1000 Words on Eat, Pray, Love

I have no idea why I haven’t read this book sooner. As a young adult captivated by the world of travel and stuck on the romanticism of writing about it, this book should have been my bible and yet, I read it for the first time over (another) rainy weekend on Cape Breton Island. It was nearing the end of July, cooped up in my room along the Atlantic, that I finished Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love. After marking it as “read” on my Goodreads challenge, I promptly questioned how I could rearrange my plans to divide my next year into four-month chunks of eating, praying, and loving as if that wasn’t basically the lifestyle I already had on the coast.

I’ve now lived on Canada’s East and West coasts and trapezed through Europe, all while thinking about where I could go next and what I could do in those places to sustain the lifestyle I am still thinking about today. It was always a single-character play of acting out what comes next, not necessarily what was happening then and there. Mostly though, I’ve been trying to figure out what remains of my identity after being a student. What I can build to be the person I want with me in the future. So, I’ve been in a constant cycle of travel since I graduated, hoping that eventually somewhere new will be the somewhere “right” I seem to be searching for, endlessly.

But, really, I’m just trying to have fun. I want my life to be fun, which I don’t think is an unrealistic want to have or task to achieve. I think there are many expectations for us to be these big stoic figures, the heroines in our…