When you’re a slightly overweight fourteen year old girl living in a country town with not a lot of friends, you tend to have some serious dreams. The, “knight on a horse dream,” where the dream man will come out of nowhere down your street and proclaim undying love to you, while you stuff sour straws down your mouth was a personal favorite of mine. Also, the traveling dream, which consisted of falling asleep hoping that you would wake up in some exotic place, full of adventure also topped the dream list. So, when you watch a movie about a strong woman, with fantastic facial features leave her home to go travel the world, you tend to become obsessed with it.
So, on this day in the year of 2016, as a twenty one year old, slightly adult person, I totally Eat, Pray, Loved my life.
Eat.
I had been obsessed with my weight since I was younger, like really obsessed. I was always counting calories and trying to jam my body into clothes for people shaped like poles. I had grown curves early and I wasn’t so confident about it. I just didn’t understand why my butt wasn’t fitting into GAP cords like all my friends. I wasn’t picked on, but I wasn’t exactly sought out by all da bois. It created this complex in my head, that food was the enemy and that running was the only way that I felt validation in my own skin. I started running at least six miles everyday, which was already destroying my knees, (you could hear that awkward popping sound when i crossed my legs).
Then I went to Sicily. The one line in Eat, Pray, Love that really affected middle school me, was, “has a guy ever seen you naked and asked you to leave?” No, the answer was a resounding no. Now, I don’t mean to say that my acceptance of food was for any dude, it wasn’t. It was the fact that the only person that didn’t get a, “ahem” hard on, when they looked at me, was me. I was so hard on myself for having a slightly bigger butt or thighs, and I envied the girls that could wear jeans without the middle becoming all frayed. But, in Rome I was told by a little old lady in Palermo, Sicily, that “I was a beautiful woman.”
That statement still echoes in my head. Being a woman means having thick or thin thighs, a butt, and whatever else you might have, whether it be thick or not. A woman is not a diagram that one can simply map out and say you must have this, this, and this to be beautiful. On a little beach in Sicily, far away from media influence, I was a beautiful woman. So with that thought, I ate the entire plate of pasta.
Pray.
A Sunday at five in the morning waiting outside the Vatican, I was almost side swiped by a fifty five year old Italian woman who wanted me to get the “f” out of the way so that she had a better chance of getting to Papa Francesco. In Seville, I waited behind the parade of the Virgin Mary and statues of Jesus, ironically to get a cup of Sangria. In Morocco, we watched as people stopped everything to pray five times and at this time I hope that you’re understanding the theme here. It seemed that every part of my travels was dictated by some type of religious figure or religion.
My prayer experience was a little different than these typical experiences. I wasn’t in a Church, or Mosque, or anywhere. I wasn’t into the whole control that I thought that the Church had over Europe, I mean everything was controlled by it. I began to resent the gold plated walls of the Vatican as people on the streets were freezing, and starving hungry beneath it. People trampling over the homeless to get just a glimpse of the pope was something that I could barely understand as a whole. It wasn’t until I got back home from my travels, that I really began to understand why people were praying in the first place.
Believing in something wasn’t the crime, it was the way they were going about it. I went for my first run around my hometown, and realized that I was thankful, to something I didn’t know. I just didn’t need my world to be plated in gold to find it beautiful. The spiritual thing about that moment was that after experiencing most of the world, I was happy to be home. I was thankful to be home.
Love.
People say that you find things right where you’re not looking for them. You find things when they’re ready to find you, not when you think that it’s about time you had someone to love ya. I went abroad and began to travel with the idea that I would have some crazy international love story, full of longing and Nicholas Sparks type actions. In the world’s most ironic twist of event, that all happened when I was at home.
I met my current boyfriend in New York, and I am writing this piece eight months later in a coffee shop in Toronto. Yes, I understand it’s not the most international relationship, but there’s a little culture shock, (Tim Hortons is definitely no Dunkins). I’ve missed flights, he’s booked random weekends, and I’ve run through airports to get back into the car with him. I was ready to be in love, not because I wanted it, but because we both deserved it. The love that we’ve felt in this short time didn’t need to be in the same zip code or city, we were way more than just your local loves.
I know this article was long. I’m sorry. But I’m glad you finished it, and my eighth grade self is very happy I could share this with you. It was definitely years in the making.
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