Speaker 1: This episode was recorded on cameragle Land. Hi guys, and
Speaker 1: welcome back to another episode of Life on Cut.
Speaker 2: I'm Laura, I'm Brittany, and I'm excited.
Speaker 1: Well, okay, you might remember we did an episode with
Speaker 1: Tory Dunlap a couple of months ago. Now, now, she's
Speaker 1: an incredible money expert, has loads loads of follows on Instagram,
Speaker 1: and she said, quote unquote on that episode, if you
Speaker 1: ever get the chance to spend all of the money
Speaker 1: that you have to see Elizabeth Gilbert live, you should
Speaker 1: do it. And now let me tell you this, you
Speaker 1: don't have to spend a single penny because you're going
Speaker 1: to get it for free. Right here today, Elizabeth Gilbert
Speaker 1: is joining us and she is one of the most
Speaker 1: brilliant authors of our time. She authored Eat, Pray, Love,
Speaker 1: which sold over twelve million copies and then, as so
Speaker 1: many of you would know, it was turned into a
Speaker 1: massive movie starring Julia Roberts.
Speaker 3: She's also written.
Speaker 1: Books like Committed, Big Magic, and City of Girls. Elizabeth
Speaker 1: shares so many teachings throughout her books around vulnerability, connectedness,
Speaker 1: and living a life that is led by love. And
Speaker 1: now how also to become is what she describes a
Speaker 1: relaxed woman, which is pushing back on the expectations of
Speaker 1: what society wants from you.
Speaker 3: Liz, Welcome to the pod.
Speaker 4: Hi, that's so nice to be here. Thank you. Gosh,
Speaker 4: that's a really nice thing to hear that somebody thinks
Speaker 4: you should spend all your money. Better money expert thinks
Speaker 4: that you.
Speaker 1: Should spend She is the biggest money expert female lad
Speaker 1: money expert. She has the biggest podcast in the world.
Speaker 1: And she was like, every dollar you have spend it
Speaker 1: on Liz.
Speaker 3: So there you go.
Speaker 4: Wow, listen, listen, the return on investment is enormous. On that.
Speaker 4: It's so lovely to be here with you both. Thank you,
Speaker 4: thanks for inviting me.
Speaker 5: Just to double down on that, we just like ten
Speaker 5: minutes ago, finished an interview with a psychotherapist in New
Speaker 5: York who's just written a book on toxic productivity. Her
Speaker 5: name's isra Here, and we were like, hey, we've got
Speaker 5: to go. We've got this interview. She's like, who are
Speaker 5: you interview? We said, oh, this is Gilbert. She goes,
Speaker 5: no way, She's like in the book that's just released.
Speaker 5: She's like, I quote Liz in the book. She's like,
Speaker 5: please tell her.
Speaker 2: So you've got a lot of super fans out there.
Speaker 4: Oh that's so sweet. Thank you.
Speaker 1: Well, now that we've puncturitized up enough, it's time to
Speaker 1: take the gas out of them. So we did just
Speaker 1: mention to you that we do accellent and filtered stories,
Speaker 1: and then I could just see you crumble into the
Speaker 1: shell of what I think is coming. Liz, Please share
Speaker 1: your most embarrassing story with us.
Speaker 4: Okay, so I will share that. When you asked me this,
Speaker 4: I immediately had one. But I was like, yeah, that
Speaker 4: was kind of a cute one. And then I thought
Speaker 4: of the real one, and I was like, oh, no,
Speaker 4: I can't. I can't, but we're going to go. I'm
Speaker 4: going to tell you the real one. So when I
Speaker 4: was in high school, my best friend Jenny, and she
Speaker 4: and I are still friends all these years later, we
Speaker 4: got invited to a party from a girl who was
Speaker 4: way above our status and who was also in college
Speaker 4: and she was home for the summer. And I don't
Speaker 4: even know how we got invited to this party. We
Speaker 4: had no business being there. It was cool older kids,
Speaker 4: and it was outside in a lawn and people were
Speaker 4: hanging out and drinking. We were trying to act cool,
Speaker 4: and this is such an awful story. He had brought
Speaker 4: with her her two roommates from college home who didn't
Speaker 4: know any of us, and they had just come from
Speaker 4: the funeral of their best friend who had drowned. This
Speaker 4: is a great way to start a comedy podcast. So
Speaker 4: they were grieving. Those two girls were grieving, and everyone
Speaker 4: else and they didn't know anyone else at the party,
Speaker 4: and everyone else was trying to have a good time,
Speaker 4: and every time a song came on that reminded them
Speaker 4: of their friend who died, they would start crying. Oh anyway,
Speaker 4: at one point, we were all sitting in a circle
Speaker 4: of lawn chairs and there was one empty lawn chair
Speaker 4: next to them, and somebody walked in and said, is
Speaker 4: anybody sitting there? And I said there was somebody. There
Speaker 4: was somebody sitting there, but she died.
Speaker 2: Why did she say, you just forgot?
Speaker 4: I don't know. I don't know. I don't know why
Speaker 4: I said that talk about I don't.
Speaker 6: Know why I said that to those two girls whose
Speaker 6: friend said died. And that was a thing I thought
Speaker 6: that I thought would be funny. I thought, I think
Speaker 6: I didn't I don't know. All I know is that
Speaker 6: they both started to cry.
Speaker 2: Was that when your career in comedy ended?
Speaker 4: It's like you say it like I watch, It's the
Speaker 4: worst thing I've ever said. I watched it was like
Speaker 4: I wanted to reach through my mouth with my arm
Speaker 4: and grab me by the neck and pull me back
Speaker 4: into myself like I was like, I can't, why would you?
Speaker 4: It was just a completely uncensored, unfiltered thought. And then
Speaker 4: we re Jenny grabbed me and my friend grabbed me,
Speaker 4: and we ran into the bathroom and she was like
Speaker 4: what the fuck did you just why what? She was
Speaker 4: like she I remember her falling into the bathtub with laughter,
Speaker 4: like what And I'm like, I don't know. I was screaming.
Speaker 4: I'm like, I don't know why I said that. I
Speaker 4: don't know why I said that. And then we had
Speaker 4: to figure out how to leave, but we had run
Speaker 4: into the like the party was in the front of
Speaker 4: the house, so there was no escape other than to
Speaker 4: walk through the whole thing again with the car. It
Speaker 4: was that's the most. It's so beyond embarrassing. It's like
Speaker 4: the definition of mortifying. Wrong thing to do. I don't
Speaker 4: even I can't answer for it.
Speaker 5: Sometimes something sounds really great, in your head and it
Speaker 5: just doesn't land. But sometimes words escape and you have
Speaker 5: no control over it. It was like that was an internal
Speaker 5: thought and somehow my mouth started moving and it came
Speaker 5: out of my body.
Speaker 4: Well, i'll tell you just to make it this conversation.
Speaker 4: Fancy and literary Gertrude Stein told a story about how
Speaker 4: in Paris between the Wars, when all those cool people
Speaker 4: were all hanging out, they had a friend, an acquaintance
Speaker 4: who was a Frenchman whose father had been in the
Speaker 4: French Foreign Legion and he had been trampled. The man's
Speaker 4: father had been trampled to death by a camel, and
Speaker 4: Gertrude Sein said, you would think that you don't bring
Speaker 4: up camels very much, but every time this guy was
Speaker 4: in the room, somebody would start talking about animals, stop
Speaker 4: talking about camels, Stop talking about camels. But they it
Speaker 4: just happened every single time, Like there's some sort of
Speaker 4: deadly magnetism that we have towards the most inappropriate thing
Speaker 4: that you could possibly say. So it's not just us,
Speaker 4: it's also fancy literary people and France between the worst.
Speaker 5: Well, I hope you've forgiven yourself now, I hope you've
Speaker 5: gotten too a place where you're okay with the things
Speaker 5: that you've said in the past. But speaking of the
Speaker 5: things you've said in the past, the success that you
Speaker 5: had with Eat Prey Love is something that most authors,
Speaker 5: well every author can only dream of, Like people can't
Speaker 5: fathom that level of success, especially on something that's been
Speaker 5: written about your own life and your own experiences. Can
Speaker 5: you tell us a little bit about who you were
Speaker 5: before that moment, because I have this picture of just
Speaker 5: like being a struggling author that's just.
Speaker 2: Going to every corner of the world to try and
Speaker 2: write a hit.
Speaker 3: What was life like?
Speaker 4: What was that before that? I mean, right before that,
Speaker 4: I was like practically suicidally depressed, you know, total failure, divorced.
Speaker 4: The love affair I had left my husband for had
Speaker 4: crashed and burned. I was so full of shame, you know.
Speaker 4: I was really a wreck, heavily medicated and very lost.
Speaker 4: So that's what I was right before that. And then
Speaker 4: I went on that journey and it shored me up
Speaker 4: and kind of boosted me up, and then he Pray
Speaker 4: Love became me Pray Love. But the weird thing for me,
Speaker 4: like the thing that felt like such a cultural and
Speaker 4: emotional disconnect that I had to figure out how to
Speaker 4: kind of absorb is that prior to that, I had
Speaker 4: been a woman who wrote only about men, and only
Speaker 4: four men. I wrote for all these big men's magazines
Speaker 4: back in the nineties, for Spin magazine and Esquire, GQ,
Speaker 4: back when magazines were king. I'd written three books. Two
Speaker 4: of the books I wrote before He Pray Love had
Speaker 4: the word men in the title, like one was called
Speaker 4: The Last American Man, and one was called Stern Men
Speaker 4: that was about lobster fishermen. Like I was known as
Speaker 4: a woman who was very sympathetic to the male experience,
Speaker 4: and I never wrote anything about women, and I never
Speaker 4: wrote anything about myself. And when I quit my really
Speaker 4: good job at GQU to go travel the world for
Speaker 4: a year and sold everything that I had, what I
Speaker 4: felt like as I was writing that book was this
Speaker 4: is something I have to do for myself, and nobody
Speaker 4: is going to want to read this because it was
Speaker 4: so out of character from what I had been doing.
Speaker 4: And I even felt apologetic about it, like I'm sorry
Speaker 4: I have to write this like super emotional, vulnerable girl thing,
Speaker 4: but I have to do that in order to save
Speaker 4: my life, and then suddenly I was catapulted into being
Speaker 4: like the ultimate chick lit writer and suddenly like a
Speaker 4: voice of for women. And I was like, whoa, I'm
Speaker 4: all about women now, okay? Cool. I used to all
Speaker 4: like be all about masculinity, and now it's all And
Speaker 4: that was the really wild shift, and then learning how
Speaker 4: to how to respectfully hold that space. Because another thing
Speaker 4: that happened is that even though I wasn't a wealthy
Speaker 4: author before that, I was an award winning author before that,
Speaker 4: and I got all the big awards and the big
Speaker 4: award nominations, the National Book Award nomination and the National
Speaker 4: Book Critic Circle Award nomination and National magazine awards, all
Speaker 4: of this stuff because I was writing about men and
Speaker 4: so I was considered serious and important. And when I
Speaker 4: wrote about myself and sold twelve million copies, I've never
Speaker 4: gotten another award since. Wow, I've instantly lost all my
Speaker 4: literary legitimacy, you know, and instantly got shunted into like, oh,
Speaker 4: she's a lady writer for ladies, so nothing important can
Speaker 4: it possibly be coming out of that mind? And I
Speaker 4: would do it again. I would do it again. I
Speaker 4: would give up all my literary legitimacy in order to
Speaker 4: have written a book that inspired untold members of women
Speaker 4: to get divorced, that inspired them to leave jobs that
Speaker 4: they hated, that inspired them to realize that they didn't
Speaker 4: have to have children, that inspired them to travel alone.
Speaker 4: Like that's the award, right, Like that ends up being
Speaker 4: a thing that is so much more valuable to me.
Speaker 4: Those felt like the sort of really startling differences between
Speaker 4: before and after.
Speaker 1: What I think is also so incredible about EP Pray
Speaker 1: Love and the phenomenon that happened obviously after you published
Speaker 1: the book. I've heard you speak about how it went
Speaker 1: to the best seller's list for a little while and
Speaker 1: then it kind of dropped off and had like the
Speaker 1: normal trajectory that some of the books that you'd published
Speaker 1: had had in the past. But Eat Pray Love was
Speaker 1: before social media, it was before book talk. It was
Speaker 1: before how some authors now become super viral really really quickly.
Speaker 1: But your book had this groundswell. It was like women
Speaker 1: who had read it and then passed it on to
Speaker 1: the people that they loved, and then that's how this
Speaker 1: momentum organically grew from word of mouth. How and what
Speaker 1: does it do to you as a person. When something
Speaker 1: that you've written that's so authentically you, that's based completely
Speaker 1: on your life, that you've put out into the world,
Speaker 1: When you know that that many people have resonated with
Speaker 1: your life experience, when you go from being someone who
Speaker 1: nobody knows to everyone knows and they also know your
Speaker 1: deepest heartbreak, your your deepest traumas, how do you reconcile
Speaker 1: that it's not.
Speaker 4: My deepest heartbreak and traumas, it's our deepest heartbreak and traumas,
Speaker 4: you know, Like that's that's where the reconciliation is. Like,
Speaker 4: I don't think that it would have had the impact
Speaker 4: that it had if I wasn't telling a story that
Speaker 4: so many women recognize themselves.
Speaker 3: Of course. Yeah.
Speaker 4: And in addition to that acting out, you know, there's
Speaker 4: a line in the Brain Love where I said, like
Speaker 4: I didn't want to hurt any feeling, anybody's feelings. I
Speaker 4: didn't want to cause me trouble. This is me Like,
Speaker 4: as I was trying to figure out how to get
Speaker 4: out of my marriage, I just wanted to run out
Speaker 4: of the back door of my house and not stop
Speaker 4: till I got to Greenland, you know, like just run,
Speaker 4: like to escape this life that was so inauthentic to me,
Speaker 4: and that I had been taught and told was the
Speaker 4: ultimate of what a woman wants, which is to get
Speaker 4: married in her twenties and buy a nice house and
Speaker 4: have children. And I was about to do that third piece,
Speaker 4: and instead I ran for the hills. And the fact
Speaker 4: that twelve million women read that book makes me know
Speaker 4: how much we want to run for the hills, like
Speaker 4: makes me know that that story that we've been sold
Speaker 4: about what makes women happy must not be true because
Speaker 4: every like a lot of people want out of like
Speaker 4: whatever they're in because they wouldn't have identified with it
Speaker 4: so much. And so what felt to me like my
Speaker 4: private shame because I was really young, you know, I
Speaker 4: was twenty nine when my marriage started falling apart, and
Speaker 4: my whole orientation in my mind was there's something wrong
Speaker 4: with me. There's something wrong with me, because I've got
Speaker 4: everything that you were supposed to get, and I either
Speaker 4: want to die or run away. And my friend Martha Beck,
Speaker 4: who's a great teacher and writer, has described how many
Speaker 4: when she was coming up in psychology and sociology, how
Speaker 4: essentially they were being taught how to medicate women. So
Speaker 4: that women wouldn't run for the hills, Like the question
Speaker 4: was how much medication do we have to give you
Speaker 4: so that you will be happy? Because women like me
Speaker 4: were coming into psychiatric settings and saying like, I have
Speaker 4: everything that I was told I was supposed to want.
Speaker 4: I have a husband, I have a house, I have children,
Speaker 4: and I want to kill myself. And they were like, well,
Speaker 4: let's up your dosage of whatever we have to give you,
Speaker 4: because you're right, you do, you do have everything that
Speaker 4: you should want. And so I had so much shame
Speaker 4: about not wanting what I had. And now now I'm
Speaker 4: sixty five and I'm living like I'm like the patriarchy's
Speaker 4: nightmare the way I'm living, Like I'm like twice divorced.
Speaker 4: I'm like a woman who were taught to pity, like
Speaker 4: twice divorced, widowed, childless, living alone, you know, like I've
Speaker 4: given up on my looks. I shaved my head like
Speaker 4: like I don't care, I'm not even trying anymore, you know,
Speaker 4: And I'm like, now this is the life, you know, Like,
Speaker 4: now this is the life like this, and like I
Speaker 4: wish I could have shown my twenty nine year old
Speaker 4: self what was coming like wait till you're in your
Speaker 4: fifties and answering to nobody, and you see how good
Speaker 4: it gets.
Speaker 5: So much of what you said I have lived myself like,
Speaker 5: I went through a horrific breakup bort Awa, my ticket,
Speaker 5: moved to Italy for a year, went around the world
Speaker 5: for three years.
Speaker 3: I live alone.
Speaker 5: Now I'm thirty seven. I'm constantly fighting whether or not
Speaker 5: I have kids and settle down and have life, because
Speaker 5: deep inside, I'm not convinced I still even want it.
Speaker 5: But the internal battle comes from society telling me that
Speaker 5: you should want it and you should.
Speaker 3: Have it, or you're going to miss out if you don't.
Speaker 5: Or you're missing out on something. And I still can't
Speaker 5: reconcile with.
Speaker 2: That within myself.
Speaker 3: And I know that I'm not alone.
Speaker 5: And everything that you have written has just hit so
Speaker 5: many women so deeply. Did you get to cast Julia
Speaker 5: Roberts to play you?
Speaker 4: Like?
Speaker 2: Do you get to pick who gets Because that's the.
Speaker 5: Biggest question, right we all ask our friends at dinner
Speaker 5: parties if you were ever in a movie, who would.
Speaker 3: You cast to play yourself?
Speaker 2: Because like, I'd probably choose Julia too.
Speaker 4: No, I don't have that kind of power no, here's
Speaker 4: how it works, ladies. Julia Roberts chooses you right, like, like,
Speaker 4: I don't have that kind of power. Like that was
Speaker 4: a phone call that I got one day saying that
Speaker 4: Julia Roberts wants to make this film and wants to
Speaker 4: be when I was like, oh, you have my consent.
Speaker 4: That's how that conversation went.
Speaker 1: Watching something that's so precious to you back and being
Speaker 1: involved in the production of it. Was the movie adaptation
Speaker 1: what you wanted for yourself? Was it something that you
Speaker 1: felt deeply proud of in the way that you feel
Speaker 1: about your own book or were there variations in it
Speaker 1: that you kind of, I don't know, reflect on and
Speaker 1: don't feel as though there as a lie?
Speaker 3: And how do you see the two projects?
Speaker 4: The movie is exactly aligned to the book. They were
Speaker 4: so incredibly loyal to the book, and that's very rare,
Speaker 4: I think. And I wasn't involved in the production at all.
Speaker 4: I've had other instances where things that I've written have
Speaker 4: sold the film rights, and I learned I'm lucky enough
Speaker 4: that I learned very early on to just stay out
Speaker 4: of it because you don't really have any power or control.
Speaker 4: I mean, they don't even really have. The director doesn't
Speaker 4: even have all that much power control. It's such a
Speaker 4: different art form. Like I get to sit in this
Speaker 4: exact room that I'm talking to you guys, with my
Speaker 4: bookshelves and my plants and my and the door shut,
Speaker 4: and this is where I spend my life doing what
Speaker 4: I want, you know, like doing what I want and
Speaker 4: making what I want and creating what I want, all
Speaker 4: within my own imagination. And then when you sell that
Speaker 4: thing to have a film made out of it, you're
Speaker 4: suddenly selling a singular, very intimate art form into a mass,
Speaker 4: collaborative hourt form. Like when you look at think the
Speaker 4: credits rolling up at the end of that film, how
Speaker 4: many people are involved in making that vision. It's entirely
Speaker 4: different from the way that I work. And I happen
Speaker 4: to know that they don't really want me there, you know,
Speaker 4: like they already have enough, the producers and the director
Speaker 4: and the actors already have enough people with opinions. Like
Speaker 4: the last person whose opinion should be there is mine.
Speaker 4: So I stay out of it, and I'm like, i'll
Speaker 4: see you, I'll see it at the premiere, I'll see
Speaker 4: you on the red carpet. I actually just sold that. Recently,
Speaker 4: I'd sold the movie rights to City of Girls, and
Speaker 4: I think the producer was a little shocked because we
Speaker 4: went to lunch and they were trying to say, will
Speaker 4: include you, and I'm like, well, you don't need to
Speaker 4: like it's yours now. You know it's yours now. And
Speaker 4: when you sell something, I feel like you must let
Speaker 4: it go, you know. Just it's like selling a house
Speaker 4: and then driving by the house every day for five
Speaker 4: years and being like, they took down the perg a lot.
Speaker 4: You know, it's not yours anymore. You sold it. And
Speaker 4: so that was the decision I made with You Pray Love,
Speaker 4: was to just like it's yours. You guys, do whatever
Speaker 4: you want. But what they did was so true to
Speaker 4: the book that it ended up working out really nicely.
Speaker 1: Your writing is so deeply personal to you, but it's
Speaker 1: writing something that you've always had an affinity for. Has
Speaker 1: it always been something that's been purposeful for you?
Speaker 4: Yes? Always. I mean there's never I've been really lucky.
Speaker 4: There's never been anything else that I wanted to do.
Speaker 4: And it's been like thirty five years now that it's
Speaker 4: the only thing I've had to do to make a living.
Speaker 4: And that's extraordinary and far beyond what I ever could
Speaker 4: have dreamed. But I was writing the entire time. I
Speaker 4: always tell people it's not that I When people say, like,
Speaker 4: when did you start write, I always say, it's not
Speaker 4: about the fact that I started. It's about the fact
Speaker 4: that I never stopped because I grew up with a
Speaker 4: lot of a lot of your kids are intuitively creative,
Speaker 4: and all the people that I grew up with when
Speaker 4: I was kids, we were all doing, we were all writing,
Speaker 4: we were all singing, we were all dancing, we were
Speaker 4: all creating. And then as people get older, you know,
Speaker 4: they drop one art form after another, and I never dropped.
Speaker 4: I wouldn't drop it. So it's been with me.
Speaker 5: Always, LIZI, you've spoken a lot and written a lot
Speaker 5: about pouring yourself wholeheartedly completely into relationships and giving everything
Speaker 5: to that relationship, and then, as we know, they hadn't
Speaker 5: worked out for you a few times.
Speaker 3: What do you think you've learned.
Speaker 5: From heartbreak and from those experiences, from being in such
Speaker 5: a relationship like that and putting the pieces back together.
Speaker 4: Well, I just want to say I really did the research, y'all,
Speaker 4: Like I, like I have committed I went out there.
Speaker 4: I really did the research out there, all bent to
Speaker 4: find like the platonic ideal of a romantic love, to
Speaker 4: find a soulmate, to find perfect love multiple times, you know,
Speaker 4: and I've tried like every possible kind of combination of
Speaker 4: ways that you can do it, you know, Like I've
Speaker 4: been with men, and I've been with women, and I've
Speaker 4: been in open relationships, and I've been in closed relationships,
Speaker 4: and I've cheated on people and I've been cheated on.
Speaker 4: And I've tried to be with somebody who loved me
Speaker 4: more than I loved them, and been with people who
Speaker 4: I loved more than they loved.
Speaker 7: Me, you know, like like tried to be with people
Speaker 7: I didn't really love but liked, and then tried to
Speaker 7: be with people that I was obsessed with. And I
Speaker 7: really do feel that I put the years in, you know,
Speaker 7: like I really put the years away, and.
Speaker 4: Some of those I really did. Man, I did the work,
Speaker 4: so you don't have to. But I guess, you know,
Speaker 4: we all have to do the work that we have
Speaker 4: to do. This wonderful thing happened after my second divorce.
Speaker 4: My mom wrote to my grandmother, who at the time
Speaker 4: was almost one hundred and said Liz is getting divorced,
Speaker 4: and must have said Liz is getting divorced and my grandmother.
Speaker 4: I was going through my grandmother's things when she died,
Speaker 4: and I found this note that my grandmother wrote back
Speaker 4: to my mother that I cherish, and she said maybe
Speaker 4: Liz just doesn't like being married. And I was like,
Speaker 4: you know, Grandmama, I think you're right. I think that
Speaker 4: maybe all that trying to make it work with like
Speaker 4: one person after another person, after another person after another person,
Speaker 4: and just always finding disappointment somehow, always finding heartbreak or
Speaker 4: disappointment or boredom or ambivalence or shadowedness or devastation, like
Speaker 4: it might be that after thirty five uninterrupted years of
Speaker 4: doing that, the universe was like, are you getting the pattern?
Speaker 4: Are you starting to notice that maybe you just don't
Speaker 4: like this? And have you noticed that you really like
Speaker 4: being by yourself and all of that sort of shatteredness
Speaker 4: and boredom and ambivalence and trying and striving. When I'm
Speaker 4: on my own, I don't have any of that, Like
Speaker 4: I don't.
Speaker 8: Have ambivalence about being on my own, and I always
Speaker 8: have ambivalence about being in a relationship, always like, no
Speaker 8: matter how passionate I am about the person, there's always
Speaker 8: a part of me that's like.
Speaker 4: But is this the right person, the right time, the
Speaker 4: right thing, the right way. And because I'm passionate, and
Speaker 4: because I'm intense, and because I haven't had great boundaries,
Speaker 4: my answer to ambivalence is to just double down. It's like, well,
Speaker 4: just pour more of yourself into the like make it
Speaker 4: work by just pouring even more yourself into this person
Speaker 4: until there's really nothing left of me. So I'm starting
Speaker 4: to get the message that where I seem to really
Speaker 4: bloom is the way I've been living for the last
Speaker 4: almost six years, which is single and solitary and emotionally
Speaker 4: autonomous is the word that I keep using, because all
Speaker 4: of that energy and emotion that I've poured into the
Speaker 4: other I suddenly have freed up. It's like it's like
Speaker 4: a reserver reservoir of like just this massive amount of energy,
Speaker 4: like this massive amount of energy that I'm pouring now
Speaker 4: into my spiritual work, into my creative work. Evert in
Speaker 4: three books in the last six years, like I used
Speaker 4: to used to take me four or five years to
Speaker 4: write one book. But it's because I was shunting and
Speaker 4: draining so much of myself into creating, sustaining, leaving, managing
Speaker 4: these intimate sexual and emotional relationships. I feel like I'm
Speaker 4: having this tremendous renaissance. I have a friend who wrote
Speaker 4: a book about menopause and said that in some African
Speaker 4: culture's menopause is called second childhood because you're not menstruating anymore,
Speaker 4: you're not sexualized, You're free, you know. That's the feeling
Speaker 4: that I feel right now is just I'm going to
Speaker 4: Costa Rica for three months in two days and I
Speaker 4: don't have to ask anyone I can do that. It's
Speaker 4: like I don't have to I don't have to run
Speaker 4: it by anybody. I'm just like, oh, well, you know,
Speaker 4: people invite me to thing and I'm like yeah or no,
Speaker 4: Like there's none of this negotiating, Like it's this so
Speaker 4: emotional autonomy is what I think the second half of
Speaker 4: my life is going to be all about. And I
Speaker 4: think there's a blossoping happening that feels more ecstatically alive
Speaker 4: than anything I've experienced yet.
Speaker 5: The way you just sell the fact that, like you're
Speaker 5: so comfortable in your own skin and in your own
Speaker 5: company it's such a beautiful thing that I don't think
Speaker 5: a lot of people ever get to truly experience.
Speaker 4: Well, traditionally, women have never gotten to experience it. Women's
Speaker 4: jobs throughout history, in all traditional societies, which is all societies,
Speaker 4: have been jobs of service. And it's chilling. And I
Speaker 4: knew this when I wrote the book Committed, and I
Speaker 4: got married again anyway, and I don't regret it because
Speaker 4: I love the twelve years that I spent with my
Speaker 4: Brazilian husband. I loved those years, and then it was
Speaker 4: time to move on. But I did this research when
Speaker 4: I wrote the book Committed, because I had such ambivalents
Speaker 4: about marriage. And it's devastating to see the statistics what
Speaker 4: marriage does to women. You know, there's not a single
Speaker 4: sociological data point at which married women do not fall
Speaker 4: so far below unmarried women. Married women don't live as
Speaker 4: long as single women. They're more likely to report being
Speaker 4: depressed and anxious. They're more heavily medicated on average, they
Speaker 4: weigh ten pounds more, they have more autoimmune diseases, they
Speaker 4: have more addiction. They're more likely to dive suicide or homicide.
Speaker 4: Most likely person to kill them being their partner, like
Speaker 4: it's so freaking grim. And it's because we pour our life,
Speaker 4: our actual life force into the people that we love.
Speaker 4: It may be from just having all this estrogen that
Speaker 4: tells you to nurture, but it's like the job of
Speaker 4: women like biologically and traditionally has been empty into you, know, like,
Speaker 4: out of your body will come life. From your breasts
Speaker 4: will come milk. From your hands will come food for
Speaker 4: the entire family. From your heart will come the love
Speaker 4: that nourishes everyone. And deplete yourself and just be depleted
Speaker 4: into love. Right. And on the other hand, married men
Speaker 4: fucking thrive. It is the best idea that a man
Speaker 4: can have to marry a woman. They will live on
Speaker 4: average seven to ten years longer than single men. All
Speaker 4: the opposite things will happen. They are healthier, they are
Speaker 4: less likely to suffer from addiction, they take care of
Speaker 4: their health better. They're more likely to hold property. Married
Speaker 4: women much less likely to hold money and property than
Speaker 4: single women. Like it's incredible the benefit it's called the
Speaker 4: marriage benefit and balance about how much more strongly a
Speaker 4: marriage benefits men than women. And yet culture because it's
Speaker 4: opposite day into women like as though they are like
Speaker 4: fois gras Geese force these women this story that without
Speaker 4: this union you are incomplete, when in fact be wary.
Speaker 4: I think it's taken me fifty five years and two
Speaker 4: marriages and many many more relationships and watching myself again
Speaker 4: and again and again deplete, deplete, deplete into the other
Speaker 4: and see them shine and rise because I'm uplifting them
Speaker 4: and I'm supporting them, and I'm encouraging them, and I'm
Speaker 4: loving them. The really big important question to ask in
Speaker 4: any relationship is who in this relationship is doing the
Speaker 4: traditional work of the woman, And that includes emotional work
Speaker 4: like who is the one nourishing, encouraging, uplifting, sacrificing, tending, nurturing,
Speaker 4: and what is the cost to the one who is
Speaker 4: doing that. My friend Mark Beck was telling me about
Speaker 4: this sociological debta that says the happiest people in culture
Speaker 4: of married men right at at the top, right underneath
Speaker 4: that unmarried women, right underneath that single men, right underneath
Speaker 4: that married women lowest, lowest, right. So like to know
Speaker 4: that that's true and then to see every fucking romantic
Speaker 4: come in the world, be like, the messaging is completely
Speaker 4: opposite to the reality. And I think that's why so
Speaker 4: many women in relationships feel crazy because they're like, wait,
Speaker 4: I was told that reality was this, But what I'm
Speaker 4: experiencing in my body and in my life and in
Speaker 4: my bank account and in my energy and in my
Speaker 4: moods and in my mind is the opposite of what
Speaker 4: I was told, So I must be crazy, like I
Speaker 4: just I mean, I remember going to couple's therapy with
Speaker 4: my first husband and him saying to the therapist, were
Speaker 4: here because my wife is going crazy?
Speaker 5: Oh wow, Can I just ask that daughta that you
Speaker 5: were just saying, is that linked solely to marriage or
Speaker 5: marriage with kids?
Speaker 4: Only's marriage way worse.
Speaker 2: I'm going to say, the kids haven't even entered the
Speaker 2: chat yet.
Speaker 5: How great.
Speaker 7: It's even worse now that I get to be the crone.
Speaker 4: I feel like I get to walk around and share
Speaker 4: illegal knowledge with young women and be like just so
Speaker 4: you know, like look at the data, you know, and.
Speaker 1: It's it's so interesting to me because I had a
Speaker 1: very similar conversation not with the data points by any means,
Speaker 1: with my mother in law recently. My mother in law,
Speaker 1: she lives with us, She's completely single and has been
Speaker 1: for the better part of fifteen years, and everyone always
Speaker 1: says like, but maybe you'll meet someone, or maybe you'll
Speaker 1: you'll be with someone again, Like, aren't you lonely? Don't
Speaker 1: you want the companionship? All of these tropes that we
Speaker 1: kind of expect you get from a relationship, or the
Speaker 1: expectation that you can't be possibly happy being completely single
Speaker 1: and on your own, because it must equate to loneliness.
Speaker 1: And she said, I have never been more unhappy than
Speaker 1: when I was in relationships. And I don't trust myself
Speaker 1: to make good relationship choices and not commit everything to that.
Speaker 1: She's like, and I just love being a grandma, and
Speaker 1: I love having my friends, and I love having my time.
Speaker 1: She's like, and people cannot comprehend that that is a possibility.
Speaker 1: She's like, people cannot comprehend that I am not lonely.
Speaker 4: They won't let you have it. It's interesting when she
Speaker 4: said I've never been lonelier. I could tell you the
Speaker 4: loneliest I've ever felt, and it was sleeping three inches
Speaker 4: away from somebody. And it's happened multiple times in my life.
Speaker 4: It hasn't happened all the time. It's not like every
Speaker 4: relationship left me lonely, but like there was there have
Speaker 4: been a couple of relationships that I was in. Two
Speaker 4: can be lonelier than one. You know where I was
Speaker 4: so lonely. I was so lonely inside that relationship that
Speaker 4: I remember in one case, my body. What happened in
Speaker 4: all these cases is that my body, because bodies can't lie, Like,
Speaker 4: you can't sell a story to your body. You can't.
Speaker 4: It knows truth that your mind is trying to gaslate
Speaker 4: itself around. Right. My mind was like, I should be happy,
Speaker 4: I should be grateful, I should be this, I should
Speaker 4: be that. And my body was like, I can't live
Speaker 4: in this house. I can't live with this person anymore.
Speaker 4: And then the relationship I was in where I experienced
Speaker 4: such loneliness, I remember waking up in his bed and
Speaker 4: I remember hearing. If my body could speak, what it
Speaker 4: said was, if you don't get me out of this,
Speaker 4: this is not a place for us. We should not
Speaker 4: be here. This is not safe, this is not I loved,
Speaker 4: this is not warm, like we're not being seen, we're
Speaker 4: not being met. And if you don't get me out
Speaker 4: of here, I'm going you either leave or I'm jumping
Speaker 4: out that window, like I will jump us out that
Speaker 4: window to get you out of here because this is
Speaker 4: not okay. But the emotional autonomy that I feel now
Speaker 4: is less about I don't even want to frame it
Speaker 4: where it's like I'm happy because I'm not with someone,
Speaker 4: because that still includes them in the story.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you know what I mean.
Speaker 4: Like to even talk about not having a partner makes
Speaker 4: the story about me not having a partner. And what
Speaker 4: is actually happening in the ecosystem of my spiritual life
Speaker 4: and my physical life and my emotional life is a
Speaker 4: garden is blooming. You know, That's what's actually happening. It's
Speaker 4: not about who isn't here, It's about what is here.
Speaker 5: You have this beautiful friendship for fifteen years with a
Speaker 5: woman named Raya, and you ended up falling in love
Speaker 5: before she very sadly passed away. How did you guys
Speaker 5: find each other? And how did you know that this
Speaker 5: was your person? Why was it different to any other
Speaker 5: relationship you'd had before?
Speaker 4: Raya was so extraordinary. She it took so long for
Speaker 4: us to become what we became, which is the very
Speaker 4: opposite of all my other relationships, which tend to be
Speaker 4: like very fiery and fast and you know, and immediate.
Speaker 4: But we were friends. We were acquaintances, and then we
Speaker 4: were friends, and then she moved to my small town
Speaker 4: and we became neighbors, and then we became best friends.
Speaker 4: And all this was happening while I was married in
Speaker 4: my really contented second marriage, and then gradually we became
Speaker 4: something that we didn't even have a word for anymore,
Speaker 4: because we would say, like, Liz is She would say,
Speaker 4: Liz is my person. You know, Ray is my person.
Speaker 4: And what we weren't saying was this is the love
Speaker 4: of my life, because it would have been extremely inconvenient
Speaker 4: to say that, because it would have meant like, now
Speaker 4: lives have to be flipped again, you know, like and
Speaker 4: chaos has to enter, and you know, contrasts and relationships
Speaker 4: have to end, and you know, every There was just
Speaker 4: no way. And we both loved each other too much
Speaker 4: to do that, I think, to ever put the real
Speaker 4: name on it, and we loved we both loved my
Speaker 4: husband too much to do that, like all of us
Speaker 4: would just we didn't want anything to change. But I
Speaker 4: feel like I always say that after like thirty five,
Speaker 4: I think every woman can write a memoir with the
Speaker 4: same title, and that same title is not exactly what
Speaker 4: I had in mind, or an alternative title is everything changed,
Speaker 4: you know? And then everything changed, and that's the nature
Speaker 4: of reality. Is not exactly what I had in mind,
Speaker 4: and then everything changed. What I loved about her, and
Speaker 4: I loved talking about this because she was, when she
Speaker 4: was at her best, the most fearlessly honest person I've
Speaker 4: ever met, And it was so exciting for me to
Speaker 4: be around her honesty. He would stale her ships straight
Speaker 4: into the teeth of the gale if there was if
Speaker 4: there was any conflict, if she sensed that there was
Speaker 4: something that was being withheld, if she sensed that somebody
Speaker 4: was having a problem with her, like she'd go right
Speaker 4: into it, like she would shoot herself right into the
Speaker 4: person like an arrow. And she used to say, like,
Speaker 4: the sooner we put this on the table and look
Speaker 4: at it, the sooner we can fix it. So like,
Speaker 4: just what is it? What is actually going on? Like
Speaker 4: Raya at her memorial service, a friend of ours said,
Speaker 4: she didn't want your fake self. She wouldn't let you
Speaker 4: have your fake self. She could smell it from like
Speaker 4: three blocks away and she could read it, and she
Speaker 4: was like, dishonesty is happening right now? What is it?
Speaker 4: And she was one of the only people I've ever
Speaker 4: met in my life who actually meant it when she
Speaker 4: said I would rather hear the truth. That's a dangerous
Speaker 4: thing to say, because you might hear the truth and
Speaker 4: you might not like it. But she meant it, and
Speaker 4: she could handle it so beautifully. There was a fortitude
Speaker 4: in her, in the honesty and truth that I've learned
Speaker 4: so much from and that I aspire to be, even
Speaker 4: though I'm much more frightened of the truth than she is.
Speaker 4: Was powerful and incredible. And then she was diagnosed with
Speaker 4: terminal pancreatic and liver cancer, and they gave her six
Speaker 4: months to live, and it was no longer possible for
Speaker 4: any of us, I mean, not her, not me or
Speaker 4: my ex husband to anymore pretend that she and I
Speaker 4: didn't love each other and so we needed to go
Speaker 4: be together.
Speaker 1: What impact did it have on you? And I love
Speaker 1: the way that you speak about her having this truth
Speaker 1: teller in your life. When you, I mean, I've heard
Speaker 1: you describe yourself as a people pleaser and someone who
Speaker 1: kind of wanted that affirmation from other people that you're
Speaker 1: doing a good job. You know that you're almost being
Speaker 1: a good girl. What impact does it have on you
Speaker 1: having someone in your life who is so unapologetically a
Speaker 1: truth teller when you are on the opposite of that
Speaker 1: spectrum and you're a people pleaser.
Speaker 4: I mean, that's why she was sent to me, and
Speaker 4: I was sent to her because she was so frightened
Speaker 4: of creativity and I'm not and I'm scared of people
Speaker 4: and she isn't. I say all this in the present
Speaker 4: tense because people, I don't know. We're still in relationship.
Speaker 4: You know, she didn't happen to be here in a body,
Speaker 4: but we're still in relationship. And that was you know,
Speaker 4: that was what we brought to each other, was that
Speaker 4: I was able to fortify her and show her how
Speaker 4: to be really fearless and courageous with expression and with vulnerability,
Speaker 4: and with creativity and with daring to do something even
Speaker 4: if you might fail, Like that stuff is so easy
Speaker 4: for me, Like it's easy for me to do and
Speaker 4: being honest and directive people was easy for her. What
Speaker 4: was hard for her was easy for me, and vice versa.
Speaker 4: But before she died, she said, I refuse to leave.
Speaker 4: I'm not going to leave until we're both ready, and
Speaker 4: I'm not going to leave until I see you standing
Speaker 4: on your own two feet in every circumstance in your life.
Speaker 4: That's what I want for you. And I wasn't ready
Speaker 4: for her to go because I wasn't sure that I
Speaker 4: could do that. But the impact has been and I'll
Speaker 4: add a caveat too, as I came to no Raya,
Speaker 4: and I saw her toward the end of her life,
Speaker 4: and I saw more of her frailty and her humanity,
Speaker 4: and I saw the places where she was dishonest, you know,
Speaker 4: with her off in others, and you know, the pedestalization
Speaker 4: that I am so often guilty of of, you know,
Speaker 4: just really thinking that somebody's this perfected being who's got
Speaker 4: all the answers, which never is true. One of the
Speaker 4: legacies I've been left with, and what I've been hearing
Speaker 4: in meditation sometimes is you have the opportunity now to
Speaker 4: become what you always thought she was, because she wasn't
Speaker 4: necessarily always what I thought she was, But that same
Speaker 4: value of radical courageous honesty, I can now embody that
Speaker 4: and make that like a singularly important characteristic of my
Speaker 4: own existence. I have the opportunity to do that. Now.
Speaker 5: You mentioned that it took her terminal diagnosis for you
Speaker 5: both to recognize the love that you have for each other,
Speaker 5: like truly, honestly openly recognize the love and want to
Speaker 5: be together. What do you think the messaging and the
Speaker 5: takeaway there is, because I feel like there's a really
Speaker 5: powerful message in that.
Speaker 4: Oh. I just honestly the word that just drifted into
Speaker 4: my mind was innocence, you know, because I think it
Speaker 4: would be tempting to say, like, don't wait, you know,
Speaker 4: till somebody is dying, to tell them your true feelings,
Speaker 4: you know, don't squander Like so much of my life
Speaker 4: I've made really big, bold, radical decisions because of this
Speaker 4: anxiety about not wanting to waste or squander my life
Speaker 4: or miss the opportunity. And it would certainly be tempting
Speaker 4: to have that be the takeaway here. But the takeaway
Speaker 4: for me having gone through that extremely painful experience was
Speaker 4: how terribly innocent we all are. It was such a
Speaker 4: good guess for all of us, and I say all
Speaker 4: of us, all three of us, to try to preserve
Speaker 4: what we cherished for all those years, you know, I
Speaker 4: mean I was in love with Rea for so many years,
Speaker 4: and I loved my husband, and it was such an
Speaker 4: honorable thing that we were trying to do, you know,
Speaker 4: like let's not create chaos, and like let's not dishonor
Speaker 4: the vows we make to people that we love. Like
Speaker 4: there are times where I would vaguely allow myself to
Speaker 4: have the thought like I'm in love with Raya when
Speaker 4: I was married, and then I would just I would
Speaker 4: put it away. But I don't want to criticize myself
Speaker 4: for that because the thought I had was, well, then
Speaker 4: love her, you know, well, then then love her. That's it.
Speaker 4: Just just love her. You don't have to do anything
Speaker 4: about it. But then life presents all of us with
Speaker 4: these none of us get to move through this curriculum
Speaker 4: of life without these like terrible dilemmas.
Speaker 1: I also think it hugely oversimplifies because I think it
Speaker 1: is so easy to say, well, if that's the way
Speaker 1: you feel, like, run after those feelings. But an entire
Speaker 1: life can't be lived off impulses. Not everything that you
Speaker 1: do in life can be off the back of a
Speaker 1: surge of feelings because you want to do the opposite.
Speaker 1: You know there are and I'm not saying that you
Speaker 1: should deny those feelings if they're screaming at you for
Speaker 1: a long time. But I think if we will always
Speaker 1: just driven by the feelings that we have, we would
Speaker 1: probably be also very conflicted around what it is that
Speaker 1: we want and how we feel in life. Something that
Speaker 1: you touched on, and I know it's been something that
Speaker 1: you have spoken about, is that Raya, prior to your meeting,
Speaker 1: she was an addict, and then when she was going
Speaker 1: through her treatment for cancer, part of that was opioid
Speaker 1: prescriptions for the pain medication, which was obviously something that
Speaker 1: can be very triggering for someone who has addiction issues.
Speaker 1: What was it like discovering a different side of a
Speaker 1: person when they aren't the person that you fell in
Speaker 1: love with.
Speaker 4: Yeah, you know, it was pretty shocking. It was pretty
Speaker 4: shocking because Raya was the person who I trusted more
Speaker 4: than anyone I've ever trusted in my entire life. The
Speaker 4: feeling that I would have somatically for years whenever Raya
Speaker 4: walked into the room, was I'm safe, Raya is here,
Speaker 4: you know, Like that's how my body registered her. That
Speaker 4: was the non lie that my body told is now
Speaker 4: we're safe, Like this is our safe person. And to
Speaker 4: watch as the person who I experienced as being the
Speaker 4: safest person in the world devolve into a raging and
Speaker 4: I use that word in all definitions, a raging junkie
Speaker 4: very quickly and to descend. You know, I had never
Speaker 4: known Raya when she was a speedball heroin and cocaine addict.
Speaker 4: I'd heard stories, and the stories were amazing, but they
Speaker 4: were kind of like the heroic stories of I survived
Speaker 4: this thing. It wasn't the true ugliness of what that
Speaker 4: actually looks like and what it does to a person's
Speaker 4: spirit and what it does to a person's personality. I
Speaker 4: remember her her nephew during the time that she was
Speaker 4: using at the end of her life, saying, I wish
Speaker 4: she was a nicer drug addict, because some are nice,
Speaker 4: some are just sort of nice and tragic, because she
Speaker 4: was not a nice drug adct. She was a mean
Speaker 4: drug addict, and she was a narcissistic drug addict, and
Speaker 4: she was a cruel and demanding drug addict. And adding
Speaker 4: to that the immediacy and the death that she was facing,
Speaker 4: which eroded her in so many ways, but it also
Speaker 4: empowered her with a case of what I now know
Speaker 4: in the rooms of twelve Step they call like a
Speaker 4: massive case of the fuckets, Like she got a really
Speaker 4: big case of the fuckets, and nobody could blame her
Speaker 4: because she was facing a few months left to live.
Speaker 4: So there was an element at which we were all like, well,
Speaker 4: look go for it, like ride the dragon one more time?
Speaker 4: Who cares? Like you know you're dying anyway. But then
Speaker 4: she didn't die. She ended up living like a year
Speaker 4: longer than anybody had expected, and a year as a rage.
Speaker 4: Like it was a nightmare. You know. In the Zen tradition,
Speaker 4: they say, I got a back up and look at
Speaker 4: the sort of spiritual view of this, They say, like
Speaker 4: going back to this idea of not exactly what I
Speaker 4: had in mind. And then things changed, And the Zen say,
Speaker 4: first they pulled the rug out from under you, and
Speaker 4: then they pull the floor out from under the rug,
Speaker 4: and then they pull the ground out from under the floor,
Speaker 4: and now you're ready to begin. Now you're ready to
Speaker 4: begin your spiritual journey. There's a whole ground under your feet, right,
Speaker 4: And that was the feeling was I had expected to
Speaker 4: lose her to death, but I had not expected to
Speaker 4: experience her addiction and to lose her before I lost
Speaker 4: her to the nightmare that is addiction and It was
Speaker 4: one of the most shattering things I've ever been through.
Speaker 4: I mean, it took years for me to recover from that.
Speaker 5: That's it's pretty powerful to say you lost her before
Speaker 5: you lost her, And I guess that's what addiction is is, right,
Speaker 5: like you're already mourning someone the person that you know
Speaker 5: before they leave. That actually turns everything we're ever taught
Speaker 5: on its head as well. Like we're taught when you
Speaker 5: get unwell to live the healthiest, best life you possibly can.
Speaker 5: And you hear all these people that do that, they
Speaker 5: don't go down the holistic path and they're getting the
Speaker 5: treatments and it doesn't work. And here Rayer is fuck it,
Speaker 5: going to go hardcore on the drugs and she doesn't
Speaker 5: die like she she continues to extend her life.
Speaker 2: And I wonder if that's got.
Speaker 3: Something to do.
Speaker 2: It's insane, Like it's insane. It goes against everything we've
Speaker 2: ever been told.
Speaker 4: I mean, I remember the doctor at one point saying
Speaker 4: like I don't know how she is alive and not
Speaker 4: just alive, but like alive and being a motherfucker like
Speaker 4: alive and being like a problem, you know, like alive
Speaker 4: and like like a problem to everybody, and and he's
Speaker 4: I'm like, welcome to my world. Like, I don't know
Speaker 4: how she's still He's like, how can someone survive on
Speaker 4: a diet of whiskey, cocaine, opioids, candy, beer, and cigarettes
Speaker 4: was essentially what she was eating, you know, And like,
Speaker 4: but I think what she was surviving on was I'm
Speaker 4: going to do it my way, which I actually sort
Speaker 4: of also love that she was like, no, you're not
Speaker 4: going to give me a green juice it that way.
Speaker 4: I mean, that's not how Ray lived, you know. So
Speaker 4: there was something that was kind of epic about it,
Speaker 4: even it was as it was happening, except for that
Speaker 4: it turned into a disaster for me because you know,
Speaker 4: I was having to try to manage an unmanageable, dangerous,
Speaker 4: exploitative sort of psychopath. Was what it felt like. Suddenly,
Speaker 4: if there's ever been a lesson in like things will change,
Speaker 4: you know, like we all just long to create these
Speaker 4: lives where you can be anchored in your life and grounded.
Speaker 4: And I feel like, I don't know, my curriculum here
Speaker 4: in Earth school is like I get grounded. I'm like, oh,
Speaker 4: I'm doing this really well. Yeah, I figured out and
Speaker 4: then the ground changes and the planets flipped, the sun explodes,
Speaker 4: and it's like, I don't know how to live in
Speaker 4: this world. You know, I figured out how to live
Speaker 4: in that world, and I think that's just maybe what
Speaker 4: life on Earth is.
Speaker 1: You've written so much about loss in relationships, you know,
Speaker 1: about divorce, about the untethering of two humans. But what
Speaker 1: was this experience and learning about loss but through grief,
Speaker 1: about through actually losing someone tangibly they're not here anymore?
Speaker 1: What does that taught you about grief and loss?
Speaker 4: So humbling? I mean, I will say this, I don't
Speaker 4: know that grief can be done right. I have a
Speaker 4: friend right now who just had a terrible sudden loss
Speaker 4: in her family, and she called me and she said,
Speaker 4: I just want the syllabus, Like tell me what I
Speaker 4: have to read, Like, tell me what podcasts I have
Speaker 4: to listen to, tell me what Ted talk I have
Speaker 4: to watch, so that I I mean, essentially, so that
Speaker 4: I don't have to feel what I'm feeling, you know,
Speaker 4: don't like, what do I have to do and not
Speaker 4: go to the bottom of hell? Are there any hammocks
Speaker 4: along the way where I can take or breather and
Speaker 4: my experience with grief is that the bad news seems
Speaker 4: to be that you have to go to the bottom
Speaker 4: of hell. The good news seems to be that there
Speaker 4: is a bottom, you know. I mean, that's what Dante's
Speaker 4: Inferno teaches us. It's like, you keep going down, and
Speaker 4: you keep going down, and you keep going down, and
Speaker 4: it can't possibly get worse, and then it gets worse,
Speaker 4: and it gets worse and it gets worse, and in
Speaker 4: the end, you know, he comes out of hell by
Speaker 4: going through the lake at the bottom of the hell
Speaker 4: that is in the center of Satan's heart, like the
Speaker 4: middle of the worst thing. And it's such an easy
Speaker 4: cliche to say that the only way out is through,
Speaker 4: but the only way out is through it. And I think,
Speaker 4: I'm I've spent my life trying to find other ways out.
Speaker 4: Surely there's got to be another There's got to be
Speaker 4: some sort of tack that I can figure out so
Speaker 4: that I don't have to experience grief at this level.
Speaker 4: And I had to experience grief at the deepest, deepest level,
Speaker 4: and it was so humbling. But my friend Gigi, who
Speaker 4: is actually Raya's ex wife and a beloved friend, taught
Speaker 4: me this phrase and She called it a bow down moment,
Speaker 4: and she's like, when the waves of grief come, because
Speaker 4: they come in waves, surrender immediately to it, like, don't
Speaker 4: try to evade it. You can't. It's like a tidal
Speaker 4: wave is coming. You get under it, like get under it.
Speaker 4: And the way you get under it is that you
Speaker 4: literally get on the ground. We also called it starfishing.
Speaker 4: You get on the ground, on your face, with your
Speaker 4: limbs out as low as you can get, and you
Speaker 4: just bow down before the god of grief and you
Speaker 4: let it take you. And you just let it and
Speaker 4: you just sob and you wail and you clean, and
Speaker 4: you don't resist because the resistance actually just makes it worse.
Speaker 4: And the really weird thing about the nature of grief
Speaker 4: is that you think, you're like, I'm not going to
Speaker 4: be able to survive, how hard I'm feeling this, And
Speaker 4: then twenty minutes passes, maybe, and the sobbing diminishes, and
Speaker 4: then you're like, I need to go to bathroom, bell
Speaker 4: like I need to get a glass of water, I
Speaker 4: have to have a sandwich. Like something changes, it moves
Speaker 4: through you, and then you have to stand up and
Speaker 4: go about your life until the next one. Comes. And
Speaker 4: I think I've heard a beautiful description of depression, that
Speaker 4: depression is the refusal to grieve. What depression is is
Speaker 4: like I will shut down rather than feel these terrible, terrible,
Speaker 4: terrible feelings. But I actually want to find this quote.
Speaker 4: I just sent this to my friend by a fella
Speaker 4: named Stephen Jenkinson who wrote a book called Grief Walker,
Speaker 4: and he said, grief is not a feeling. Grief is
Speaker 4: a skill. And the twin of grief as a skill
Speaker 4: of life is the skill of being able to praise
Speaker 4: or love life, which means wherever you find one authentically done,
Speaker 4: the other is close at hand. Depression is I won't grieve,
Speaker 4: and I also won't live. I will control the wild
Speaker 4: ride by not allowing myself to be fully human. And
Speaker 4: I think that I didn't experience depression after Raya died.
Speaker 4: I've experienced depression in my life. I experienced nassid grief
Speaker 4: like level ten grief, but I didn't experience depression because
Speaker 4: I experienced grief.
Speaker 5: Well, this might be an unusual question, but going off
Speaker 5: what you've described that last sort of year of Ray's
Speaker 5: life in your relationship, was there also a complicated level
Speaker 5: of relief that came. I don't want to cause any
Speaker 5: offense by that, but I imagine you would have wanted her
Speaker 5: to live forever. But the state she was in, with
Speaker 5: the addiction and what was happening, it doesn't sound like
Speaker 5: your relationship was quite where it should have been anyway.
Speaker 5: Was there sort of a level of relief that was
Speaker 5: mixed in with the grief?
Speaker 4: One hundred percent. Yeah, I want to take you out
Speaker 4: of the awkwardness of feeling like, no, it wasn't even
Speaker 4: a complicated amount of grief. And I say that openly
Speaker 4: in order to normalize when people have that feeling. I
Speaker 4: mean people who have dealt with even people who are
Speaker 4: in addicts, people who have been caregivers and caretakers of
Speaker 4: people who are dying long, painful, extended deaths where there
Speaker 4: is a feeling of caregiver fatigue and caregiver overwhelmed. Where
Speaker 4: there does you do reach this moment where you're like,
Speaker 4: if this person doesn't die soon, I am going to
Speaker 4: die soon. I can't keep going at this pace and
Speaker 4: giving it this pace. And people always feel guilty about
Speaker 4: saying that they were relieved, and they always want to
Speaker 4: couch it by saying, well, I'm just relieved because their
Speaker 4: suffering is over and they're in a better place. Dude,
Speaker 4: your suffering is also over and you are going to
Speaker 4: be you know, like And it doesn't mean that grief
Speaker 4: won't follow that feeling of relief, but that's one of
Speaker 4: the ingredients, is relief, like you've been freed by this
Speaker 4: person's death. If it was a long, painful, agonizing called death,
Speaker 4: often that is the case. That doesn't make you a monster.
Speaker 1: I do want to go back to asking one question.
Speaker 1: We mentioned it, but then I don't think you gave
Speaker 1: closure to it completely. You said that Raya had said
Speaker 1: that she didn't want to leave until you were able
Speaker 1: to stand on your own two feet. You had this
Speaker 1: chance of embodying all the things that you saw in
Speaker 1: her or that you thought that she was in yourself.
Speaker 3: Do you feel as though you have achieved that?
Speaker 4: You know, I'll work backwards from it. I feel as
Speaker 4: though she has left, like when I said before, like
Speaker 4: we're still in a relationship. I feel her less now
Speaker 4: than I have ever felt her. And at times that's
Speaker 4: disturbing because when she in the year or two after
Speaker 4: she died, especially, she was so present, like she was
Speaker 4: as present as you are right now, like we could.
Speaker 4: She was so present and it wasn't just for me.
Speaker 4: I mean, she was such a vivid person. And the
Speaker 4: thing about really vivid people is that I think their
Speaker 4: vividness remains for a long time after they're gone. But like,
Speaker 4: she was here, you know, she was here, and she
Speaker 4: was inside my head and she was we were in
Speaker 4: constant dialogue. I turned to her for guidance, you know,
Speaker 4: I would say, like, don't go. Don't you dare, Like,
Speaker 4: don't you dare, like vaporize off into the cosmos and
Speaker 4: become music and leave me here with all these motherfucking
Speaker 4: assholes on this dying planet to figure this shit out.
Speaker 4: Like I need you. You can't you like, like don't
Speaker 4: you don't get to go? You know, And also you
Speaker 4: owe me because you were such an asshole for the
Speaker 4: last six months of your life, Like you better stick
Speaker 4: around and help me. I need your assistance, like and
Speaker 4: she did, you know, Like I felt like she really
Speaker 4: honored that and that she was here, and certainly, like
Speaker 4: in the last year, I can't find her, you know,
Speaker 4: like I can't. I can't feel her and I can't
Speaker 4: find her. And actually I'm really grateful that we had
Speaker 4: this conversation because you reminding me like us going on
Speaker 4: this threat that we've gone on. It's sort of my
Speaker 4: own answer of like, oh, she said, I'm not going
Speaker 4: to leave until I see you standing on your own
Speaker 4: two feet in every circumstance of your life is left.
Speaker 4: I must be standing on my own two feet in
Speaker 4: every circumstance of my life. That's so nice.
Speaker 3: She'd be really proud of yourself.
Speaker 4: I think so too.
Speaker 3: That's a nice realization.
Speaker 4: Yeah, because it is really beautiful.
Speaker 5: But you recently have gone through a bit of a
Speaker 5: life change. You've shaved your head, You've given up the fellers,
Speaker 5: the injectables, the botox, You're going to Costa Rica for
Speaker 5: a couple of months.
Speaker 3: What's that about?
Speaker 2: What has changed in your life to get you to
Speaker 2: this point.
Speaker 4: I've been wanting to shave my head for decades. It's
Speaker 4: a fantasy that I've had for such a long time,
Speaker 4: and I always think about it. I also just want
Speaker 4: to make really clear, like I like didn't have the
Speaker 4: greatest hair, Like honestly, I'm vain enough that had I
Speaker 4: been gifted with the hair that I felt I deserved
Speaker 4: in life, that had I been given a forgeous main
Speaker 4: no hair. I doubt that I would have been quite
Speaker 4: so like fuck it, you know, I'm just going to
Speaker 4: shave it. So it's I always had difficult hair and
Speaker 4: problematic hair, so so part of it is just the
Speaker 4: relief of not wanting to deal with that anymore. But
Speaker 4: tons of stuff in my face there for about ten years,
Speaker 4: I did like really good, you know, pretty good. One
Speaker 4: bad case of botox, but for the most part, like
Speaker 4: you know, I was. I was doing it well enough
Speaker 4: that I looked good and I looked pretty, and it
Speaker 4: seemed to be very important that I look pretty, and
Speaker 4: it seemed to be very important that I stay looking pretty.
Speaker 4: And I remember when my last book came out with
Speaker 4: The New York Times did a profile of me, and
Speaker 4: the woman said, like, you know, Gilbert is whatever age
Speaker 4: I was forty eight, she's forty eight, but she looks
Speaker 4: ten years younger than she is. And I remember feeling
Speaker 4: that to be like a trophy victory, you know, It's
Speaker 4: like I want to meddle. The New York Times said
Speaker 4: I looked ten years younger than I am, and that
Speaker 4: seemed to be extremely important. And also as a public figure,
Speaker 4: I was like, I'm going to be people are going
Speaker 4: to be looking at me. I'm on TV a lot
Speaker 4: like I can't have these lines. Though that all seemed
Speaker 4: that all seemed very, very very true, and it also
Speaker 4: felt very true that I felt better when I looked better,
Speaker 4: and so it felt like it was an act of
Speaker 4: self care. So I don't want to demean anybody who's
Speaker 4: doing those things or for whom those things feel true.
Speaker 4: But something shifted in the last couple of years where
Speaker 4: that just doesn't seem true anymore. All of those things
Speaker 4: just don't feel true. And part of it was that
Speaker 4: I spent a week traveling actually across Costa Rica with
Speaker 4: a woman in her eighties who is a great hero
Speaker 4: of mine. And actually I took a road trip with
Speaker 4: three eighty year olds and it was amazing. I was like,
Speaker 4: I'll be your tour guide in Costa Rica. I'll be
Speaker 4: your driver. I've got the jeep, you know, like, let's go.
Speaker 4: And they're all amazing people. And none of them have
Speaker 4: done any work on themselves physically, I mean what we
Speaker 4: define is like cosmetic work. And they were all so
Speaker 4: gorgeous and I was walking The wild thing is I
Speaker 4: was walking down the street in Nosara, Costa Rica with
Speaker 4: these two women, one Argentinian, this eighty four year old
Speaker 4: and this eighty three year old, both incredibly spiritual beings,
Speaker 4: incredibly creative beings with passionate, beautiful, amazing women. And we
Speaker 4: were walking side by side, and the man walked by
Speaker 4: us and said, are you sisters? And I was fifty
Speaker 4: fifty four and they were eighty four, and I said yes,
Speaker 4: and I was never did I feel so honored that
Speaker 4: somebody thought that they were my sisters. And they have white,
Speaker 4: like full on white hair covered with wrinkles, and being
Speaker 4: in their presence was an awakening where I just thought, like,
Speaker 4: it's a funny thing to be afraid of getting older
Speaker 4: or looking old. That's a funny thing to be afraid of.
Speaker 4: It suddenly became like no, like literally, why is that scary?
Speaker 4: Why is it scary to look at your face and
Speaker 4: see line? Like why did I experience is that for
Speaker 4: so many years as frightful? Like that seems like a
Speaker 4: weird thing to be frightened up? And I just lost
Speaker 4: my fear, Like I lost my fear, and you know,
Speaker 4: like I look when I shaved my head and stopped
Speaker 4: doing bowtops, I instantly looked I looked ten years older
Speaker 4: than I looked three years ago. But I find that
Speaker 4: I don't care, and I actually find that not to
Speaker 4: get like Tou wou. But my higher power, what I
Speaker 4: choose to call God, has said to me, it's extremely
Speaker 4: important that you don't do those things. Like I've heard
Speaker 4: this in meditation now, it's extremely important that you don't
Speaker 4: do those things. And it's extremely important that you go
Speaker 4: out in public on TV with no makeup and lines
Speaker 4: in your face and no hair. We really need you
Speaker 4: to do that. And it's extremely important for you that
Speaker 4: you look in the mirror and look at what you
Speaker 4: look like, and that you that this is what fifty
Speaker 4: five looks like. And I accept and believe. But that's
Speaker 4: extremely important. So that's my that's my vibe.
Speaker 5: Well, we've even seen, like even just recently, the level
Speaker 5: of media attention that Pamela Anderson has received just because
Speaker 5: she decided to stop wearing makeup so brave. It's insanity
Speaker 5: the fact that we as a society are so shocked
Speaker 5: to see a woman turn up as her natural self
Speaker 5: with no makeup and no botox.
Speaker 1: It takes so much work to unpick those values. It's
Speaker 1: a lifetime of values that we have been conditioned to
Speaker 1: believe that. And I know it's a sliding scale, like
Speaker 1: some people place more value on it than others. But
Speaker 1: I think all of us as women have this feeling
Speaker 1: of like, well, we will be more liked, we will
Speaker 1: be more loved, we will be more pleasant, we will
Speaker 1: be more accepted successful the better we look, you know.
Speaker 3: And it's and that condition.
Speaker 4: You are not wrong.
Speaker 1: Unpicking it is yeah, I mean you know it shouldn't
Speaker 1: be something that you're like, Wow, you should be so
Speaker 1: proud of yourself, but really you should. People don't get
Speaker 1: to that place of being able to unpick those society values.
Speaker 4: Yeah, you're not wrong. All of those things that you
Speaker 4: said are true. Like the prettier you are and the
Speaker 4: lighter your hair color is and the smoother your skin is,
Speaker 4: the more you will be approved of. It is true.
Speaker 4: And I don't get a shit. You are the best, Okay,
Speaker 4: I don't care. I deeply approve of myself these days.
Speaker 1: Liz, you have incredible perspective in life and I have
Speaker 1: loved so deeply speaking to you. For everybody who's listening
Speaker 1: to this, who is based in here in Australia, most
Speaker 1: about listeners are you're coming out here soon?
Speaker 3: What does that look like for you?
Speaker 1: How can people hear more, read more.
Speaker 3: And get as much Liz as they could possibly have?
Speaker 4: Oh that's so sweet. If you go to my website,
Speaker 4: you can see my tourist schedule for coming to Australia
Speaker 4: and New Zealand in February and so making a bunch
Speaker 4: of stops and a bunch of cities I actually have.
Speaker 4: I used to go to Australia all the time, like
Speaker 4: every year for a really long time because my ex
Speaker 4: husband's kids lived there, still live there, and I've spent
Speaker 4: a ton of time in Australia. But the last time
Speaker 4: I was in Australia was right before the pandemic. And
Speaker 4: I mean right before the pandemic. I mean I was.
Speaker 4: I was on Bondi Beach in an Airbnb and I
Speaker 4: jumped in a cab and went to the airport without
Speaker 4: even a plane ticket and was like, I got to
Speaker 4: get home because the President said they're closing the borders
Speaker 4: right before the pandemic. So I'm excited to come back
Speaker 4: in a slightly less frantic way. But the really cool
Speaker 4: thing is I'm going to be teaching. There's a creativity
Speaker 4: workshop that I teach that I've taught for years all
Speaker 4: over the world. And don't be frightened of the word creativity.
Speaker 4: It's not. You don't have to be a quote unquote
Speaker 4: creative person to come. It's really about teaching everything that
Speaker 4: I've learned about what I call creative living, which is
Speaker 4: not so much about what you produce, but about how
Speaker 4: you live and a style of living that is based
Speaker 4: more on curiosity than fear. Anyway, I'm going to be
Speaker 4: teaching my creativity workshop in Sydney. It's the I've never
Speaker 4: taught it in Australia or New Zealand before, so that's exciting.
Speaker 4: So come to that. But then I'll also be giving
Speaker 4: talks where we tell stories and I take Q and
Speaker 4: A from the audience, and it's going to be lovely.
Speaker 4: It's always it's always lovely, and it's always better if
Speaker 4: you're there.
Speaker 1: So come, say, go and spend all your money and
Speaker 1: make sure that you go and see it.
Speaker 5: Well, I think we'll spend our money and come and
Speaker 5: see you as well. Thanks so much, Lias, Thank you
Speaker 5: for thank you. Yes, well we leave in Bondai, so
Speaker 5: if you want to ride back, we'll have a coffee
Speaker 5: in Budai.
Speaker 3: We will have it. It'll be really nice to catch up.
Speaker 4: You are both really lovely and brilliant and delightful to
Speaker 4: talk to, and this time has passed so swiftly and
Speaker 4: easily being with you. So thank you for just being
Speaker 4: as great as you are. Kaberam kamaboo.