Free Eat Pray Love Made Me Do It by Elizabeth Gilbert Page A

time of diagnosis.
    My meeting with Charlotte was never supposed to happen. I was set to return home three days earlier, but a bout of food poisoning left me unable to fly. Charlotte arrived from London to visit her mom a few days before my rescheduled flight home. For days, we laughed together almost nonstop while silently wondering what would become of our quick bonding and seemingly mystical meeting. I had never been in a relationship with a woman, but I quickly knew this could be something more than friendship. Soon we had to separate. Over the coming weeks, we wrote enough e-mails to each other to fill books. Then, three months after leaving Delhi, we decided to take the next step and meet halfway between her home in London and mine in California. We settled on Boston. The night we arrived, after our first kiss, I asked Charlotte to marry me. She said no. We laughed, and time moved on.
    We racked up travel miles just to be together for a week or two at a time. Moving was impossible—her mother’s health was rapidly declining, as was my father’s in California. But we made it work. My dad always told me the way you know if someone is “the one” is when you feel like “it’s you and me against the world, baby.” And I did.
    Our love story continued, but not in the typical way. We held hands over Charlotte’s mother’s hospital bed as she took her last breaths. We then held my dad’s ashes in those same hands not long after.
    While it has not all been a fairy tale, we have always remained absorbed in the magic. That feeling the first day in the physioroom; the knowing we were meant to be together; the laughter and joy we find in each every day; and the absolute blessing of what we commonly refer to as “the best love story ever”—not because it’s been perfect but because it’s ours.
    Since the day I took that giant leap of faith and gave an echoing yes! to my Indian adventure, I have survived what doctors said I never would. I have taken my healing to new heights. I have turned inward to recover completely, far beyond what medicine or stem cells or doctors could offer. I have lived, and I have lived well.
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    I n the years since the incurable cure, I have made up for lost time. Charlotte and I have traveled all over the world. We’ve eaten copious amounts of pasta in Venice, Italy, and cuddled up in a jeep while roaring over the red dirt of the South African desert.
    Eat Pray Love
started for me as many books do but became so much more.
    Eat Pray Love
gave me the chutzpah to jump into the ultimate unknowing. It gave me the courage to make it through each day in India when I only had wipes for showers, and the curiosity to take responsibility for changing my health and my life.
Eat Pray Love
helped me turn a whole lotta faith over to the Universe. Most of all, it gave me the everlasting grace to stumble and sometimes even fall, knowing that it’s much more fun if you always play life like one hell of a grand adventure.

Failure to Freedom
    â€”
    Linsi Broom
    M y first encounter with
Eat Pray Love
was the movie. I remember watching it and thinking that an adventure like that could never be possible for someone like me: middle-class, wrought with student loan debt, juggling a full-time job and full-time school. I couldn’t imagine a world where one could just drop out of one’s own life. After all, my family taught me that my name was all I had and I must—above all else—make sure that name signified responsibility, practicality and a dogged work ethic. It wasn’t until 2013, when I experienced a series of very intense sudden failures—in school, in love and in life—that I began to question everything I thought I knew about what I should and should not be. About what
responsible
and
practical
even meant.
    After that string of failures, I moved across the country, desperate to start