Eat Pray Love by Elizabeth Gilbert (#3, Nonfiction)

Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat Pray Love has been on my reading list since this summer. I wish I had read it over the summer--I think it would have helped me tremendously during my rough transitional period. But alas, perhaps I was not meant to read it until I was truly ready to be scared shitless by Gilbert's message.

My sister and my good friend Sarah both told me that I had to read this book--and then a couple more people told me to read it as well. How could I resist and not read this book when there were people telling me I had to? So I made my sister finish it before she left for New York so I could have it. Eat Pray Love was not an easy read for me. It hit so close to home that I would read it before bed and not be able to fall asleep for hours afterward. I identified with a lot of the things that Gilbert wrote about--her sadness and depression and not knowing herself. She was 30 when she realized that something was wrong and that she needed to learn to love herself. She had never been alone in her entire life and it caught up with her one horrible night where she found herself crying alone in her bathroom at three in the morning.

I clearly see similarities between the way my life has been going and the way that Gilbert's went. As I read the book, I began to see it as a cautionary tale of what not to let happen to yourself. There are tiny beads of wisdom throughout the book. Here is one of my favorite:

The karmic philosophy appeals to me on a metaphorical level because even in one lifetime it's obvious how often we must repeat our same mistakes, banging our heads against the same old addictions and compulsions, generating the same old miserable and often catastrophic consequences, until we can finally stop and fix it. This is the supreme lesson of karma--take care of the problems now, or else you'll just have to suffer again later when you screw everything up next time. (Gilbert 262)

The first two parts of Eat Pray Love stressed me out. While she is in Italy and India, she is still working through the pain. It is hard to read especially when you are going through something very similar. Once she reached Bali, though, I relaxed. Our narrator became happy--things worked themselves out. But there key here is that she made them work out. She created her own happiness. Her story is inspiring and it makes me realize that I need to do something like that. I need to go away for a while and spend some quality time just getting to know me. There is a strength that I need to build in myself that I don't have--a strength that can only come from knowing yourself and trusting in yourself. I need that.