More rambling incoherencies that may or may not be a book review.

I would like to share my thoughts on a book with you. It's a popular book, I'm sure you've heard of it, but that should by no means diminish the value of it. Eat. Pray. Love. by Elizabeth Gilbert.

You can easily find multiple reviews on many Web sites and in many newspapers, so I'm just going to sum this beautiful book up as follows:

This book, a little over 300 pages, took me about three months to read. It absolutely should not have taken that long, but I think I avoided reading it on a steady basis because I was afraid. It brought out so much in me that I did not want to see or think about or acknowledge. Eat. Pray. Love. is a memoir (all true) about a woman's search "for everything across Italy, India and Indonesia." In the regular world, this is a book for emotional women. But, I believe, it is also a book for addicts.

Compulsive overeaters like myself should not be afraid to read this book because the word "eat" is in the title. For the author, this was simply a word for pleasure, pleasure of which she had not believed herself to be worthy. Addicts hate themselves. Not always and not completely, but one must hate themselves at least a little to believe themselves worthy of the torment we put ourselves through. This book is about allowing yourself to experience pleasure.

It was also about spiritual journeys. As any good urban professional 20-something is, I am a flavor-of-the-week spiritualist. I was raised Catholic. I became skeptic in high school, explored for a bit, decided nothing made sense (excluding Eastern Philosophy, which I ignorantly deemed as simply too weird), and became an ardent, political atheist. Then, I met OA, decided something out there was bigger than myself, and that's where I am now. Somewhere.

It's hard to feel ok with this when every day we are bombarded with bad news about genocide, war, terror, etc etc etc everywhere in the world. You need to believe in something...and not to have something firm on which to ground yourself...yikes! Especially when you ARE an urban professional 20-something.

Well, Eat. Pray. Love. says that's ok. Moreover, it made me even more interested in Hinduism and Buddhism than I have been over the past year (I've been dating an Indian, and he's taught me a lot about Hindu philosophy. It's not weird. If anything, it makes a whole lot more sense than Christianity...to me anyway).

And it spoke to me in a lot of other ways...ways that may be too personal or incapable of being described in a rambling blog post, for which I apologize profusely.

Since moving, starting my job, and not getting to a meeting in over a month (see previous post), I have been having a hard time loving myself. I just feel...unworthy. Thinking about this fact, prompted by the book that took me three months to finish, makes me cry. But that's good. Crying is evidence of emotion, of vitality, of real-ness. I am grateful for this.

I would like to share the last line of the book with you (whoever you are...wherever you are). It really spoke to me, since I, like many addicts, feels the need to so desperately convey gratitude to everyone in a tangible way, perhaps through gifts or excessive verbal thanks...sometimes for unhealthy reasons. Myself, I just want to be loved. Here it is:

"In the end, though, maybe we must all give up trying to pay back to people in this world who sustain our lives. In the end, maybe it's wiser to surrender before the miraculous scope of human generosity and to just keep saying thank you, forever and sincerely, for as long as we have voices."