I just watched Eat, Pray, Love this past weekend with my daughter. I have also read the book. I remember when I first read the book was the last time I was preparing to leave my H, about 3-4 years ago. There are parts of the book/movie that are just as poignant now as they were then. Maybe you can get something out of these quotes as well. The book is really good, btw, particularly if you are in the process of trying to make some changes in your life.
Below is a quote from a letter Liz wrote to her ex-husband:
":)ear David,
We haven’t had any communication in a while, and it’s given me time I needed to think.
Remember when you said we should live with each other and be unhappy so we could be happy? Consider it a testimony to how much I love you that I spent so long pouring myself into that offer, trying to make it work.
But my friend took me to the most amazing place the other day, it’s called the Augusteum. Octavian Augustus built it to house his remains. When the barbarians came, they trashed it along with everything else. The great Augustus, Rome’s first true great Emperor, how could he have imagined that Rome, the whole world as far as he was concerned, would one day be in ruins?
It’s one of the quietest and loneliest places in Rome. The city has grown up, around it over centuries, feels like a precious womb, like a heartache you won’t let go of…as it hurts too good. We all want things to stay the same, David. Settle for living in misery because we’re afraid of change, of things crumbling to ruins.
Then I looked around this place, at the chaos it’s endured, the way it’s been adapted, burnt, pillaged then found a way to build itself back up again and I was reassured. Maybe my life hasn’t been so chaotic, it’s just the world that is and the only real trap is getting attached to any of it.
Ruin is a gift. Ruin is the road to transformation.
Even in this eternal city, the Augusteum showed me that we must always be prepared for endless waves of transformation.
Both of us deserve better than staying together because we’re afraid we’ll be destroyed if we don’t."
Elizabeth Gilbert (Julia Roberts), Eat, Pray, Love
Then there's this... .
This is the line David told Liz in Eat, Pray, Love:
"What if we just acknowledged that we have a bad relationship, and we stuck it out, anyway? What if we admitted that we make each other nuts, we fight constantly and hardly ever have sex, but we can't live without each other, so we deal with it? And then we could spend our lives together -- in misery, but happy to not be apart."
I hate to admit that I have been living under the above mentality for many years. I have acknowledged to myself that I am in a bad relationship but also giving my H credit for the fact that he loves me and the kids the best he knows how and that I either have to accept that or leave, because he will not ever figure out how to love me in the way I need to be loved. Never.
“In desperate love, we always invent the characters of our partners, demanding they be what we need of them, and then feeling devastated when they refuse to perform the role we created in the first place.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love
“The only thing more unthinkable than leaving was staying; the only thing more impossible than staying was leaving. I didn't want to destroy anything or anybody. I just wanted to slip quietly out the back door, without causing any fuss or consequences, and then not stop running until I reached Greenland.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love
THIS... .THIS is what I have lived for the past 23 years! I have always known that I should not be with H. But I was afraid to let him go, to give up on him. Realizing that I couldn't stay with him, but also that I couldn't leave him. How does one reconcile those two things? I have to think about who I am staying for and who I am leaving for. Staying... .for him. Leaving... .for me. In order to save my own live, I must choose me. There is no other option.
“I'm choosing happiness over suffering, I know I am. I'm making space for the unknown future to fill up my life with yet-to-come surprises.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love
“Listen to me. Someday you're gonna look back on this moment of your life as such a sweet time of grieving. You'll see that you were in mourning and your heart was broken, but your life was changing.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love
