Eat Pray Love Made Me Do It (16 page)

—

Elizabeth Veras Holland

I
was introduced to
Eat Pray Love
a little more than two years ago. I guess you could say I was a late bloomer. I was deep in grief after losing my mother and trying to get used to life without her. I kept reaching out for people who weren't there. I needed something or someone. I needed a lot of things I did not have.
Eat Pray Love
fell into my lap at the perfect time, a gift from my Higher Power to tell me I'm not alone.

My mother emigrated from the small Central American country of Guatemala to San Francisco, where she met my father on a bus. He asked her how she was doing, and she looked at him with a puzzled expression. He realized that she did not speak a word of English and so used his broken Spanish to communicate. A sweet but short marriage followed.

My dad was and is a roamer at heart and just couldn't settle into family life the way my mother needed. She came to the
United States in search of stability and a home. He eventually moved out, and I was raised by my mother and my two older half sisters. It was a Hispanic household, but you probably wouldn't guess that by looking at me. I'm very pale with green eyes and dark blond hair. I look like an all-American girl, and that made it hard for me to identify as a Latina—but I also didn't identify with being completely American. I'm bicultural, and I struggled with what that meant every single day. Who was I supposed to be? How was I supposed to carry myself in the world?

Men were always the easiest way to solve my identity crisis. If I could be sexy and attractive to a man, then that sexiness could be my identity. It didn't hurt that any attention was a confidence booster—a two-for-one deal! Except it wasn't. Because without a guy to validate me, I was right back to not knowing who I was. Whenever I broke up with someone (or got dumped), I had to have someone else ready to go. My mother would shake her head and tell me to give it a rest, but I just couldn't.

I was lucky to have a mother who was always there for me, day in and day out. I spent so much time pushing her away that I didn't realize how much I internalized her presence. She would shake her head and scold me for dating so much but was still there to wipe away my tears when the heartbreak inevitably came. Then one day I met someone who I fell especially hard for, who seemed to understand me in a way no one else ever had. I put all my faith into our relationship and decided to move to a new city with this love of my life, where I'd start college. It would be perfect.

And it was. Until one Friday, halfway through college, when I received a phone call from my sister who was spending time in
Guatemala City with my mother. A benign tumor had been discovered on my mother's brain. The fact that it was benign didn't give me any comfort. I heard the word
tumor
, and a numbness enveloped me. I couldn't pray, I couldn't do anything. I just had to wait.

That same weekend, she went into surgery to have the tumor removed. There were complications following the operation, and she passed away suddenly. Life changed in a matter of hours. How did it happen so fast? Only a few days ago, I had been studying for exams and preoccupied with relationship drama. How was I supposed to deal with the loss of my mother? I couldn't even begin to answer that question.

Instead, I self-destructed. I left my relationship (and college) so I could party and live the single life back in San Francisco. I used drugs to feel good. I fell in love again, this time with a guy from Germany who I put on a pedestal so high you would need multiple ladders to climb up it. Together, we partied like rock stars. I slipped into my old role of sexy party girl, but I was beginning to hate myself so much that I cringed at the sound of my own name. My mother was dead, and I hadn't appreciated her enough when she was alive. I hadn't finished my college degree. My German had moved on when he realized what a mess I really was. I had nothing. I didn't deserve to be happy.

At my lowest, I checked myself into a recovery program. I was drinking every day, and grief was overwhelming me. I handed myself over to the hospital and said, “I can't take care of myself anymore.” I knew I needed help.

It was while wandering around the library shortly after being released that I picked up
Eat Pray Love
. I had heard of it, of
course, but had never committed to reading it. Now my head was a little clearer and my heart a little more open.

The Italy section touched me the most. I was inspired by the idea that those of us who have suffered depression could find a big happiness based on small moments of joy. It could be a vision, a word, a taste that encourages us to keep going. Before Elizabeth Gilbert bought her famous three tickets, she sat in the bathtub of her home with a dictionary of Italian words and felt something. She wanted to speak this foreign language over a plate of spaghetti. That little dictionary represented a new beginning for her. Maybe I could also practice being good to myself through food and culture. My mother's culture. My culture. The culture that I felt so conflicted about because I didn't look the part.

I was broke, though, and in early recovery, so traveling to Latin America wasn't an option. Luckily, that's the beauty of culture. There are many avenues that you can use to explore it.

I started going to a
panaderia
in the Mission District of San Francisco that sells pieces of
pan dulce
and
pastelitos
for ninety cents each. With every taste of those little pieces of sweet Mexican bread, with every sip of Abuelita's hot chocolate, I could feel something in me coming back to life. The food brought me back to my childhood; it reminded me so much of my mom that it felt like she was right there with me. There were always regulars sitting in the shop speaking Spanish and watching soccer. They got a kick out of how good my Spanish was. “Where did you learn to speak Spanish,
guerrita
?” I felt at home.

Eat Pray Love
taught me that we can all go on journeys to find ourselves, and we don't necessarily have to get on a plane to
do it. I never thought I could find myself through a piece of bread—but I did. I realized that when I speak Spanish, I feel like me. I don't care anymore whether I “look” Latina or not. I am Latina, and I feel it in my heart. My savings account is now getting bigger, and Guatemala is first on my travel list.
Adelante.

—

Susan Krakoff

I
gave the man at the river's entrance ten rupees, and he gave back five under a paper bowl containing a small pile of flowers and a candle. Before cupping my hand around the flame, I shoved the change between my hip and the elastic of my skirt. Then I kicked off my flip-flops at the top of the stairs that descended into the river.

The cold from the Ganges chilled my legs like when I tiptoed into the Cheat River back home in West Virginia too early in summer. Because the sun hung in the middle of the sky, the brightness from the light gray shirt made me squint when I looked down at it. Walking toward the big rock in the middle of the river, I kept my gaze ahead, as if focusing on the rock would keep me from losing my balance against the current. My heels sank farther into the muddy bottom of the river, brown and gray water creeping up my legs.

No one made me do this. No one urged me to. When I
e-mailed one of my girlfriends in California about the letters and shirt my ex-boyfriend had sent me, she'd told me it would be funny to throw his shirt into the river, where it belonged. Now that I was actually here, it didn't seem like a joke.

A couple of months before coming to India for yoga teacher training, he had said he wanted the freedom to see other people, that I couldn't expect him to only want to be with me while I was gone. After dozens of nights lying awake in the dark trying to really hear each other through crying and yelling and justifications, we'd made the decision to walk away with love.

Inch by inch I stepped deeper into the river, looking downstream. The water flowed and nothing could stop it, not even my bare legs that stood firm like the rock in the middle of the river. The hem of my blue skirt billowed out and darkened, then sank down to my knees, as if heavy with the weight of my past two years with him. I didn't want to lose him entirely, and yet I knew that if I didn't unclench my fingers from the gray bundle in my hand, I would end up going back home in two months as if I had never come to India. The distance from him felt good, like I was slowly creating space for something new.

In the few minutes that I had been in the river, I'd almost forgotten why I was there. When I looked down at the paper bowl of flowers resting on my left palm, I remembered. I could smell the mustiness of the river, filled with dirt and people and gasoline from small boats. Closing my eyes above the smoke from the flame in the bowl, I thought I felt myself inhale, but no air came in, like the false inhalations we practiced in yoga class. I could feel my chest rise and fall, but it wasn't until I heard an
om
ring around me that I realized my lips had parted and I had been breathing the whole time.

I dropped my right hand into the water and felt the river weave between my fingers and the folds of his shirt. I placed the bowl on the surface of the water. The flowers that had seemed to fade when I bought them a few minutes ago looked brighter to me now. Making my chest tight, I clenched my ribs, released both hands and turned around to walk out of the Ganges, empty-handed.

—

Tracie Cornell

I
t was 2008. I had just put my two children to bed (at the time they were five and twelve months old) and was now lying in bed myself. I did this every night: crawled into bed with the TV on, while my husband watched the other TV downstairs. We were experts at this dance—we existed in each other's presence but were merely going through the motions. I assumed this was normal, just what happens to a couple when you have two kids and two careers, you're tired and the marriage isn't new anymore. I thought everyone felt like this. Still, some part of me knew something was wrong—I just couldn't put my finger on it.

That particular evening, though, I had something to look forward to besides staring at the TV until I fell asleep. I had just started reading
Eat Pray Love
, after seeing Elizabeth Gilbert's first appearance on
Oprah
. I dove into Elizabeth's story. The scene where she's lying on her bathroom floor in the middle of the night, crying and asking God for answers, was pivotal for
me. For the first time, I was reading about someone who was honest about her unhappy marriage. I wasn't alone! But could I admit that this was more than just a phase?

In the coming weeks, I read
Eat Pray Love
every moment I could. I read about Elizabeth's adventures, her self-realizations. But what really resonated for me was the decision point—the particular moment when she decided she could not keep doing what she was doing for one minute longer. It felt like a lightbulb went off. Yes! It
was
okay to admit that I didn't like my married life anymore. It was okay.

•   •   •

S
o often, women—in particular, moms with very young kids—give up on themselves. They think they can't change their lives and make themselves happy if they have babies waiting for them at home. But reading about what Elizabeth went through, her years abroad, created a door for women like me to walk through. It created a space for us to leave our unhappiness behind.

In the weeks after finishing
Eat Pray Love
, I started to be more vocal with my husband. At a wedding, I suggested we dance and he looked at me like I had five heads. After the wedding we went to a bar with friends; I looked over and found my husband across the room flirting with two blond women. I was mortified. When we got home, I told him how upset I was with him—and not just about his behavior at the wedding. There was a lot more to what was going on with us than a dance or a dalliance at a bar. At one point he said, “Well, what are we going to do? It's not like we can get divorced.” I said, “Oh. Yes. We. Can.” I could tell from the expression on his face that he didn't expect
that from me.
Eat Pray Love
had given me the permission I felt I needed to let the word
divorce
fall off my lips.

Now I became determined to find my own voice. I started to make the shift from “I'm going to just stay in this situation and hope it fixes itself” to “I'm going to do something to change my life” because we have only one life—we better live it.

I didn't go away for a year, which would have been impossible with two young kids at home and a full-time job, but what I did start to do was to take care of myself in any and every capacity I knew how. The gym was my Italy, a weekend away with girlfriends was my Indonesia and spending quiet time reading or running or just going for a coffee was my India. I was about to enter into a phase of life where I was on my own for the first time in fifteen years, and this was the most incredible gift I could give myself.

I had a rough eighteen months ahead of me, and it turns out I didn't know half of what had been going on in my marriage (as Lily Tomlin says, “If you want to get to know someone, divorce them. No, if you want to realize you never really knew them at all, divorce them”). But one of the reasons I didn't completely lose it during this time was because I was already on the path to myself. It all started with this little book called
Eat Pray Love
.

—

Lettie Stratton

T
he stomach flu is an all-or-nothing kind of thing. Either you have it or you don't. And one day in the middle of June, during my twenty-second year on Earth, I definitely had it. To make matters worse, so did my partner.

We both stayed home from work and, between bouts of you-know-what, ended up reading the entirety of
Eat Pray Love
out loud to each other. Luckily, we started feeling better by early afternoon. It was dinnertime once we closed the book, and, given the subject matter, we wanted pizza. Scratch that, we
needed
pizza. And not just any pizza—we were craving the mouthwatering, to-die-for kind, with fresh mozzarella, heirloom tomatoes and piping-hot artisan crust that Gilbert describes so well.

We placed our order and had high hopes of being sensually transported to Tuscany with a single bite. Unfortunately, it didn't take more than a sniff of the flat, oval-shaped thing in front of us
for us to know—this was no pizza. We decided it was time to travel.

Even though I had a job I loved at a sustainably minded book publishing company in Vermont, I couldn't shake the daily frustration of being trapped inside for eight hours a day, staring at a computer screen. I daydreamed of ditching the desk and learning to drive a tractor, or at least getting some dirt under my fingernails.

Six months later, my partner and I had quit our jobs and were boarding Air New Zealand Flight 5 to Auckland, about to embark on a fourteen-month mission of self-discovery. This wasn't really about pizza, of course, even though that was what sparked my wanderlust. I was craving adventure, exploration and the chance to delve into things I'd always wanted to learn about but had never made the time for.

I wanted to find out if Buddhism was for me. I wanted to do more yoga and really learn to meditate. I wanted to read more. Write more. Visit eco villages and ask whether I could live like that. I wanted to learn natural building skills and decide if I was going to settle in the United States or another country entirely. I wanted to try living the way I'd always envisioned I would.

At home, I found it easy to make excuses for why I didn't do my morning meditation or my yoga practice or introduce myself to my neighbors or eat in season or buy only organic or even always recycle. I called myself a writer, but I hadn't written anything other than a few newspaper articles in close to a year.

How can a person graduate from an accredited university and still feel virtually skill-less? Sure, I could write a personal essay and discuss the works of Nikolai Gogol, but I didn't know a decent wood-chopping technique or which plants belonged to
which plant family. And I could do just fine in life without knowing these things, but I
wanted
a life that required this knowledge. Part of me was scared to go after it, though, because it felt like a commitment. If I learned how to grow my own food and construct a house using natural building techniques and rely on hand tools instead of electricity—if I actually had the skills—then I would have no excuses left. I would have to dive in. It would be the start of being entirely responsible for meeting my own basic needs. And in the age of ease and convenience where success means being able to pay other people to do things for you, that's a scary thing.

Before leaving, I wrote myself a letter. Dear Self, I began. You're on the other side of the world, damn it! So enjoy it! Be vulnerable and honest. Be patient with yourself and others. Don't stop writing. Have fun! Above all, have fun. I love you.

During my time in New Zealand, I spent a month at a Buddhist center learning how to really meditate—and also learning just how much sitting could hurt. I enrolled in a monthlong yoga teacher training course and a yogic sexuality class complete with public, naked massages that we were not warned about. I did a stint as a bricklayer and built a mud brick house. I spent a week at an electricity-and-petrol-free Catholic worker farm. I attended a Kiwi/Filipino wedding, sheared a sheep bum, raised seventy bull calves and got a good lesson in patience. I dog-sat a poodle named Poopy, cycled the world-famous Alps 2 Ocean Cycle Trail, picked grapes on a vineyard and went on a quest for New Zealand's best
tom kha
soup (Baan Thai in Hamilton takes the cake).

I also got head lice; found a rat nesting in my backpack; endlessly butchered Maori pronunciation; killed a spider with a
book of Rumi poems (probably not great karma); was unable to figure out how to order straight black coffee in a mug larger than a thimble; spent a three-day backpacking trip completely drenched, with no dry clothes or tent; got an irreparable flat tire twelve miles from my final destination after a two-week cycling trip; and usually wasn't brave enough to correct people when they assumed my girlfriend and I were just friends or, even worse, when they knew we were a committed couple and chose to refer to us as friends anyway.

Overall, though, it was the best fourteen months of my life. Because of this trip, I gained the courage to really go after my dream of a totally self-sufficient off-the-grid homestead. Now, back in the States, I've begun my first independent foray into farming, complete with all the trial and error that goes along with it—seeds that fail to sprout even though I sing to them; a sore back from endless weeding; trying to properly irrigate in Boise, Idaho's high desert climate; and an eighty-year-old landlord who comes outside every day and grumpily asks, “Is my corn ready yet?” Still, there's nothing like sitting down to dinner and knowing that I grew the food on my plate with my own hands.

These days, you can find me sitting on the kitchen floor stuffing kimchi into Ball jars, covered in beet-stained brine, or talking to my watermelon plants as if they were human. The farm is my new office, and my to-do list includes items like: build solar dehydrator, buy scythe and whetstone and research baby goats. My partner and I are searching for our own land in hopes of soon making our dream of that homestead a reality. And it all started with the stomach flu, a great book and a terrible pizza.