Kate Bowler: When someone you love is in pain, whether they’re sick or addicted or falling apart, you show up. You show up, you bring the ice chips, you plan the meal train, you make the calls, you stay late, you go without. Because that’s what love does, right? But sometimes caregiving, especially when it’s constant or codependent or entwined with addiction, often costs more than we realize. It asks for everything and then it asks for more. This is a story about when a good thing, love, loyalty, care, becomes something else. When helping turns into losing yourself. I’m Kate Bowler and this is Everything Happens. It’s a podcast where we ask what it means to live wisely and love well, even when it costs us more than we expected. You probably know my guest today. From Eat, Pray, Love, or my very favorite book on creativity that’s ever been created called Big Magic, or maybe her TED Talk, which has been watched more than 20 million times. Elizabeth Gilbert has written novels and memoirs and essays and stories, and her words have found their way into more than 50 languages. But what I just love about her isn’t just her spectacular talent, though yes, she He’s been a finalist for the National Book Award and the Penn. Slash Hemingway, whatnot. But what I love is her honesty. It’s honesty about beauty and about grief and what it takes to keep trying to be born in this story of our lives that keeps trying to foreclose us. And her latest memoir, All the Way to the River, is one of those rare books that took me apart because of the way that it tells the truth about all the way through. It’s about caregiving and the way that our loves can eat us alive and addiction and what it means to walk someone all the way to the edge of life. Liz, I like ate your book up and then I just fell in love with you all over again and I have been so excited to talk to you today. Thank you for doing this. Hi, sweetheart. What a lovely introduction. It’s so nice to see you. No, it’s one of the great gifts of reading as a friend and just enjoying. Watching someone learn. This book is you trying to learn an almost impossible way to re-navigate your own life. So it takes us back to the beginning in a way of this friendship that was absolutely going to transform you. This gorgeous person in your life, Rhea, who you were friends with years and years before anything romantic began. What did it mean? To be loved by her before everything happened.
Elizabeth Gilbert: What a great first question in the short story version of it is that she was my hairdresser. A friend had a hair intervention for me in the year 2000, so 25 years ago. In a very different world. I just thought she was the coolest, because she was. Her description of herself was a glamor butch dyke, post-punk, hardcore Syrian-American, Detroit-raised, Lower East Side Forged. Aries, you know, she was just formidable and super funny. And to me, she always just felt absolutely free, which it turns out she wasn’t. But in some respects, in respects where I feel trapped and struggling, she was always free. And we were, I think, really attracted to each other as friends because I’m really free. In certain areas of her life where she struggled forever. Like creativity for me is like easy peasy lemon squeezy. Like you just do it, you don’t have any outcome. Like you could try anything, it’ll work or it won’t. It doesn’t matter if anybody likes it. Like I have this very loose relationship with creativity which was a realm in which she suffered enormously. But I’m terrified of people. Which is kind of maybe not obvious because I’m very sociable.
Kate Bowler: Most charming, you’re truly the most charming person I’ve ever met.
Elizabeth Gilbert: Well, that kept me alive in this realm filled with people who I’m fucking terrified of.
Kate Bowler: You know, because it’s so, it’s when people just see the smile and the attention and the care with which you can pour yourself and other people, it is, I imagine, hard for people to see the like, the fear of disappointing them, the uncertainty about what to do and just to watch someone who’s like exciting and socially terrifying in a wonderful way move through the world. It must have been exciting to see Rhea be herself.
Elizabeth Gilbert: Yeah, it’s taken me years to learn how to be even half as honest as Rhea was on her like most dishonest day. Like fearless in the face of the truth, fearless in face of conflict, fearless in… Like she would sail her teeth straight into the gale of anything that was going on interpersonally and in a relaxed way, you know? Like, I mean, I can feel a vibe changing in a room and then I adjust in order to try to control the vibe that’s happening in the room that’s got me frightened. Rhea would just say like to the person creating the scary vibe, why are you acting like that, dude? Like what are you, like what’s that all about? Like why are being a little bitch right now? Why are you making everybody afraid of you? Like why, like she would just like walk right up to a dragon and be like, why you blowing flames at everybody, man? That’s fucked up. Like she was so comfortable with everyone at that level and I was like, how are you doing that? Like how are, you know, terrifying repercussions? So, so to be loved by her as a friend, We had a really, we had a really gorgeous friendship. For so many years because we upheld and supported each other in the realms where the other one had real terror and trauma. We helped each other a lot and then we became closer and closer friends and neighbors and kind of muse and patron inspiration and like flipping back and forth between being each other’s hero and helping each other out and as the years and years and we very… Secretly fell in love with each other. I mean, secretly even to each other and especially, I would say, to ourselves. Like, we both knew that this was more than a friendship, but we didn’t know what to do about it, so we didn t do anything about it. We both just stayed very quiet until she was diagnosed with terminal pancreatic and liver cancer. I was told she had six months to live and there was just no way anymore that I could deny that my best friend was the love of my life. I did it in a very different way.
Kate Bowler: I found it very powerful the way you laid out, it was a lovely quote from someone about the difference between like a public life, a private life, and a secret life.
Elizabeth Gilbert: Yeah, that’s a line from Garcia Marquez. He said, everybody has a public life, a private life, and a secret life. And I remember saying to a really wise, older friend of mine, quoting that like 20 years ago to them, and they said, yeah, and the reason we keep our secrets is because if our secret life were to be exposed, our fear is that it would destroy both our private life and our public life. So that made me understand that even better, which is like. This public-facing life where I’m a lot of, it’s a lot, of superficiality and then I’ve got this private life where there are some people around me who I love and care about, who I share intimacy with and vulnerability with, but there are some things that if even they were to know, if even they were, to know what I’m up to, addiction always, always goes under this category of secret life until it becomes so messy that it It does disrupt both your private and public life. And everybody knows the secret that you’re not doing a very good job hiding. I mean, I have beloved friends in recovery programs who managed to keep their alcoholism a secret from their spouses and their spouses were loving, attentive people. They had a gambling addiction that nobody knew about. They had porn addiction that no one knew about, they were cutting themselves and nobody knew about it, they were having an affair that nobody know about. Often times I think the secret life is… It’s the thing that you have to do in order to feel okay, but it is completely unacceptable even to you that you’re doing it. And also, I’m a really good compartmentalizer, so I can keep, I am the first person I keep a secret from. I was actually hanging out, I was hanging out with Martha Beck recently, and. I went over to her house and she’s like, how are you doing? I’m like, I’m doing great. Life is amazing. Everything’s awesome. And she said, you always say that, Liz. And we find out five years later that you’re in so much trouble. And I’m, like, well, I also find out five years, later, Martha.
Speaker 3: This is really funny.
Elizabeth Gilbert: It’s so tragic, it’s so true. The things we hide for ourselves. It’s not, I don’t, I’m not disparaging myself or any of us. By saying this, as it is, as I know you know, rather a complicated endeavor to learn how to operate one of these things, how to be a human. It’s like, I dunno, I just got here. Like, I got dropped into this body. I got dropped into this family, I got dropping into this culture, I dropped into this moment of history, and I am doing my level best. I know that to be true, but lots of times it will take me a long time after something happens that’s really devastating to see, like, where, where it began and how it began. Um, I’m not always that in tune. So, yeah, so we both were having secret lives. I mean, I was, I, was secretly falling in love with her. Well, at the same time, being a perfect wife to somebody who I loved very dearly. And just doubling down on being a perfect wife at the same time as having a lot of hidden pain and relying more and more and on Rhea to help me with that. And then she had a secret life. She was an addict in recovery who decided that it was totally cool for her to start drinking and that that wasn’t a big deal. And she was going to 12 stumbings for years in AA meetings and like qualifying at an AA meeting and like actively drinking at the time as she’s talking about being sober, like. And she had completely compartmentalized that to where she couldn’t even see it and couldn’t see the contradiction of it and the problem of it. So like many of us, we are many people and we were carrying a lot of unhealed trauma that attracted us to one another and that also made us kind of a danger to each other.
Kate Bowler: I see.
Elizabeth Gilbert: Innocently, I just want to keep using that word
Kate Bowler: Sometimes too, we just have this overwhelming desire to live inside of this story that can still make sense. It can make sense of all the costs we’ve already paid. We don’t want to imagine that the choice we made might be too expensive. I imagine that in leaving your marriage. For real, you- It might have been just very tempting to be like, well, I paid this enormous cost to be with this incredible person. And now the story that will come after is in it will always in its own way be a happy ending because we finally got to be together and we love each other. And Liz, you could have just written that book and I would have read it and I wouldn’t have been like, oh my gosh, I’m learning so many things. And you could’ve hidden the whole rest of it. But-
Elizabeth Gilbert: That’s the only problem. That’s only problem with that beautiful story you just told Kate.
Speaker 3: Ellie, thank you so much for watching!
Kate Bowler: But like, I do think that’s what most people do is they just tell themselves the story over and over again until we all conveniently end.
Elizabeth Gilbert: Well, please be called till we all conveniently end. Oh my God. I love you so much. I love so much, oh Lord. I really like that you’re like, but that is not at all what happened. That isn’t as it turns out and very inconveniently that is now what happened because, and boy did I try to make that be the story. And I really thought that was the story and, you know, she’d been told she had six months to live. We had six really amazing months together, but she lived for a year and a half. And the last year of her life was not that story. If the doctors had been correct and she had lived for six months, I would have written this absolutely insufferably beautiful story about how I had the best romance that anybody ever had in the entire world. I was so good at it, I was such a good cancer partner. I was so good at it until the wheels came off for both of us and then kept coming off. I mean, I don’t even want to point to who relapsed completely first. You know, Rhea at that point was a fully unrecovered drug addict and alcoholic who hadn’t been going to the rooms for a long, long, time, hadn’t working on her recovery. And when the fear and the pain of cancer caught up with her, she went right back to the worst iteration of herself, which was a speedball opioid and cocaine addict who wasn’t very nice. And I had never known drug addict Rhea. I’d heard stories, which I always thought were kind of funny stories because she was such a great storyteller and they were like outrageous stories. They were kind wild stories about a life I’ll never know, you know, like living on the streets and hustling and like, you know just kind of bad-ass stories. Actually, when I got to face-to-face me, Rhea the drug addict, she’s an awful monster. Like just an awful, monster. And then a lot of people who had known her back in the day were like, oh yeah, we always, we remember that one. You never knew that one, but we certainly did. We, her family and friends who had to deal with this just awful monster for so long. And then I simultaneously or I mean, I would say right in alignment with her descended into the most degraded version of me, which is spineless, enabling, codependent, like approval seeking, people pleasing, you know, just nothing, like just a slime mold. Like somebody who doesn’t even have, like I was so, like, who is so unformed, she’s just an earlobe, you what I mean? Like just like there’s nothing there. There’s nobody there. I even look at pictures of myself during that time and I was like, I truly could have been in the illustration for the Tibetan book of the dead of a hungry ghost. You know, like starved, emaciated. Gazing upon this kind of chaotic energy field that was Rhea and trying to make it be different than it was, trying to her, trying to that thing love me, trying to take care of me, and then giving her, giving that vampire whatever it wanted with the hope that maybe I would get a little bit of love back in return. And that’s the lowest and most degraded version of me and it’s not the first time I’ve done it. And it wasn’t the last time I did it. You know, that’s when I’m in my most damaged self. That’s who I become, or rather, who I un-become. And that became the true story of what happened for the both of us. That’s actually what went down.
Kate Bowler: When you talk about that, I thought that language is so perfect, like degraded. Like we could be becoming, but now we’re unmade. And that language of like just, not just like unraveled, but like all the parts can no longer hold. That feeling is so much more common than I think we ever talk about. Venture to guess that many, perhaps most of us have been in a situation in which we can’t even remember who we were supposed to be because we’re so overwhelmed by other people’s needs and the desperate desire to like fix it from the outside. We’ll give you everything you want to need and then somehow this part of me will become okay again. And then it just, it never gets built from the Outside In, apparently.
Elizabeth Gilbert: Not that I’ve ever seen, and it’s, a friend of mine calls it bad maths, she’s British, she’s like, it’s just bad maths Liz, and, and its this calculation that a lot of people make, I don’t want to say only women do it, but a lot a women do. And the calculation is, if I take every single thing that I have, and every single that I am and I pour it into you. Maybe you’ll give me a couple teaspoons of it back. Yes. A great definition of addiction is a bad idea you just keep repeating. Like this over the centuries and over millennia is a idea that women just keep repeated. Which is like, I’m gonna get love by giving you, giving all, literally every single bit of myself away. That’s my best idea for how to experience the feeling of love, security and belonging. I’ll make sure that every single one of your needs is met and not a single one mine is. And then, depending on how your personality disorders arrange themselves, you either blame them for leaving you empty when you gave it all away, or you blame yourself for not being lovable enough for them to give it to you, or you blaming your parents, or you blamed whatever, or blame whoever. Like it turns, it oftentimes turns into like an enormous amount of rage and blame. To me, that’s the logical. And the logical endpoint of codependency for me is always blame.
Kate Bowler: I grew up with a very depressed dad and this desire to be pleasable is so, it’s so young in me. It’s so, and it’s in there and it is so connected to my great gifts, empathy, the ability to notice but then of course immediately respond and tend and pet and care and over care and then become resentful, and then spiral, and become depleted.
Elizabeth Gilbert: In the reach for something, people places things, substance behaviors, to medicate the hollowness and the emptiness. And then I once more wanted to use the word, innocently. All of this is innocent. Nobody sets out every day to be like, how can I be the most degraded version of myself? You know, like, it’s just we do that until we somehow don’t.
Kate Bowler: We’re going to be right back after a break to hear from our sponsors. Don’t go anywhere. As you explored your own addiction to love and tried to understand your place in the caregiving ecology of Rhea’s addiction, it really, really got me thinking about one of the contributions of alcoholics anonymous to American spirituality is, I mean, it’s frankly one of the great American religions and it’s an enormous salve to so many who feel broken beyond all repair. But one of the things I really love about it is it gives us a language of brokenness that still keeps that goodwill underneath it. So when you say innocently, I love the little flotilla that it puts under people. We are not just trying to break things. We are just trying break ourselves. In fact, so much of our own brokenness comes out of this deep desire to love and be loved. All of it.
Elizabeth Gilbert: I think you know and and and I mean far from trying to break yourself. You’re trying to save yourself It just breaks my heart with tenderness. I mean even living with Raya when she was a full-on junkie Observing that all she was ever trying to do was feel That’s all she’s ever trying To do was fell okay and to get the levels right, you know like to be like how much cocaine plus how much fentanyl plus how much alcohol plus how many nicotine plus how much sugar and is going to just get me in that pocket where i am not either spiraling with anxiety or like murderously depressed oh i could just cry hearing that that’s so right all they’re trying to do that’s all any addict and i include myself In- world of addiction. That’s all we’re trying to do. And as I did my version of that in slow motion, which was to move over the course of 35 uninterrupted years from one person to another partner to another partner to, another partner, to another, partner to. Another partner to another partner was do exactly the same thing. And I do think that 12 steps is an American religion. I also love that line Richard Rohr says that the 12 steps of Alcoholics Anonymous are America’s greatest gift to world spirituality, and I think that’s beautiful because the 12 steps are all based in exactly the opposite of what American culture teaches you. It starts with surrender and powerlessness. It’s starts with you already lost and you’ll never win. That theology could only have come from a culture that refuses to ever not win. You know what, like, and that thinks that everything can be bought and everything can commanded and every, like only the most powerful country the world has ever known could have broken itself so badly through its power that the way it had to get well was to say I have no power. What I find, what I love about the higher power who I found in 12 Step Recovery, the god of my own understanding and I also love the gentleness of that program about like it’s the god of your own understanding. You know, like you are never going to surrender your life over to a God who is forced on you. You are never gonna surrender your lives over to somebody else’s God. Like this has to be the one that’s yours. When I finally was able to like break through to be able to hear that higher power speaking to me, like directly and lovingly to me. One of the things that it said that I just find so dear, that’s why I love that Is it said? Like I really believe that there’s one thing I can know about my God is that my God loves freedom because my God gave me all the time in the world to try everything to feel better. When I finally could hear God, it was like, sweetheart, every one of these is such a good guess. Such a good guest. And when you’re done trying everything that the world has to offer, come to me. Like my friend, you’re my friend Margaret. Said to me the other day, I just did this five-day darkness meditation in this cave in Oregon where I spent four nights and five days completely alone in solitude and pitch dark. I guess that this is an experience. It’s one of the things I came to Earth to do apparently because I did it. And as I was going into it, Margaret said, are you scared? And I said, I’m terrified. And she said, why don’t you just find happiness in external things like a normal person, you idiot? And I was like, Margaret, if it worked for me, I would. Like if it works for me if having a family and a partner and a nice job and good things like fed that hole inside of me and kept me okay, then I would do that. I can assure you that there is nothing in this world that can reach that vacancy. Except God, that I have found. It’s the only thing that will calm it down.
Kate Bowler: There’s some spirituality situation. I mean, I’m very, um, as you know, Jesus is my Lord and Savior, et cetera. And, uh, one of the things I just, I’ve loved about being loved by God, it really is in that little, I think surrender has been such a, a key part it for me. Because I am such a trier, I’m such a tryer. I don’t stop. I will try forever. And it was only when I was very, very sick and absolutely certain that there was no longer any time left to try that I felt the most loved, like the most love, my God. Oh, hi, baby. That just like, that was so, that was, it was so reassuring. Like, oh, so I’m not really, well, okay. Well, maybe I’ll just simmer down a little bit, guys. Just be loved a little more.
Elizabeth Gilbert: Simmer it down and be loved. It’s gonna be the proper sticker that I need. Just simmer it down, and be love.
Kate Bowler: I was still so mad, of course. I just wished I was living in a world. I always wish I’m living in world that is made up of my certainties. I miss all my certainities. I wish I could fully build the world in which I try really hard and I finally get what I freaking want.
Elizabeth Gilbert: But Kate, have you tried harder than I know? Because it feels like, you know, I’m just looking in and I’m just like, I know you’re Canadian and not American. But like here in America, we just try harder.
Kate Bowler: A little harder. Oh honey. The harder I try, the more I understand despair. It really, it’s a wild ratio of desperately wanting to be loved and desperately wanting be cared for and then realizing I have to just unclench my fists. Can I eat sh…
Elizabeth Gilbert: Share with you what happened in the cave. Like how you leaned in. So, this is this place in Oregon called Sky Cave Retreats and they, if you pay the money, they’ll throw you in a dark hole for five minutes.
Kate Bowler: Genius.
Elizabeth Gilbert: Again, Margaret is like the anchor in my life. She’s like, you’re such an idiot. You’re such as like, give me the money. I’ll throw you in a dark closet. It’s not the same. It is actually really beautiful. They’ve created, they’re like, it almost looks like a hobbit house, but like they dig these little holes into this mountain and you go in there. I mean, you can leave it anytime door opens.
Kate Bowler: Wait, like early monastics, like they’ll dig it in the side of a mountain.
Elizabeth Gilbert: And you go live in the earth, which of course I’ve always been deeply attracted to and have always wanted to do. So I’m like, oh, I can pretend I’m an early desert father or mother from the second century of Egypt, living in a hollow in the woods is what I’ve always wanted. So God’s like, go ahead and try it. And the thing is not so much the cave as the darkness. It’s like more like going into a tomb. And when that door shuts, there’s not a scrap of light.
Kate Bowler: I pictured you were wearing a blindfold, but no, you’re just actually in utter darkness.
Elizabeth Gilbert: Utter darkness. You can’t, and I went in for the first time, the facilitator said when the door shut and they were showing it to me, he said, your eyes will never adjust to this. There’s no light in here. So your eyes can try and think that they are gonna be able to find something and they can’t. And then once a day they bring you food through a black box in the wall and the rest of the time you’re in absolute silence because you also can’t hear nature because you’re underground so you can’t hear birdsong. There’s no way to track time. And there’s no way to track space. And I chose to do that for five days.
Kate Bowler: Holy crap, Liz, is there a way to track bugs? Because of what, can your hands go everywhere without being scared?
Elizabeth Gilbert: Well, there’s no way to know if there’s a spider. There’s no, way to no, right? There’s not way to anything. And so for the year that I was leading up to this, I kept asking every night when I went to bed or when I was meditating, I’d be picturing myself in there. And I would say to God, how are we gonna do this? And God would reiterate, this is one of the things that you came to earth to do. I’m gonna be with you the entire time. And there are treasures for you in there that can’t be found any other way. I’m gonna be right, right with you. When that door shut initially, and I like the dark and I liken close spaces and I don’t have claustrophobia and I meditate a lot and I spend and I live alone, like I’m like, I’m going to be good at this. And I have a deep connection to my higher part. Like I was like, I’m to be very good. I’m would be excellent at this and that door shot. And I realized it wasn’t going to open for another hundred hours. And my body went into this like atavistic, primal terror response. And I was like, whoa, what’s happening, body? And my mind went into this, like, just wild horses crazy. And I heard God say, just let the wild horses run. Like, let the world horses run, just like, let it run out, like whatever your mind is doing, whatever your body is doing. Because I was, like oh, panic, panic panic. And thoughts, thoughts, thoughts, my head was like a pinball machine. And then at one point, I guess like two hours in, a thought arose, which was what if God isn’t real? What if God isn’t real, what if God doesn’t exist? What if this beautiful, the most beautiful relationship I’ve ever had in my life with this higher power who loves me so tenderly and intimately and who I love and who guides me and who has gotten me sober and brought serenity into my life and this daily communion that I have with that force and that love, what is that is just my imagination and there’s nothing and there actually is only void. There’s only void There’s only blackness and void. There’s nothing in the universe that we are alone like, oh my god, and I would the existential Horror is the only word I can describe is what that thought did to me is that I I was like panicked horror and instantly I felt God show up and Scoop me like just scooped me right out of that thought and just said, okay, honey that’s a bridge too far. You know, that was exactly what I heard God say. Like, remember I said, let the wild horses run and let the mind do whatever the mind’s gonna do? This is the one thought that I am not gonna let you have because first of all, it isn’t true. And secondly, you’ll die in here if you don’t know that I’m here with you. And not only that, you will die out there if you know that you’re here with me. So I don’t need you to believe in me because I need you worship me. You need this or you’re not gonna be all right. And I’m here. I’m literally talking to you right now. And I am going to be with you every single minute of that, of this experience. Just ask for me and I’ll guide you and I will tell you moment by moment what to do. And for those five days, that’s what happened was that moment by movement there would be this guidance that just said, okay, now meditate. Okay, now sing, now pray. Now do metal loving kindness prayer meditations for other people. Now go through the alphabet and see if you can name a song that begins with each letter of the alphabet. It’s so funny. Now remember all the television shows that you’ve had. It was just like God was managing my experience for me. And I was like, wow, we are really not alone. Like even if you go into the darkity, dark, dark dark where there’s absolutely nothing, there’s so much. This is a very crowded universe. Like there are angels, there are ancestors, there are saints, there’re spirits, there are guides, there’s God. I’m like, we are covered, you know? Like something is with us through this whole entire journey. Anyway, it was such a great thing to find out. And since that I came out of there, I do feel this like deeper sense of self-confidence. That’s like, just like a relaxed self- confidence. It’s like, you’re so supported, Lizzie. Like you’re really not on your own here like really
Kate Bowler: Like you finally reached the edges of what could be and found that it was still bubble-wrapped, somehow. There’s that series of speeches that Job’s friends are giving him where they’re trying to undo every promise he could ever have from God, that you won’t have this and you won’t have that and you’ll never have, and everything in your life is proof that you’re not loved, that you are punished, that your. And like the one like, and you can never strip it down, which I’ve always loved is like, but God will never withhold God’s presence from us. I’ve given up on a lot of like needing things to go my own way, but that one truth, I feel more certain of that than I ever did before. Cause I know God loves, I know, God loves the brokenhearted. I know that God never leaves, actually leaves us. And I just, it’s so beautiful to think of you feeling around in the dark and being scooped up by the God who is very determined that you know that you’re never alone. That’s the one thought.
Elizabeth Gilbert: That’s not gonna fly here, you know? Like, and because it isn’t true, you know, like it isn, it’s just not true.
Kate Bowler: We’re going to take a quick break to tell you about the sponsors of this show. We’ll be right back. When you were taking care of Rhea in the last months of her life, it really confronted this view that you had of yourself as being a really loving and caring provider.
Elizabeth Gilbert: I think saintly is the word that I would use to describe it. Yeah, just so we’re all using the same lingo, you can just go ahead and say the saintly image that I have of myself. Come on.
Kate Bowler: Do you know this story where someone else was doing possibly a better job taking care of Rhea as she was very sick and that she was an angel in your life?
Elizabeth Gilbert: Araya said to me, oh, it’s even worse than that because it was her ex-girlfriend, who I love, who is incredible, but who at that time I didn’t know very well and was like, wait, what? Because we had fallen out because of all the drugs and she’d gone back to Detroit and had gone to, essentially had called her ex girlfriend from 20 years earlier and said, like, I’m a wreck. I need to get clean. I need help. Can I come and stay with you? And Stacy said yes, and then set a whole bunch of boundaries that I never thought to do. And was like, here’s the rules, you know, like I get all the, as soon as you walk in the door, give me all the drugs, they’re going down the toilet. Like I’m taking your phone, I’m takin’ your, you know like all this stuff that I’m like, how, what? What’s this thing called a boundary? And she got in Stacy’s house, she got off all of those drugs that she was on. Astonishingly, as a hospice patient who really had no reason to get clean, I mean she might as well, she was dying anyway, so she could have just died of drug addiction, but she, she turned it around and Stacey. Took such incredible care of her. And I was over back home in New York like having a post codependency bender meltdown because like the person I’d given up my whole entire life for was in a different state being taken care of by someone else. And I hadn’t taken the slightest bit of care of myself and I was a wreck. You know, and at one point where it calls after she got clean, she calls and she’s all cheerful. Like, she’s just, I’m like, you just put me through hell. You just put through hell! And she’s having a great time. She’s like feeling, she feeling great. And she calls me like, hey babe, you know, I really wish that you would come out here to Detroit. And like, I want you to get to know Stacey better, man. She’s so awesome. She’s such an angel. And I… Chernobyl Chernobyl to my inner eye the rage and this is what I’m saying about how the end game for me of codependency is always rage. This was it. This is like peak rage. I was like and I was I wanted like it took every bit of control in the world to not scream at my hospice patient. I’m the fucking angel around you. She’s not the angel. I’m the angel! I’m a fucking angel! Like I was so angry and it was this fantastic moment where God just came in and just gathered me and just invited me to surrender and then said in my ear, if you ever are in a situation in your life where you are on the verge of howling at someone that you are the fucking angel around here, There’s a slight to moderate possibility that you aren’t. And you might have become somebody who needs an angel. That angel’s name might be Stacy because Stacy took an unsolvable problem off your hands and is solving it. And that’s what angels do. Like you were in an unsolveable crisis with Rhea and Stacy has taken it and she’s fixing it. And that what an angel does. So actually… Just be grateful that there’s an angel around. And you don’t have to be it, you know? And it was so humbling and so, but like all moments of true surrender, just like such a relief. Like, oh, there’s another angel.
Kate Bowler: I don’t have to do this. You know, that’s so funny because just even the word humble, because my attempts at like usually end up in this sort of feeling of like humiliation for both of us. So I just, I love that you’re like, you know, the person I’m going to go to helping.
Elizabeth Gilbert: I think I have a line of that in Big Magic, you can always tell people who live for others by the… The exhausted look on other people’s faces. The faces of the others, yeah, exactly, like, oh god, anyway, so humiliation is maybe the last stop before surrender. On the surrender highway. It’s like, okay, I’m officially so humiliated now. I can just maybe stop doing this.
Kate Bowler: It sounds like there’s more and more space in your spirituality, in your heart for freedom for yourself and then freedom for others. Like, God, you love them too. God, You care for all. God,You love the lilies of this stupid field, even when I’m not farming. Oh my God. I love all of them. It’s mine.
Elizabeth Gilbert: This is my field! My lilies! And I am spinning and toiling for those lilies. I’m pretty sure I invented birds. Who do you think planted those lily bulbs? Do you think they just planted themselves, God? Oh my gosh.
Kate Bowler: Oh, I just love it. You know, I’ve been since I’ve been trying to be less clenchy, you know, and whatnot, I I’ve been thinking a lot about joy. And so this just made me want to ask you before we go, what is experiencing joy like for you lately? I’m gonna show you because she’s right.
Elizabeth Gilbert: This is Pepita. Oh, she’s a star. She’s my best friend. She’s the best friend! She was my reward for writing this book. At the last line of the book is God saying, you can go get a dog now. Practice loving and practice loving and being responsible and that’s what we’re doing. We just love each other and there’s nothing better than this.
Kate Bowler: Liz, I am so happy for you. You’ve really, you’ve dug your way through the tar pit. And on the other side, there’s a lot of peace and there’s too many caves, but there’s a lot joy and freedom that I see all over you. And it just, it just fills my heart with happiness.
Elizabeth Gilbert: Thank you sweetheart, thank you so much. You know, nobody wants to go into the cave and nobody wants dig through the sewer, but there really is treasure in there. Like when God said, like I want you to go in to that darkness because there’s treasure in their for you. That’s why I love being in 12 Step Meeting so much because it’s rooms filled with people who have reached the end of their power and they’re in so much joy. The ones who have actually surrendered to being at the end their power are in so joy. And the ones who are still trying to hold on are like, you know, just look like what I’ve looked like most of my life when I look in the mirror at 3 a.m. But right now, just for today, it’s a good day.
Kate Bowler: Yes. It’s a good day for me. It’s so good to see you. We don’t want to tell the truth about caring for other people. I just think that has to be said from the outset. It’s hard to talk about what it feels to give and give and give even to good things, but then become someone else’s lifeline and realize that you’ve lost your own. Like, hey, look at me loving you. Wait, isn’t everyone feeling my love? Where’s my parade? My thank you edible arrangement. Why is this whole thing cantaloupe? If you’re someone who has loved way past her limit, if you’re somebody who’s lost yourself in someone else’s needs, you’ve ever confused devotion with disappearance, this is a blessing. Blessed are you when love costs more than you knew to count. For the ones who thought, isn’t everyone feeling my love? Where is my thank you note? Where is the sainthood? For the one who confused selflessness with erasure, who gave and gave and until someone else was the only thing left standing. May you have permission to be a person too, to rest, to refuse, to want something back. May you remember the steady, never-ending presence of a God who will scoop you up and remind you, you are loved. Not because you earned it, not because you were good enough or selfless enough, but because you are already always. Well, my loves, it was so good having you here. And hey, if you watch this on YouTube, you might’ve noticed I’m wearing a sweatshirt. It says everything happens. That’s right, we made merch. This is my first time making merch and I really love them. It’s like crew necks and dad hats and sticker packs and a t-shirt that says Small Talk Survivor, which is frankly my best joke. It’s just for anyone who’s tired of talking about the weather. I like to imagine all of us just spotting each other at the grocery store being like, ah, you too. If you want to wear a little more honesty on your sleeve, literally, then you can find all these things at katecbowler.com. And hey, as always, I am over at Substack, where, thanks to Liz, I got very interested in the history of alcoholics anonymous as one of America’s great religious contributions. So I wrote this essay about what it means, like what spiritual lessons we learn from surrender. And what language really that we’re all looking for. So I would love to hear from you. The comments are my very favorite part because this is truly the nicest place on the internet. So we’re hanging out at kateboller.substack.com. And before I go, if you would leave us a review, this is my Do You Mind Leaving Us a Review? Voice on Apple or Spotify. It would help so much. The algorithm overlords would smile upon us and favor us mightily. Everything happens here and everything happens with help from really special people. From Jessica Richie, Harriet Putman, Keith Weston, Anne Herring, Hailie Durett, Megan Crunkleton, Anna Fitzgerald Peterson, Elias Zaneo, and Katherine Smith. This is Everything Happens with me, Kate Bowler.
Leave a Reply