Eat Pray Love

I have recently started reading a new book, 'Eat Pray Love' by Elizabeth Gilbert, and I have found so much insight in it. She is writing of her journey to Italy, India, and Indonesia after her divorce from her husband and an affair with a man in New York. She loves her husband, but they are not in the same place, and she is a writer and feels as though she has settled on life as she knows it. Anyway, she goes looking for something more exciting, and ends up traveling for a year. The book is broken down into 3 smaller books, each with 36 chapters (the symbolism of that is really neat). Anyway, she spends 4 months in each place, in Italy learning about pleasure, in India learning about devotion, and in Indonesia learning to balance the two.

So, I'm still in the first book, Italy. She is talking about her past and relationships, as well as her decision to remain celibate during her year of traveling, to figure herself out. She reminds me of me before Jeff. Anyway, as she is talking about being wrapped up in relationship after relationship, she starts to talk about how sometimes she feels lonely. She says:

"When I get lonely these days, I think: So be lonely, Liz. Learn your way around loneliness. Make a map of it. Sit with it, for once in your life. Welcome to the human experience. But never again use another person's body or emotions as a scratching post for your own unfulfilled yearnings." (65)

Then she goes on to say:

"Moreover, I have boundary issues with men. Or maybe that's not fair to say. To have issues with boundaries, one must have boundaries in the first place, right? But I disappear into the person I love. I am the permeable membrane. If I love you, you can have everything. You can have my time, my devotion, my ass, my money, my family, my dog, my dog's money, my dog's time--everything. If I love you, I will carry for you all your pain, I will assume for you all your debts (in every definition of the word), I will protect you from your own insecurity, I will project upon you all sorts of good qualities that you have never actually cultivated in yourself and I will buy Christmas presents for your entire family. I will give you the sun and the rain, and if they are not available I will give you a sun check and a rain check. I will give you all this a more, until I get so exhausted and depleted that the only way I can recover my energy is by becoming infatuated with someone else..... Some time after I'd left my husband I was at a party and a guy I barely knew said to me 'You know, you seem like a completely different person, now that you're with this new boyfriend. You used to look like your husband, but now you look like David. You even dress like him and talk like him. You know how some people look like their dogs? I think maybe you always look like your men.'" (65)

It amazes me that someone else could write the story of my high school and college years without ever meeting me. You know, the way God can make everyone so unique, yet at the same time give two complete strangers such similar emotions and experiences. I loved these two passages, not only for what the mean to me in hindsight, but for the way she speaks. It is as if she were saying, "this is how it is, and I am not ashamed in the least." I like that about a person. I would like to think I do the same, but in truth, I say things the way they are, and I tell all whether it is necessary or not, but after it has been said, I always find myself asking, "will that person hate me now? Did that just make me sound completely stupid? How could I have told them that?"

I also love these passages because they make me wonder:

Do men ever do this to the women in their lives? We, as women, are known to be moody, irrational, obsessive, and easily infatuated, and it is completely acceptable. However, when men show overwhelming displays of affection, they are 'pussies' in the eyes of not only their male friends, but other women as well. I can't help but wonder, if men were to give everything--their time, their devotion, their ass, their money, their family, their dog, their dog's money, their dog's time--and women were left to soak it all up and deplete their partner... what would society look like?

I don't know that this post will make much sense to anyone else, but this book was just screaming to be blogged about. I hope everyone has a happy Fourth of July!