Eat Pray Love Made Me Do It by Elizabeth Gilbert

Author:Elizabeth Gilbert
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2016-02-23T15:36:09+00:00

Me Time

—

Theressa Real

Eat Pray Love has been changing lives and rocking worlds for ten years now, but I came to it relatively late, a Liz Gilbert newbie in September 2013.

As the product of a fairly liberal, transient upbringing, I never thought I’d find myself living in the South. But after an apartment fire left me homeless in 2005, I hopped on a bus and followed my mother to a small town in Tennessee. I was young, barely nineteen, and pregnant with my first child. The first person I met after stepping off the bus was the man who would become my husband. He lived across the hall from my mother and me, and you could attribute our friendship and subsequent relationship both to our physical proximity and the general lack of entertainment in town. We passed the time with each other, sharing music, poetry and ideologies.

By 2008, we were married, and my life consisted of working long hours and tending to my husband, our children and various members of his family who lived with us from time to time. For as long as I had known him, my husband had had a dark outlook on life. He was distrustful of any new friendships I made, whether online or through my eighty-hour workweeks. Books became my escape from a painfully isolated reality, but I never quite felt like I deserved to dream of something more than a life spent caring for my family in this little, backward town.

That same year, my husband enlisted with the Army Reserves. He would be gone for six months for basic training, and I remember breathing a sigh of relief at the prospect of being away from him for any length of time. When he returned, he seemed even more controlling than he’d been before. I had recently been laid off, and though I was receiving unemployment benefits, it was nowhere near enough money to support a household. For the first time in our relationship, my husband had complete control of the finances, the house and me.

There had to be more to my life than this, I thought. While my husband was away, I had discovered positive psychology and the power of your own thoughts. I started reading Thich Naht Hahn and Rhonda Byrne, authors who offered a lit path out of my own dark forest. I realized that I did deserve to dream of something more. That I wanted a life full of friendships and experiences. In fact, like my husband, I wanted to join the military! I felt it would give me purpose and direction, and would show my daughters that women could do anything they wanted to do.

Of course, my husband couldn’t stand the idea of me having any sort of freedom outside the home, and I had to fight tooth and nail to be able to enlist. Eventually, I won that battle, but I was tired of the fighting.

My husband wasn’t my only obstacle—my weight was another. I had been overweight all my life, and having recently had a baby meant I was even more out of shape.

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