguarded moments, I recognized myself as a friend.

Eight years after my first full reading of
Eat Pray Love
, I pick it up annually to relive the dog-eared pages and reflect on new insights. I have eaten. I have prayed. I am working on love.

Let's cross over.

—

Danielle Rhinehart

I
picked up Elizabeth Gilbert's memoir in the summer of 2008 or, as I like to call it, “the dark time.” And this wasn't just any old dark. It was the kind of dark that your eyes adjust to, so you don't even think it's that bad, until something (in my case,
Eat Pray Love
) slices into your field of vision like a sliver of sunlight through blackout curtains and you realize how much things need to change.

Once flagged as a “gifted and talented” kid, I was now twenty-six years old, bored and unmotivated, dropping in and out of junior colleges, bouncing from one dead-end job to another, and 90 percent sure I never really had all that potential people used to go on about when I was younger. I'd been through some stuff, like anybody, and I hadn't recovered very well. Sure, I was keeping up appearances, but I wasn't making wise choices or surrounding myself with healthy people, and I was dangerously
close to accepting a life far less wonderful than the one I deserved.

When I began reading
Eat Pray Love
, I was sitting in my dingy apartment, which was in a bad neighborhood and wedged among the airport, the train depot and a major freeway. It wasn't the best place to live—perhaps the most blazing sign of this was the fact that it was literally on Elm Street—but I received free rent in exchange for working as the building's property manager (quite a deal in Silicon Valley) and, more important, I didn't have to keep crashing with my parents, which had become the norm as I bounced among apartments and relationships.

So for about a year I juggled my “most fabulous landlady in the ghetto” duties, a full-time receptionist gig to pay the bills (the property manager position only covered the rent), some awful online university courses and a deep case of denial. As is often the case with wandering souls in their twenties, I was looking for my life's purpose in the bottom of bottles, which I often drank in dark music venues, with people who didn't respect me or my potential. A winning strategy, obviously, and it was going about as well as you'd expect.

Thankfully, there are some wonderful people in my life, who tend to give me piles of books on special occasions, which thrills my inner bookworm, and I adore them for it. To this day, not one of them has taken credit for gifting me this particular book. They all swear they have no memory of buying it. I have no idea how it wound up in my apartment. It simply appeared at exactly the time that I needed it.

I read the first ten pages of Elizabeth Gilbert's journey toward self-discovery and heard my own voice echoing back at me.
I began shouting out loud in amazement as she would perfectly, wittily, beautifully describe something I felt deep in my gut. I texted excerpts to my best friend, Katie, who wrote back with the same enthusiastic recognition of this kindred spirit. (Where had she been all our lives?) I spent at least a dozen nights reading and crying in my lonely apartment, eager to get to the next “bead.” I bought a journal and wrote, “I love you and I will never leave you” on the first page.

Eat Pray Love
told me I was capable of making the drastic changes that would lead me to a better life.
Eat Pray Love
reminded me that I
deserved
a good life. That I could embrace joy; accept my body as a house for my spirit, not an advertisement for my worth; find peace in solitude, and find the strength to accomplish all of the above.

In the year that followed, much like Liz, I lost everything. The day after returning from another round of bridesmaid duty, I was laid off from my receptionist job. It was the first time I'd ever been “let go,” and I know they were being diplomatic by calling it a layoff. I was a disaster, and I'm sure I wasn't hiding it as well as I thought. Then came more heartbreak, along with the depression that tends to follow unemployment wherever she goes. Four months later, I was laid off again, this time from my property manager job. This meant I was out of an apartment.

Suddenly I was back in my parents' house, sleeping in my childhood bedroom, starting over, again.

I was so tired of being limited in my job opportunities (read: receptionist) simply because I never finished college. But opening up my career options meant facing the demon I had been avoiding for years: my dyslexia. I was only four credits away from an associate's degree, but those credits had to be math
credits, and unfortunately, my type of dyslexia, dyscalculia, is numeric.

On many occasions in my junior college stints, I would enroll in the math courses necessary for university admission, hoping to squeak by with a C- and get it over with, but I dropped or failed them every single time. My shame was keeping me from doing what was necessary: enrolling in an entry-level course. Going back to basics.

Then I thought of Liz and how she bravely started from scratch, trusting that the universe would replenish her funds and her life, just as Ketut predicted. So I swallowed my pride and enrolled in remedial algebra. I worked my tail off, and, to my own amazement, I aced it. By June 2010, I had earned my AA and was accepted as an upper-division transfer student at all four of the California State universities to which I applied. I accepted the offer from San Francisco State the moment it landed in my inbox. Given the state of my bank account, I knew paying for housing in such a big, expensive city was probably out of the question, and I'd likely have to spend many hours commuting to class while still living with my parents, but I also knew I had to go. Without even consciously realizing what I was doing, I set the wheels in motion that would lead to a complete life-overhaul.

The day before classes started, I went in to San Francisco to have lunch with my long-lost friend Sam who had been through a transformation of his own. I told him that I was planning to commute to school, and when he asked why, I explained that (for a handful of pathetic reasons) I just couldn't move. The truth was, I was scared of failing, and he could see right through me. He looked at me skeptically, grabbed my napkin off the table and, with a click of the mechanical pencil from his pocket,
proceeded to analyze my financial aid package, finding just enough money for rent,
if
I could find a good deal. He showed me it was ridiculous to do anything else. He was right. I packed my bags and moved to San Francisco.

Miraculously, I found an affordable apartment right across the street from campus. My first class at San Francisco State made me giddy; I suddenly remembered how much I love to learn. I stayed in most nights, did my homework, found a part-time job, finally quit smoking and got straight As for the first time since before my troubled teenage years. I stopped going back to the safe bosom of my tiny hometown every weekend, even though it meant some of my friendships wouldn't survive the changes I was making, and let my old life dissolve into thin air behind me. It was painful but liberating.

Of course, no story would be complete without a little romance, and just like in the movies, I fell in love with that wonderful friend who wasn't afraid to call me out on my excuses and fear. Miraculously, he loved me back. In May 2015, I graduated with a master's degree in communication studies, my family, friends and wonderful Sam by my side. Life was better and brighter than I would have believed possible only a handful of years before, and I still pinch myself occasionally to be sure it's real.

When I think about the awful way I lost sight of myself and how I had to burn everything down in order to rebuild my life, I can't help but wonder if Elizabeth Gilbert handed me the matches.
Eat Pray Love
taught me how to devour joy, become devoted to myself and fall in love with growth. I am so grateful.