Go To Bed, Liz.
This post was originally published July 6, 2023.
Eat, Pray, Love garnered a lot of publicity. I think most people have seen the movie, read the book, or at least had it recommended to them. It was recommended to me back in 2015, almost a decade after its publishing, but it wasn’t until 2017 that I took the time to pick up the audiobook and listen to it.
As someone who, at the time, recently wrote about the experience of living in a foreign country, I had a lot of thoughts. Liz Gilbert is a talented writer, but Eat, Pray, Love is an extremely romanticized take on travel written by an extremely privileged person, who was navigating a difficult change in their life. Still, I enjoyed it, and parts of it still stick with me. This post isn’t a review on a book that came out 17 years ago; instead, it’s commentary on a single line that resonates with me to this day.
“Go to bed, Liz.”
In the book (spoiler alert), Liz realizes her marriage is loveless and she’s fast-forwarding towards a divorce. She writes that she spent several nights crying on her bathroom floor, while her husband slept unknowingly in the other room. She kept asking God, the Universe, anything that would hear her, what she should do. Then she writes that she heard a little voice in the back of her head say: “Go to bed, Liz.”
Maybe it was herself or maybe it was God, but the point remains, as she explains, that at 4 am in the morning there simply wasn’t anything she could do. No one else was awake, businesses weren’t open, conversations couldn’t be had, and things couldn’t be done. It was the middle of the night. The only thing she could realistically do was go to bed.
For a while, I would tell myself “Go to bed, Liz,” which admittedly, is an odd thing to say seeing as my name isn’t Liz and sometimes it was the middle of the day, but it served as a valuable reminder. There are many problems in my life. Some small and some bigger, and I’m sure there are a million potential paths to resolving them, but it’s helpful to have a reminder of what is possible in the moment. Over time, “Go to bed, Liz” shifted into “Go take a shower,” “Go get groceries,” “Go make that phone call.”
I’ve had many instances of this, but most recently, I’ve been thinking about my writing. I’m deep in the editing process for my book and sweating about everything that comes after. There are a lot of things for me to figure out still, and as time continues to fly by, there will be more. I have to keep reminding myself that not knowing all the answers is okay because not knowing them now doesn’t mean I never will. I have learned so much over the years. There was a time when I didn’t know what the alphabet was, and another time when I didn’t know how to write a long form piece of fiction. I didn’t understand the difference between internal and external conflict or where to place commas in a sentence. But now I do.
It’s not just that I don’t need to figure out my career today. I can’t. It’s not something that can be figured out in a sitting or even a day, but what I can do is draft a blog post, edit a page in my book, feed myself and my cat, and go to bed.