Finally, Fun Friday is back! Negative Nancy has been thrown to the wayside! Yippee! Though I must give credit where credit’s due: thank you Miss Elizabeth Gilbert for finally offering up something bigger than the plastic wrapped story of those strong young city chicks of the past few adventures.
What impressed me with Eat Pray Love was that I was finally forced into some self-reflection. Now, maybe it’s that I’m graduating in a few weeks and am scared about entering into the “real world,” or maybe it’s because I’m extremely envious of Gilbert’s international tom-foolery, or maybe it’s just that I’ve been aching for even the tiniest shred of depth in these books that I’m making a mountain out of a molehill, but I have to give it to her – Miss Gilbert is inspiring!
As I was reading the book, I remember noting on a number of occasions a sense of surprise deriving from the fact that I could really relate to the Gilbert’s life assessments. She provides an objectivity, I hate to say, unusual for a woman coming out of her situation (i.e. tough divorce, hot, passionate love affair gone wrong etc.). The epiphany which seems to have occurred with Gilbert has opened her onto a sensibility that I find to be very admirable for women with similar struggles.
She had to get out of her marriage simply because she was better off sad without it than sad with it. She had to end things with David because her misery, honestly, outweighed her love for him. Though at one time she needed medication to help her out of a deep, dark depression, she refused to rely on drugs forever just because she wouldn’t allow it. And lastly, she had to up and leave, she needed time away, because it was what she wanted. And what she wanted was all that should really matter, right?
In reading Eat Pray Love and in sharing Gilbert’s ongoing self-discovery, I found that I was forced into my own self-discovery (I know, it sounds really corny). It made me think about all the thinking I’ve done, and the over thinking I’ve done, about boys, life decisions, eating, loving, and maybe even a little praying. It made me realize that sometimes in order to think we have to not think, and just do. For Gilbert, the doing is writing.
For others, perhaps it’s eating, or maybe praying, but hopefully loving.
