I HATE ELIZABETH GILBERT

TL;DR: restlessness is a type of addiction

I wasn’t particularly interested when “Eat, Pray, Love” was first published. (To be fair, I was a literal child.)

But when the movie came out and it seemed everyone was obsessed, I watched. It was good. Elizabeth Gilbert seemed cool. Feminist. She wasn’t happy in her marriage, so she took action.

And wasn’t that the whole point of being a woman in the 21st century? Weren’t you supposed to be constantly exercising your autonomy? (After all, how do you know you’re free if you’re not continually testing your freedom?)

Although I didn’t consciously think much about the movie after watching it (I mean, I was a teenager and didn’t really see the appeal of Javier Bardem), it must have subconsciously impacted me. I quietly internalized the idea that the best thing you could do when you were unhappy was: run.

A few years later, off I ran.

First to New York City. Then to Paris. Then London. I ran into becoming a travel journalist, then I ran around the world—landing in random cities for three or four days (just long enough to convince myself I had two different lives: one at home and one…everywhere else.) I ran and I ran and I ran, convinced that one day I would run to the perfect place or the perfect stranger and finally, everything would make sense. I didn’t know where I was running to (that was the great mystery) but I was convinced that all I had to do was stay moving. One day, I’d eat transcendent pizza in Naples or scrub floors in India or meet some healer in Bali—then, suddenly, everything would make sense.

I should have paid attention to those words. You must make sense, you never find it.

Whenever I read Elizabeth Gilbert, I see me: disappointed in bedouin tents in the deserts of Morocco because the secret to life wasn’t there; lonely in the south of France after spending an entire week without speaking my native tongue; lost in Vietnam and Mexico City, aghast at how the healers were hired by Hilton and the sweat lodges didn’t even get that hot because they didn’t want tourists to sue.

There are almost 20 years between when Gilbert set out to explore the world and when I did. When she was adventuring, the word “overtourism” hadn’t yet been coined. Corporate imperialism was still just emergent. You didn’t have a smartphone.

Gilbert, undoubtedly, was more immersed in foreign cultures than the typical American traveler today. But despite profound changes in the global landscape since Gilbert’s year of self-discovery, travelers still follow her model like gospel, believing that leisure, in the right light, can become self-improvement. In their minds, Gilbert wasn’t taking a year off to fuck around and find out; she was taking a year to figure out how to live.

***

And Gilbert did end up finding some profound insights. “Eat, Pray, Love” the book is filled with some stunning reflections. The movie, however, erased them. (As movies tend to.)

Take, for example, the famous scene at an ashram in India when Gilbert is talking about her heartbreak to a fellow American. The movie goes something like:

The man affirms that Gilbert is special. Only she has the wisdom to one day love the whole world.

However, in the book, the scene plays out very differently. The man’s speech transforms from a specific you and into a royal you…the sort of “you” that’s talking more about humanity itself. He says:

“Don’t you see what happened? This guy touched a place in your heart deeper than you thought you were capable of reaching. I mean you got zapped, kiddo. But that love you felt, that’s just the beginning. You just got a taste of love. That’s just limited little rinky-dink mortal love. Wait till you see how much more deeply you can love than that.”

In the book, the point is not that Gilbert has a special, exceptional capacity for love; it’s that every human being who opens their heart does.

However, that’s not the message the movie would have you believe. Movie Elizabeth Gilbert is A Protagonist—which means that she is special. (I wonder if this is how Gilbert the person began to see herself after publication.)

***

Travel and love are often linked. There’s the honeymoon, sure. But more prevalent in culture today is the newly single solo trip (perhaps popularized by Gilbert herself.) We have been culturally primed to replace connection with adventure. (Think of all the trips you couldn’t take when you were with that ol’ ball-and-chain.)

But the link between restlessness and romance is deeper than simply planning a vacation. Writing about seduction in 2015 (almost a decade after her runaway bestseller), Gilbert said:

“I might indeed win the man eventually. But over time (and it wouldn't take long), his unquenchable infatuation for me would fade, as his attention returned to everyday matters. This always left me feeling abandoned and invisible; love that could be quenched was not nearly enough love for me.”

Love that could be quenched was not nearly enough love for me. This is the sort of sentence only spoken by restless souls. (Hungry ghosts, the Buddhists call them.) Gilbert’s persona has come to epitomize this insatiable wanting. An existential craving displaced in lust and wanderlust. It is, not so coincidentally, also the basic premise of addiction: however much you have is never enough. There’s always another drink to be had, another man to kiss, another country to explore.

About a year after publishing that essay on seduction, Gilbert revealed that she was in romantic partnership with a close female friend, Rayya Elias. Some thought this a shocking reveal of sexuality for a woman who had now publicly left three relationships with men. It wasn’t. (Anyone who was really reading Gilbert would have found this development inevitable. She lives to push her boundaries; naturally, sexuality would eventually make its way onto her list of “previously uncharted terrains.”)

But the most Gilbert-y part of this development was that Rayya was dying of cancer. Gilbert has written at length about only desiring that which she cannot have. Her friend’s diagnosis would have been erotic catnip. Gilbert had—finally—found a love that could never be quenched because that love would always be threatened by imminent death.

I do not doubt the sincerity or depth of the love Gilbert experienced. (In fact, I would wager that it was, indeed, a profound experience.) It’s just that after years of pushing yourself and crossing boundaries, the true challenge may be not in what you’re willing to burn for your desires but rather what you’re willing to build and endure—despite your wanting.

It’s probably no surprise that Gilbert is now in SLAA recovery.

***

When I write about Elizabeth Gilbert, of course I’m always writing about myself. I am writing about what I used to think possible. I, too, went to SLAA meetings after being brought to my knees by my desire. I, too, thought external adventure could transform me.

As a travel journalist covering a daily news beat, I was often assigned stories about “the power of travel.” I was encouraged to say that when you travel, you break down the walls of ignorance through direct, first-person experience. We were branding travel as something the traveler didn’t do for themself but the world at large—using the backdrop of the first Trump administration and its cultural ignorance to enforce the idea that travelers were, somehow, different. Good. Wise.

But as I traveled around the world and met people who had journeyed to hundreds of countries, I couldn’t find any of that purported wisdom. In fact. it seemed the further someone had ventured into the world, the more they had lost the plot. Fellow travel journalists wanted to tell me what they had seen—but more than that, they wanted to tell me where they were going next.

Carl Jung wrote about this phenomenon in “The Symbolic Life” published in 1957:

On my many travels I have found people who were on their third trip around the world— uninterruptedly. Just traveling, traveling; seeking, seeking. I met a woman in central Africa who had come up alone in a car from Cape Town and wanted to go to Cairo. “What for?” I asked. “What are you trying to do that for?” And I was amazed when I looked into her eyes—the eyes of a hunted, a cornered animal—seeking, seeking, always in the hope of something. I said, “What in the world are you seeking? What are you waiting for? What are you hunting after?”

Over a half-century later, travelers haven’t evolved beyond this “seeking, seeking.” It is a restlessness that mirrors addiction and aligns with Gilbert’s definition of love: any place that can make me stop traveling is not nearly enough.

***

Gilbert’s insatiability—by which you now know means my own—is perhaps unproblematic in and of itself. You could just consider it one individual’s psychological patterning. However, this hunger for experience is complicated by the moral twists now emerging in contemporary travel.

As more of the world becomes over-touristed and corporations use the language of tolerance to bludgeon traditional ways of life around the world, there’s a vague feeling that to travel now is an ethically complicated act. The Swedish have a word for the guilt of taking a flight (“smygflyga.”) There are think pieces about how “The White Lotus” exemplifies modern colonialism. Despite your spending abroad, money is still funneled back to our imperialist home countries. (The U.S. and China own over $3.4 trillion in international real estate assets, well over half of the Top 100 portfolio.)

So what’s a modern traveler to do?

Certainly, movement imparts some lessons—we are exposed to new ways of eating, dressing, and living. If we never leave the confines of our culture, we never look at it (and ourselves) through different lenses.

But this is the crux of the problem: with the rise of corporate imperialism and a culture industry dominated by the U.S., Americans can go all around the world and never really leave their culture. The world can bend to their desires—or at least their customs, behaviors, and ethics—and they never really sacrifice anything more than a couple of weeks without an iced latte. Yet, thanks to a narrative popularized by Gilbert, travelers still believe that what they’re doing is somehow noble or bold or transformative. It is usually, in reality, nothing more than experiential consumption.

***

Gilbert was an addict whose experience we accepted as wisdom. We can no longer afford to follow (much less herald) this type of narrative. Otherwise, we’ll be caught in insatiable cycles that sacrifice not only our mental well-being but the environmental and sociological well-being of the planet.¹

In the most recent interview I’ve been able to find with Gilbert, she appears to be still searching.

“I feel like my 50s are the decade I am giving myself as a gift. When I am in a relationship, I give my whole self. I’ve done that all my life and I don’t want to have that leakage any more. It’s like a hole in the boat; it all pours out of me and I can’t seem to stop. I want to pour into myself, my work and my friendships.”

It almost sounds wise. It almost sounds feminist. Decentralized forms of care sound like growth for Lizzy! However, this idea of finally doing what she wants is the exact same way that Gilbert described going off for her year of “Eat, Pray, Love.” In 2006, she wrote:

“I was actually feeling kind of delighted about all the compartments of time and space that were appearing in my days, during which I could ask myself the radical new question: ‘What do you want to do, Liz?’”

Based on the fact that she appears to be asking herself the exact same question 20 years later, I wonder both how radical that question actually was and perhaps more deeply: what do we get when we follow our desires?

I’m asking that sincerely. I’m asking you.

I don’t know the answer. But there’s this line from “The Inner Light” that constantly jangles around my brain:

the farther one travels, the less one knows / the less one really knows

1. Today, it seems far more radical to stay in one spot and try to transform your community than to become unmoored and flit from culture to culture, milking them for some lesson.