I went to see 'Eat, Pray, Love' on Friday. The premise of the story is a woman (I guess in her 30s like me) who just couldn't live the life she had created for herself anymore so she gets a divorce and takes off and spends a year in Rome, India, and Bali.
Just like her (and many other thirty-somethings), I found myself suffocating...f*%&ing suffocating...in the life I made for myself. I did it all pretty much by the book: met a "good man" (no kids, college-educated, solid work history, handsome, disease-free), married him, had his child a few years later, bought a house in the suburbs, put my dreams on the shelf and became fully preoccupied with being the perfect wife to someone totally wrong for me. Totally wrong for me? How could I have missed that minor detail? How could I have based my life and every detail of my existence around him? How could I have made myself so dreadfully unhappy? No one picked that god-awful husband for me. No one picked the job, the house, the level of education I attained, the car I drove, the places I traveled but ME. I made all the decisions that led to my unhappiness, my sheer misery. Who could I blame? He may have been then nutcase causing me to want to vomit daily but he sure wasn't gonna accept any responsibility for 11 years of misery since he never put a gun to my head demanding my hand in matrimony.
And there you are left to begin the self-loathing and the hard decision-making: You either go thru the rest of your life miserable or you grab the basic necessities you need to survive and you RUN! You run away from it all as fast you can until you are totally out of breath, too far away to consider going back, and can finally get your bearings and just breathe fresh air of freedom. You are left alone with yourself to begin the process of self -forgiveness, self examination and then re-selection.
Re-selection is where I am now.
I've learned that even great decisions sometimes become mundane and temporarily dissatisfying but less-than-great decisions about things we have to do daily (work & love primarily) WILL eat you alive. So now I only do (love/work) the things I truly enjoy and pray God provides the security.
In the 2.5 years on my own, so far so good ;)
Julia Roberts, although a little dry, totally delivers a great lesson about how it is our duty to design our own lives as we see fit by being brave enough to be loyal to our our truth.
Enjoy the movie!
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