Stewarding My Soul: A Conversation with Elizabeth Gilbert, Part I
On turning people into your personal god, confronting bullies, truth as the safest place in the world, compliance and codependency, and the lies we tell ourselves about ourselves.
Intimate conversations with our greatest heart-centered minds.
Anyone familiar with
knows something about her potent, dreamlike love story with Rayya Elias. Back in 2000, Rayya, a cocaine and heroin addict in recovery, cuts Liz’s hair, over time a friendship grows, then Rayya’s life bottoms out and Liz suggests Rayya leave New York City and come live in the small magical converted church she’s bought in New Jersey, which Rayya does, Liz and Rayya become supersonic, go-everywhere-together (including Liz’s book tours in place of her husband) best friends, in 2016 Rayya’s diagnosed with incurable cancer, Liz owns up to being deeply in love with Rayya to which Rayya responds, “my beautiful baby, why did it take you so long to come to me?”, Liz leaves her husband and she and Rayya share a year and a half together, a year more than the doctors promised, and then Rayya dies.All of that is beautifully and tenderly and devotedly rendered in Liz’s new memoir, All The Way To The River: Love, Loss, and Liberation. Their love, their playfulness, their messiness, their friendship, their passion, their vulnerability leaps off the page.
What’s also in the memoir, is that when the pain from Rayya’s cancer becomes unbearable, the doctors start her on morphine, despite Rayya’s history with opioid addiction. She’s dying, they think. She won’t relapse now.
“Let the dragon roll one more time,” Rayya says when she pops her first morphine pill. And roll it did. What follows is harrowing and brutal and, at times, hard to read. Liz lays herself bare with such candor in these pages. With Rayya’s blessing, she does the same with her beloved. She turns their relationship inside out with empathy, tenderness, and precision: it’s like watching a treasured timepiece be taken apart and reassembled. In the end, Liz recognizes she too is an addict, for her it’s sex and love, and codependency. After Rayya’s death, she starts on her own path of recovery, which continues today.
This book was especially meaningful for me as I knew Rayya back in the day. We met when I was nineteen; she was the best friend of my boyfriend-then-husband and our lives became inextricably tangled for decades. These were the years that Rayya was deep in her addiction; it was not an easy time and whilst Rayya and I tried to find peace with one another, we also fought a tremendous amount. After her gorgeous memoir, Harley Loco, was published we found one another again and did, at last, reach a place of tenderness and understanding. Life is full of surprises!
Once more, Liz and I got on such a roll it was impossible to fit all of Liz’s wisdom and humor and beauty in one post so I’ve split it into two. You’re reading Part I. Part II will post tomorrow.
Of course, I loved speaking with Liz. Her warmth radiates through every word. I look forward to hearing your thoughts in the comments!
xJane
⭐️ Liz is generously gifting three readers an autographed copy of All The Way To The River! If you’d like to be one of the recipients, please add “RIVER” after your comment. The winners will be chosen at random on Monday, September 15th and notified by Substack Direct Chat. I’m excited for all of you! (Shipping is limited to the United States) ⭐️
You captured Rayya so beautifully on the page. She was exactly the Rayya I knew, but for the first portion of the book, she’s in a happier, more vibrant time in her life. You gave me such a gift allowing me to spend time with her in this place.
Not a lot of people have read this book yet, and it's incredibly meaningful for me to hear somebody who knew Rayya before I knew Rayya, and who knew a Rayya that I had never met. During the time we were friends and then the sunny part of our love story, that Rayya was a myth: the unleashed, full junkie, enforcer, narcissist, all of it, I never saw that in her. But you did. You had to tussle with that, and wrestle against that being. And I ultimately did as well. This is not at all what I wanted to do, and I'm sure it wasn't what you wanted to do either. She was an incredible challenger.
But to hear that you recognized the person in the book as the person who you knew, is so touching to me. One of the things that made it take so long for me to write this book was a deep creative and spiritual doubt as to whether I could get Rayya described. She’s not a freaking simple person to describe, full of contradictions, full of extreme paradox. So it means a lot to me to hear you say, “Yes, that's Rayya. I recognize that person.”
Liz, like, really-really recognize her. I guess her soul, her essence, was unchanged and you captured that.
The first time we talked about my relationship with Rayya the conversation tilted toward the difficulties of Rayya, but there were difficulties to me, too. I was very controlling. I thought I could control my husband into not getting as far along the path as Rayya. So I don't think I was the easiest person for Rayya, because I was increasingly saying “no.”
You were doing what I was doing: you were trying to control an uncontrollable force.
Totally.
When you do that, when I do that, when any of us do that, it does not bring out the better angels of our nature. It doesn't go well for us and it doesn't go well for anybody else. It takes us far away from our true essential nature. That's what addiction does, too. It takes people from their true essential nature and brings us into these hell realms.
At the time, I did think I was having a good influence on my husband, because he didn't end up on the streets. He didn't end up shooting heroin. Et cetera. But I look back and realize that had absolutely nothing to do with me.
I have a feeling when we all meet up in the boardroom for the afterlife review, there's going to be nothing but laughter. One of the things that we're going be rolling on the floor laughing at is what we thought we were controlling, what we thought we were influencing, who we thought we were helping, who we thought we were saving; all this absolutely distorted, outsized, deeply-egoic-disguised-as-empathic sense of our own power over others in the world.
Yes!
Realizing: Oh, Lord, I literally was powerless over everybody. And I was burning this enormous amount of energy trying to flex some sort of power that I never ever had when I could have been doing so many other things: I could have been loving someone, I could have been creating something, I could have been sitting drinking tea looking at the wind move through the tree boughs. I could have been hanging out with an animal. I could have been cooking a meal.
Instead, I was taking a force I do not possess to try to influence a force that could not be controlled What a colossally ridiculous way to spend my life.
And colossally exhausting.
Yes! No wonder we're all so tired!
A pivotal moment in the story of you and Rayya comes when Rayya became your bully. There was a way you kind of were idolizing Rayya and then, for a stretch, Rayya became abusive. The person that you thought was your protector became the person that you had to protect yourself from. And stand up to.
I’ve had a parallel situation in my life, from god to bully, and after standing up to them fully, including being willing to walk away, I became a completely different person. I think that's true of you, yes?
Yes. The only language I would change in what you said was “you kind of idolized Rayya.” Like, I 100% idolized Rayya, and I completely made her into my higher power. It's an incredibly dangerous thing to do to yourself and to somebody else, to pedestalize them like that. When you make somebody into your god if they don't have enough wellness to say, “I'm absolutely not going to allow you to do this,” then they become your god.
Rayya allowed me to do it, because it was beneficial for her ego, and she liked it. She started off as a benevolent god, and then became a wrathful one. Then I had to find my real god. I had to find a higher power higher than Rayya within myself to take my power back that I had given away.
Another reason it took me so long to write this book, long for me, is that it took such a long time to figure out what happened. It’s like that F. Scott Fitzgerald line, “At first slowly, then quickly.” This is how I get into dysfunction: slowly and then quickly. Our love story built slowly, and then our dysfunction escalated quickly. And then she died. And I was like, “What just happened to my actual life? Two years ago, I was a happily married woman living an exemplary life; everything was well in my world—and the bottom just dropped out.”
Oftentimes, when we find ourselves saying things like, “the bottom fell out of my life,” or “there was no more ground underneath my feet,” there's such a passivity and a victimization that’s built into that language. If I had written the book about me and Rayya right after she died, it would have been that story: “I was a nice person, standing here innocently, being good, and then, for reasons I'll never know, the ground dropped out from underneath my feet, and I was in a void over a hell realm. How sad for me.”
I’m so glad I didn't write the book after she died. I'm so glad that I spent the years after she died in recovery doing a deep forensic dive over what was my role in the fact that the ground dropped out underneath my feet. And I would say that my primary contribution to that was making somebody into my god. I lost the ground under my feet long before she picked up cocaine. I always say I started using before she did. I started using my drug of turning somebody into a deity before she started using her drug of cocaine.
This book, as much as I am humanly capable of seeing truth, is my best effort to keep the focus on “What did you do, Liz? How did your insanity and your unhealed trauma and your ego cocreate this whole story?” That’s where my healing is. It's not going be in, “What did she do?”
In that moment when Rayya shifted from your best friend, your lover, your god, and is now your bully and you have to confront her, what fears and strengths did you take into that?