Book of the Day: Eat, Pray, Love

I have been reading Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert and really loving it. It’s the story of a woman who took a year off from her life to travel and self-reflect. I suppose I like it a lot because of my own desire to take a year off like this (which I mentioned yesterday in my post about going on sabbatical). But I also like it because it’s a great travel story which shows how traveling can bring us closer to ourselves. And I like it because the language and description in the book really resonate with me.

I’m taking my time reading this book so that I can really savor it. I read quickly and could’ve finished it in a day or two but I’m drawing out my time with it because I like it that much. It’s the first book I’ve liked that much in a really really long time. Since I’m not done with it yet, I don’t really want to give a full review or solid opinion on it. But I do want to share one passage that I particularly loved. It’s not the most romantic or exciting passage in the book but it’s one that so totally sums up how I think the average American deals with the problem of depression that I wanted to write it down:

“I took on my depression like it was the fight of my life, which, of course, it was. I became a student of my own depressed experience, trying to unthread its causes. What was the root of all this despair? Was it psychological? (Mom and Dad’s fault?) Was it just temporal, a “bad time” in my life? (When the divorce ends, will the depression end with it?) Was it genetic? (Melancholy, called by many names, has run through my family for generations, along with its sad bride, Alcoholism.) Was it cultural? (Is this just the fallout of a postfeminist American career girl trying to find balance in an increasingly stressful and alienating urban world?) Was it astrological? (Am I so sad because I’m a thin-skinned Cancer whose major signs are all ruled by an unstable Gemini?) Was it artist? (Don’t creative people always suffer from depression because we’re so supersensitive and special?) Was it evolutionary? (Do I carry in me the residual panic that comes afre millenia of my species’ attempting to survive in a brutal world?) Was it karmic? (Are all these spasms of grief just the consequences of bad behavior in previous lifetimes, the last obstacles before liberation?) Was it hormonal? Dietary? Philosophical? Seasonal? Environmental? Was I tapping into a uiversal yearning for God? Did I have a chemical imbalance? Or did I just need to get laid?”

What a succinct summary of the struggle with depression that intelligent people go through today!