Eat Pray Love Made Me Do It (8 page)

—

Melissa Bergstrom

I
discovered
Eat Pray Love
in the fall of 2009. At only twenty-six years old, I had just left my job on disability. I had been suffering from debilitating back pain on and off for nearly two years, and that October it became unbearable. One afternoon I left work, simply unable to sit at my desk any longer. The next day I called in sick and lay in bed all day. I did the same thing the following day, and the day after that. I never returned to work.

I was also taking time off from a small all-female theater company I founded. Truth be told, I was okay not working as an office manager anymore, but as someone who had always considered acting one of the great loves of her life, it hurt me so much to drop out of the theater.

My life had become incredibly isolated. Going hiking or out to dinner with my fiancé or even to family gatherings was now
all things of the past. I questioned whether I was even going to be able to walk down the aisle at my wedding.

This was not the life I had imagined for myself. Would I be bedridden forever? Would I ever be able to hang out with friends again? Would I be able to act? I felt crushed underneath the weight of my physical pain and mental anguish. It was like having a huge rock on my chest that made it impossible to breathe.

Since I was spending most of my days on the floor, reading became an easy way to pass the time. I've always been a passionate reader, devouring book after book. As a kid, I would stay up way past my bedtime, reading by flashlight under the covers, feeling like the book in my hand was performing alchemy.

Books were my time machine. I flew a fighter plane with Hannah Senesh in World War II, danced with Romeo and Juliet at the Capulets' ball, sat quietly with Anne Frank in her annex. This time, I hoped reading would work its magic in a new kind of way, distracting me from the pain and perhaps delivering me from disability altogether.

It didn't.

I read books on healing back pain, books on stretching and more books on diet and mindfulness. Nothing helped. One afternoon when my soon-to-be mother-in-law was visiting me, as she often did, she said, “You know, Melissa. I know you want to find a cure for this. But I'm worried that you're not doing anything but thinking and reading and worrying about your pain. Maybe you should read some other kind of book, something different.” She gave me a well-read copy of
Eat Pray Love
that she had recently finished and said, “I think you will LOVE this.”

I had seen the book in bookstores and knew that it was a bestseller. For some reason, the idea that a book was loved by the masses made me wonder if I would be able to connect to it on a deeper level. If a book had been read by millions of people all over the world, would it feel personal enough to me?

Despite my initial hesitation, I dove in, and from the first page I could understand why my mother-in-law connected to the story so much. I felt like Liz was writing a letter just to me. I suddenly felt like I had a new friend who, yes, also cried on her bathroom floor but was also funny and fierce and adventurous. Her life had been a complete, seemingly inescapable mess, and yet here she was eating pizza, meditating and living!

With every page I read, I felt less trapped in my body. My imagination, which has always been one of my favorite parts of myself, broke open and I felt freer than I had in months. It was as if Liz had put her hand on my shoulder and said, “I know you are going through hell right now. I've been here. But I've also walked the road out, one step at a time.”

I was still in pain, but there had to be steps I could take, even from my own apartment.

I started to meditate—not a lot, and nothing earth-shattering occurred during these brief sessions, but after having felt robbed of my body for so long, I loved being able to take control over something as simple as breath.

After that, I started paying attention to the food that I ate. Even in pain, I still had my robust appetite, and I began to be grateful for being hungry and having access to fresh, healthy foods. Meals became a pleasure. Inspired by the part of the book where Liz eats hard-boiled eggs in her flat in Rome and reads the
newspaper, I began to relish eating rich buttery toast, chocolate gelato and takeout from my favorite Greek restaurant.

I wasn't well enough to go to the theater to see plays, but I discovered Netflix had versions of some of my favorite productions, along with classics I had never seen. I watched these from the comfort of my bed, with my cat curled by my side. Life looked just a little less awful.

I decided to start taking daily walks, five minutes or less, in the parking lot of my apartment complex. It wasn't the beach of Bali, but after months of being inside for days at a time, it looked new to me. I noticed cats in windows, passed by dogs out for their daily walks and heard birds. I felt sunshine. I began to feel joy and hope, to notice beauty. There were still plenty of things to experience and to love in this world.

•   •   •

I
t took six more months for my back pain to disappear, and almost a dozen doctors, daily workouts at the gym, stretching at home and a lot of loving myself through it all. Liz showed me that we cannot heal without loving our whole selves, and that it takes courage to imagine we can get better. I returned the copy of
Eat Pray Love
to my mother-in-law but imagined that its lessons had seeped into me, never to be lost.

I was able to walk down the aisle at my wedding, and I tore it up on the dance floor. As I danced with my whole body to my favorite music, it felt like coming home to my authentic self. I moved to Boston to attend grad school for theater and met people who have made my life so much richer. I traveled and founded a second theater company with one of my oldest and dearest
friends.
Eat Pray Love
is inextricably linked to all these things—it came to me at a time when I needed it most and further proved to me how powerful it is for one person to share his or her story. The book was a gift I'll spend the rest of my life giving back. Now I'm working on writing my own story, and I hope that in sharing it, I might give that gift to someone else. I'll make the
Eat Pray Love
circle complete.

—

Kahla Kiker

G
od didn't speak to me the way he did to Elizabeth Gilbert in
Eat Pray Love
, and it was the floor of my closet, not my bathroom, that I found myself curled up on for the thousandth time, lights off and tears streaming down my cheeks as I hoped for just a few minutes of peace.

Work had been even more difficult than usual that day, and I didn't want to take my frustrations out on my family. I was good at my job and had plenty of experience, but no college degree, so I was belittled constantly. The atmosphere was toxic, and I was making myself physically ill with stress. I knew I needed to quit my job, but the bills were getting paid and food was on the table, and I felt guilty for even thinking about doing something so selfish.

My husband was working late again, the laundry was piled up all over the house and my children were screaming at one another. As I sat on the floor of my closet, all I could think was:

This is not my life
.

I felt completely and utterly alone.

•   •   •

T
hree weeks later, when I was on the verge of severe depression, a coworker came into my office and said she was leaving the company. She was moving to Argentina for a three-month sabbatical inspired by this book she had just read,
Eat Pray Love
. I was shocked. I was happy for her, but also envious and sad. I wanted to run away and find myself, too, but I couldn't. I left my office in tears and spent my lunch break at my local bookstore, on a mission to find this magical, seemingly transformative book—and find it I did.

I started reading the first few pages right there in the bookstore and immediately felt something that I hadn't in a long time—hope. I dialed my boss from the bookstore and told him I was sick and wouldn't be returning to work that day. Then I went home and began reading for real. I devoured
Eat Pray Love
in one sitting. I remember having to take a few deep breaths, exhausted, before I finally fell asleep. The next morning, I woke up feeling the energy of possibility. Even though my boss angrily commented on the previous day's absence, I didn't let it bother me. Instead, I just smiled to myself—I was going to enroll in college! I was taking charge of my future while also giving my boss a metaphorical middle finger. It felt fantastic.

The journey was harder than I could have known, but every late night and bout of tears were worth it as I walked across the stage to receive my degree, and again, when I found an even better job where I felt truly appreciated.

I was content with my life—for a while. Then my brother
passed away, and I began to feel a void creeping in. I looked at my children as they grew older, my husband as he moved up in his company, and felt sure that everything in my life was evolving—except for me. I thought about my brother's short life and began to question my life's purpose outside of being a mother, employee and wife. I was losing myself again.

I spent three years struggling with depression, trying to find something that would ease the hole in my heart. Until the day I turned thirty-six—the very age my brother was when he died. That day, I decided I needed to clear the negative energy in my house, starting with all the clutter that had accumulated in my closet. I was pulling boots down from the upper shelves when I was struck on the head by a book. Yes, you guessed it—
Eat Pray Love
! I had recently begun trying to cultivate a more intentional, spiritual way of being while dealing with my grief, so I felt sure this moment was trying to tell me something.

I listened—I sat down and read the book again. But this time I wasn't trying to escape anything. This time, I was looking for love—for myself, and for my creativity.

When I was completing my college degree, I discovered how much I truly enjoyed writing. I was one of the few students who actually looked forward to writing papers, and I did well on them. I felt like stories and characters could spill out of me at any moment. And yet, as happy as writing made me, once I graduated, it soon became a distant memory, displaced by work and family obligations.

It took that bonk on the head for me to finally start writing again—this time, for no one but myself. Initially it was therapy, a way to deal with my grief. Then it became entertainment and stress relief—a creative outlet at the end of a tough workday.
Finally, my writing turned into an exploration of curiosity, of “what if?” And then, I really did it—one year ago, I hit “publish” on my first book.

I still find myself in my closet each week, but now I'm there by choice, grabbing a few minutes of silence to recharge and rebalance the energies of the day.

So much has changed since the afternoon I fled to the bookstore determined to find
Eat Pray Love
—and again since it bonked me on the head. Now, as I look around at the successful, fulfilling life I've created, I can happily say
Eat Pray Love
made me do it.

—

Sandra Roussy

L
ike a lot of other women in my circle of friends and across the globe, ten years ago I read
Eat Pray Love
in a ferocious, envious way. Within the first few pages I was engulfed. Within the first few chapters I knew.

I knew that my life was at a standstill; that it lacked passion and purpose. I also knew that something had to change. I was successful at what many thought of as a “creative” career; I had a healthy daughter; I owned my own home and paid my own bills. But in reality, my career took up most of my time and energy, time and energy I wanted to spend on my own creative pursuits; ten years ago my now-grown-up daughter was in day care and then home alone eating frozen pizza more times than I wanted to admit; the house belonged to the bank; and the bills often got paid late or on credit. How did I get here?

I knew that change was possible because someone like me had already done it. She had picked herself up off the floor and
stepped out of her comfort zone, determined to discover who she really was and what she wanted. One day, couldn't I do that, too? Couldn't “someone like me” become “me”?

I wanted to see the world while volunteering and working; I desperately wanted to make a difference with people and with the environment. For years, though, I procrastinated, making excuses as to why I couldn't move forward. “One day” was always the next day. Change felt impossible. I was paralyzed by fear and what ifs. What if I risk too much and fail? What if I make a huge mistake? What if I get my wallet stolen on the first day in a new country? What if it's really humid and I can't keep my bangs straight? I feared fear, and I feared myself.

So I faded into a socially acceptable routine that made me more and more miserable. Made me so miserable, in fact, that all those years I wasn't moving forward, I was numbing myself with a lot of wine. It was good company, until, of course, it wasn't, and then I was just waiting to hit rock bottom. I didn't know what that would look like, exactly, but I figured when I hit it I would know. So I carried on, waiting to crash. And then, I got tired of waiting. I decided that rock bottom didn't really exist—it was only an excuse to stay on a path of self-destruction without taking any responsibility for it. But I knew if I stopped, all my failures would smack me right in the face. I wasn't ready for that.

Then 2014 came careening in.

It was an early February morning, my mother's birthday.

I called to wish her happy birthday, and she told me they'd found a mass on my dad's pancreas. He was going for more tests.

The drive to work was a blur. The minute I got to the office, I Googled everything I could about the pancreas. My dad was dying. I was trying to process this information and keep my
composure when I was called into the president's office. I was told the company was struggling, thanked for my excellent service and let go. Was this day really happening?

The next eight months were spent caring for my ailing father. I was actually secretly thankful my boss let me go, because it gave me the time to be with my dad. I was there with him as much as possible, through the bad, the scary and the really ugly. I watched him fade away into a shell of what he used to be, and then I lost him completely. I could have never imagined the intense pain that comes with losing a person you are so deeply bonded to. The pain jolted me awake, and I refused to numb it this time.

I was jobless and fatherless. Now, what would I do?

I thought of
Eat Pray Love
, and my fear faded away. I had romanticized Liz's story for so long, thinking it was unattainable for someone like me. But it wasn't. Life is so short—my father's death made that clear—and I didn't want to leave it with regrets in my heart.

I decided to finally set off on my own journey. I sold my house and got rid of everything that wasn't necessary and therefore would be weighing me down. I felt so light and free! I would make my own decisions, and for the first time know that those decisions weren't being dictated by societal standards or a desire to please. I wasn't going to merely step out of my comfort zone—I was going to leap thousands of miles away from it. There would be no turning back. It felt right.

In autumn 2015, I headed off to the magnificent Galápagos Islands in Ecuador, to study and volunteer. I've always been fascinated by the theory of evolution; how it's constantly in action, shaping our own existence. What better place to be, then,
than with Darwin's finches, which started it all? And from there, I'll let life take me where it may, trusting that where I am and what I'm doing is serving a creative purpose and is beneficial to myself, to others and, most of all, to this beautiful planet. My daughter has become my biggest supporter as I embark on this new chapter, and I'm proud to show her that anything is possible, at any age.

Eat Pray Love
made me believe I could do it. Fearlessly, onward bound.