Eat Pray Love Made Me Do It (2 page)

—

Rebecca Asher

T
he decades of my life can be measured in milestones—the laughter and fearlessness of my twenties, the self-awareness and humility I learned in my thirties and now, the wonder years of my forties.

I can measure those decades because ten years ago,
Eat Pray Love
made me take a breath, and that breath saved my life.

I had been holding my breath for so long. I held my breath waiting for that compliment from boyfriends that never came (gasp). I held my breath hoping to be acknowledged and promoted by a boss who believed I was only so-so (gasp-gasp). I held my breath as I ventured out on my own, determined to be my own boss, only to be met with the second-worst recession our country has ever seen.

I kept gasping for air, and felt like I was drowning.

When I read
Eat Pray Love
, it was a gray Tuesday night. And
it happened—that deep inhale, the kind that brings color back to your cheeks and makes your head a little dizzy.

Okay. Okay. Okay.

I took another deep breath and exhaled slowly, grounding myself.

It's time to move
, I thought. And I did.

I moved to another state to be near my family. I moved and hustled to find a job, which eventually led to my becoming a freelance writer and author. I put on pretty clothes and remembered how to twirl and dance and caught the eye of a sweet southern boy. I've been breathing and moving ever since. And now, I get to listen to the most amazing breaths of all—those of my two little girls who twirl and giggle, who make me run fast or lie on the floor really still.

At the end of the day, we eat, we pray, we love, and I breathe it all in.

—

Victoria Russell

T
he first time I opened
Eat Pray Love
, I didn't make it past Italy.

I was fifteen years old and waging war against daily panic attacks. Anxiety had always been with me, but after a year of triggers (bomb threats and lockdowns at school, the death of my grandmother), my usual free-floating, indiscriminate fog of worry crystallized into phobias and then exploded into full-blown panic.

I dreaded trying to fall asleep at night in the dark and quiet; I dreaded waking up and facing the day; I dreaded leaving the house; I dreaded being alone with my racing, reeling mind. The unwelcome thoughts and feelings would come, and I would be off, gasping and crying, fighting for shallow breaths, shaking my leaden hands, pacing on tingling feet.

The only thing worse than the panic was the shame of feeling like I had no right to this suffering. I was not a soldier back from
combat, a refugee in a war-torn country or a terminally ill patient. “You're just weak,” a disgusted voice in my head said.

By the start of my sophomore year of high school, I was a basket case. I barely managed to make it through the first day of school. That night, I begged my parents not to make me go again. Months went by before I returned to class. During that time, I went to therapy twice a week and received home instruction to complete my schoolwork. I decided not to take medication for my anxiety, and instead committed myself to learning how to harness my thoughts. I knew it would be a long, uphill battle, but the voice in my head that said, “You're weak,” began to be challenged by another voice: “No, I'm not.” Slowly but surely, I was learning how to live with anxiety.

The following spring, I started to read
Eat Pray Love
. Yet as wise as I was (or thought I was), and as interested in God as I was, I was also young enough to lose interest when Liz got to India and the romance of Italy evaporated. The first section of the book was a crimson sunset; the second section was the cool, clear night. I was just awakening from my dark night of the soul—I didn't want to go back yet. I didn't know enough to let my eyes adjust.

But seven years later, I did.

Now, I was almost twenty-two, freshly graduated from college and feeling like I was about to be swallowed up into a vacuum. I had just realized that growing up really does happen to everyone—and it was happening to me. School, that stable institution that I had always relied upon, was gone. I didn't know what I wanted to do next, and I was on the brink of a breakup with my college boyfriend, who was my first love and best friend. I heard my old pals, anxiety and panic, knocking quietly but
persistently at the back door of my mind, like they had been patiently waiting there all along.

For the second time, I opened
Eat Pray Love
—and this time, I found a woman who I could relate to. I was finally ready to sit on the bathroom floor with Liz, to join her in the ashram and follow her to the medicine man. When I finished the book, I was giddy with inspiration. I wanted to make decisions. I wanted to kick fear in the face. I wanted to start with the Garden State Parkway.

The Garden State Parkway is New Jersey's yellow brick road (if the yellow brick road were a congested hotbed of aggressive munchkins refusing to use their turn signals). Still, you can get anywhere and everywhere on this multilane, sixty-five-mile-per-hour highway. That summer, I was a license-wielder of five years, and I had still never driven on my home state's biggest road—a source of both shame and inconvenience. I let a phobia of merging at high speed dictate (literally) what paths I could take.

Thanks to
Eat Pray Love
, I decided it was time to put on my ruby slippers and ease on down the Parkway. A dear friend lent me her car and volunteered to sit in the passenger seat (bless her heart). Our destination: Frenchtown, New Jersey, where we would visit Liz Gilbert's store, Two Buttons. With shaking hands, I gripped the wheel, then gritted my teeth, pressed the gas pedal and merged.

When I got into the driver's seat that day, I thought I was at the end of something, that this was a declaration of independence, a breakup with my old toxic flame, anxiety. I returned home smiling and triumphant. I had beaten a full-blown phobia. “Finally,” I thought, “I'm over all this fear business.”

I was wrong.

I talked a big game to myself and those around me about the importance of being alone and taking risks and following your own path, and even as I did, I was quietly beginning to sink again.

I was determined not to collapse back into paralyzing panic, so instead I became manic. I thought that if I kept moving fast enough, then perhaps I could outrun my fear. If I had passionate affairs, then I wouldn't mourn my lost love. If I took a low-stakes job, I wouldn't have to think about figuring out what I really wanted to do with my life. If I hung out with friends every single night, I wouldn't feel alone. Right?

I jumped from my college boyfriend to a new guy (and then another) faster than I could say “regret.” I took a job building longhouses at a local park.
Longhouses
. This stint lasted less than a month, which is longer than the guys hung around. I ran myself ragged with work and play until I was physically ill. I stayed in bed for weeks. I couldn't even look at
Eat Pray Love
sitting on my bookshelf, waiting for me to lovingly thumb through it like I had so many times in previous months.

I felt like I had failed. I had made every mistake in the book—literally. I should have known better. I thought that I could cheat the system, skip the middle, jump straight from the bathroom floor to the beach in Bali. I kept hearing Richard from Texas's voice: “If you want to get to the castle, you've got to swim the moat.”

Eventually, I dipped a toe into the goddamn moat.

I ended the relationships that weren't helping my self-esteem. I found a job I loved. I went on a silent retreat at a Benedictine monastery in the Shenandoah Valley. I tried harder, and talked to myself with a softer voice. I made more mistakes. I recognized
that, like
japa mala
beads, life is a string of small successes, big failures, love, loss, bravery, fear—all looped together in an infinite circle.

Over time, I learned to listen for what is calling out to me—sometimes in a loud, commanding voice, other times in a whisper. I learned to forgive myself for being scared and imperfect, for making mistakes. I stopped allowing myself to use those mistakes as an excuse to not try new things. Instead, I have to be brave. I have to try.

That's what
Eat Pray Love
makes me do.

—

Mallory Kotzman

M
y mother divorced my father when my brother and I were toddlers, after she had uprooted her life and moved east to accommodate her marriage. She remarried when I was six, to a man eight years her junior, and moved us to a smallish town outside Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, where she set up house with her new husband, a new baby and a slew of in-laws.

Growing up, my mother and I had a tumultuous relationship. She was a bundle of contradictions, soft and pliable one moment, fierce and bold the next. Some days we were best friends, and others, total enemies. Yet the one thing that bonded us for life was reading. Many of my most treasured memories are of being tucked in at night with my mother settled next to me, her smooth butterscotch voice giving life to the characters on the page. The books evolved as I aged; I graduated from the
Berenstain Bears to Madeleine L'Engle to S. E. Hinton to Anne Rice, and eventually even Ayn Rand. When I hit adolescence, instead of going shopping, we went to the library. When my mother became the sole breadwinner after my stepfather was injured in a motorcycle accident and I took up the slack by caring for my younger brother, I would retreat to my bedroom every spare moment I had and find solace in the pages of a book.

When I was twenty-three, my mother and I reached a sort of peace. We began to meet for lunch and dig for buried treasure at the local thrift stores—we had the kind of mother/daughter relationship we had always dreamed of. We talked about politics, the latest trends, my itchy feet and always, always books. She mentioned
Eat Pray Love
to me shortly after its release, saying that Elizabeth reminded her of me—no desire to have children, a distaste for marriage but not relationships, and a drive to travel the world. My mother said she couldn't see me living in our town long-term; she told me that she couldn't picture me “settling” anywhere. She just hoped I would find a home base to use as I traveled the world.

I laughed this idea off and tucked it away, along with my dreams of traveling internationally. We lived in a town that people often talked about leaving but rarely did. But I did tell my mother I would buy this book, which had made her think of me. Yet with a hand on my arm, in a serious tone, she told me not to.

“Mallory, don't. I want to buy it for you. It feels like a book I should give to you,” she said.

I promised my mother that I wouldn't read it until she gifted it to me.

Not long after, the world caved in. Just when we were
beginning to have an honest, adult relationship, my mother was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer. She was given eight to ten months to live. It was June 2011.

On November 5, 2011, around three a.m., she passed away.

I was devastated. Weeks later, grief-stricken, I found myself in a bookstore. I noticed a copy of
Eat Pray Love
, and I bought it. With a sense of urgency, I went home and read for two straight days. I realized why she had wanted to be the one to give me this book; she was giving me something I had always needed. I read the book a second time, and instead of hearing the author's voice, I heard my mother's. She encouraged me, she believed in me, and, at last, I didn't feel like a black sheep. I wasn't wrong for not wanting children. I wasn't alone in my dreams of traveling. I wasn't the only one who yearned to know God individually.
Eat Pray Love
woke me up. It gave me hope.

This book not only spoke to my soul: it was my mother's last and continual gift to me. Through it, she told me that she knew me, had always known me. That she loved me, and despite what we had been through and what was to come, I was free. The strings were cut. I could finally escape the claustrophobia of small-town life and live the way I wanted to. God had been there waiting, loving and accepting me, and I could choose to love and listen to Him in my own way.

Eat Pray Love
showed me that wanderlust is a real and tangible thing. That I don't have to be a mother, despite what society says. It showed me that a relationship could be anything I wanted. Most of all, it showed me that it was a beautiful thing to be myself; to love myself, to define my life any way I chose.

Four years later, that book still means the world to me. I'm married, which surprised everyone—especially me. My husband
loves me for all my dramatic eccentricities. His wanderlust matches my own; we get restless if we've been home for more than three months without experiencing something new. He has ambitious personal goals, about which he remains steadfast. He and I currently have no plans for children, but we love our nieces and nephews (honorary and otherwise) with fervor. We define our marriage and our life as we want, encouraging each other to remain individuals, in constant devotion to who we are.

Eat Pray Love
brought me through the darkest times of my life. It helped me grow in my relationship with God and taught me to be patient with myself. It made me feel that my mother is supporting me with enthusiasm and pride, enveloping me in her love. She used to say: “At the end of the day, it's just you. So make sure you like the person you're alone with.” Her words remind me to not only be honest with myself about where I am, so I can continue evolving as a person I do like to be alone with, but to be honest with my husband as well. I want to create the best marriage I can for us; we both deserve that.

Thank you, Liz. You will never know the courage you gave me simply by giving it to yourself.

—

Lisa Becker

E
at Pray Love
made me reinvent my life. I was forty-one, a mother of two, stepmother of two and married to the love of my life when I read Liz Gilbert's memoir. We lived in a beautiful house with an island in the kitchen, a pool in the backyard and roses growing through the white picket fence. After spending more than a decade on the road as a production supervisor in the film industry, and gallivanting around the globe in between projects, I was happy to be a settled-down, stay-at-home mom living my idyllic dream life. Or so I thought.

I'd always felt that I wouldn't be a complete woman if I didn't birth a baby or two. Every palm, tarot and astrological reading I'd ever had showed two kids in my future. They didn't come easy—I had three miscarriages before I had them—but I knew unequivocally that motherhood was my destiny. I just had no idea that it would be the hardest adjustment of my life. I was grateful that my hardworking husband earned a nice wage that
allowed me to stay home. Each morning the three of us stood in the doorway for the send-off—my baby boy with his legs wrapped around my waist like a fleshy horseshoe, my four-year-old daughter clinging to my leg like a little chimp, giving one last wave before the bird in the Beamer flew away.

But part of me resented that he was free and I was left to tend to the nest. For more than a decade, I had flown away like that, too, and put in a long day managing a budget and babysitting a crew of a hundred or more. Now my crew was much smaller but, surprisingly, harder to manage. I had been paid well to make important decisions and negotiate deals. Now my only decisions were about where to walk the dog, what to make for dinner and which load to do first, colors or whites. My only negotiations were with little people, small animals and the voices ricocheting in my head.
This is what you wanted
, they chanted,
and you're so lucky to stay home with your babies.
I agreed with the voices and felt the shame rise and the guilt flood over me when I responded,
But it's not enough
. I missed working. I missed being around adults, and I really missed earning a paycheck. I was never ambivalent about wanting a baby; I just hadn't gauged the impact it would have on my life until I was smack-dab in the middle of the motherhood epicenter. How does any woman know how she's going to tackle motherhood until she's put in the game? The thing I'd wanted most in life, what I'd dreamed about for years, had brought me to my knees and made me question my very identity. How could I raise my kids if I was a guilty, spun-out, conflicted mess of a mother?

My husband, who lives by the motto
Happy wife, happy life
, encouraged me to go back to work part-time. But the film industry is an all-or-nothing kind of business. It's not like I could shut
my office door and pump. And I was paranoid that my breast milk would end up in the producer's coffee. Still, despite my anxieties, I tried to return to work. But my phone didn't ring and my e-mails weren't returned. I knew what they were thinking; she's a mom now . . . a distracted, hormonal, sleep-deprived shell of her former hardworking, deal-making, whip-cracking self. We like her, but we can get someone who is more focused and won't have to leave early because her kid is sick or her breasts are about to burst.

Like Liz, I had shed many tears in my bathroom in the middle of the night. I was also suffering from postpartum depression. One night, after a three a.m. feeding, I stumbled into the bathroom and began to weep again. I looked in the mirror and saw a depressed, exasperated woman looking back at me. She had oozing watermelon breasts, hair that hadn't been washed in days, teeth that hadn't been brushed and twenty extra pounds clinging to her belly and thighs. Her eyes had big bags and were red and swollen.
“I surrender,”
I sobbed to her.
“I surrender,”
I repeated, this time apologetically.
“I surrender to God. I surrender to motherhood. I surrender the control. I surrender. I surrender. I surrender.”
She looked back at me with a steady stare and responded calmly,
“Thank you.”

With my moviemaking career on hold, I started writing again, as a way to unpack the mess in my mind. If chaos is the road to transformation, then I was well on my way. I admitted to myself that I'd been a workaholic and that most of my identity had been wrapped up in my job. If I wasn't working and earning money, then I was pond scum. My career-driven girlfriends confessed to me all the time that they would trade it all for a good man and a baby. In the meantime, they worked nonstop, drove
expensive cars, bought designer shoes and slept with their pedigreed dogs. Earning money had made me feel in control of my life, and being financially dependent on my husband had completely spun me out. It had triggered fears and anxieties that dated back to my childhood and were robbing me of my joy of being a mother. It was time to make peace with both my fear over the loss of control and my guilt for not fully embracing my role as a mother. It was time that I reinvented myself.

Eat Pray Love
reminded me to love myself first. I must feed myself first before I can give the best of me to those I love. Just as Liz was the administrator of her own rescue, I became the producer of my contentment. Reading Liz's reasons why she didn't want a baby reinforced all the reasons why I did. I decided to surrender to this higher calling and dove into motherhood with a new sense of purpose. I would give motherhood the same balls-out effort I once gave my movie job. I started out as a room mom and became copresident of the PTA. I organized playdates, coordinated school-wide reading events and produced and edited movies for my kids' school and my family.

At the same time, I didn't want to get completely lost in motherhood the way I'd seen some of my girlfriends do—the way Liz had lost herself in men. I adored and respected these women, but their every waking thought, conversation and action was about or for their kids. I promised myself that I would find a new job that was less demanding but still fulfilling and that I would keep writing because it fed my soul. After self-publishing for a couple years, I was officially published in a few literary anthologies. I also started working as an author escort and helped launched a production website for film and television industry professionals.

One day a few years back, we were walking the dog. I was pushing the double stroller, with Jack in front and Scout on the big-sister seat, facing me. Scout always had lots of questions, ranging from Dora to evolution. Today she had a new one.

“Mommy,” she asked, “when are you gonna be just a mom?”

“What do mean, just a mom?” I asked.

She elaborated, “You know, like Emma's mom. She's doesn't go to work, and she doesn't go to a writing class like you. She's at school all the time, just being a mom.”

I looked at my old soul of a daughter and said, “Never. I'll never be just a mom, because I need more than that to be happy with myself.”

She looked perplexed. “You don't like being a mom?”

I cupped her face in my hands, kissed her heart-shaped lips and said, “No, I LOVE being a mom . . . and the fact that I work and I'm a writer makes me a better mother.”

She pondered this. “Are you saying you're trying to be a good example for me?”

I laughed. “YES!” I said. “I did not join your life, you joined mine, and it's my responsibility as your mother to show you what's possible . . . to lead by example . . . to support all your passions . . . to teach you how to be creative . . . how to follow your dreams . . . and how to love yourself first.”