When I first heard of Elizabeth Gilbert, it was during one of the later waves of popularity for her bestselling memoir, "Eat, Pray, Love." My dad had read the book and when he was finished, I picked it up off his bookshelf and read it.
If my memory serves me correctly, it was 2009 and I was maybe 13 or 14 years old. I had never read a memoir and had never even heard of things like anxiety or depression. I was deeply intimate with spirituality as I was going through confirmation classes at my church and felt very connected to God but in the third chapter of the book, Gilbert describes her own spirituality in such a way that I felt I finally had the words to describe mine.
She uses her Protestant Christian vocabulary to describe a deeper, less institutional connection to God that made me feel safer within my own rejection of the idea that Jesus is the only way to God. Even then, I knew that although Jesus was my way at the time, he wasn't the only way and he wouldn't be my only way.
Since this first encounter with Gilbert and the magical way she always seems to spell out the things weighing on my heart, I have read every Facebook post, listened to every podcast, and watched every interview awaiting the inevitable, that she will say something that so deeply describes me that I will be a little step closer to wholeness. This value of wholeness is one that I have always held close but only recently began to pay attention to. All of the creatives who inspire me right now are attending to their wholeness and often helping others attend to theirs. We are actively pursuing wholeness over goodness, wholeness over order, and wholeness over perfection.
The most recent way Elizabeth Gilbert has made herself more whole is that she and her long time best friend, Rayya Elias, have come out as a couple.
In an elegantly strong post on her Facebook page, Gilbert describes the way she dropped everything else to go to Rayya's side when she was diagnosed with pancreatic and liver cancer recently. She writes of when she was confronted by even the possibility that Rayya might die, "I was faced with this truth: I do not merely love Rayya; I am in love with Rayya."
I would bet big money that everyone in the entire world and the history of the world has felt this before, the realization that one love was really a bigger love than we originally thought. Most of us don’t have to confront these feelings and then report to millions of people but Gilbert acknowledges that it wasn’t that she had to share this love with the world but that she needed to: “If I can't be my true self (whether at home in privacy, or out there in the world in public) then things will very quickly get messy and weird and stupid in my life. Sure, I could pretend that Rayya is still just my best friend, but that would be…you know... pretending. Pretending is demeaning, and it makes you weak and confused, and it's also a lot of work. I don't do that kind of work anymore.”
This is how most of us feel about coming out as who we are, whether that is about sexuality or not. It is so much harder to hide who we are and to deal with the internalized fear that leads to pretending to be someone we are not than it is to be truly and wholeheartedly ourselves. Dealing with the consequences of authenticity is so much more simple than the consequences of pretending.
So let’s all stand in our truth as Rayya describes it, "The truth has legs; it always stands. When everything else in the room has blown up or dissolved away, the only thing left standing will always be the truth. Since that's where you're gonna end up anyway, you might as well just start there."
