Page 10 of All the Way to the River

A llow me to speed through the years that followed, as though we were conducting a “life review” in heaven.

I ran away from my first husband and toward that other guy—the one who had seemed like such a hero.

We got high as hell off each other for a while, and then we crashed—hard.

This was not the first time that such a crash had happened to me, but I almost died from this one because he and I had soared to such ecstatic heights before the wings fell off.

But there was also magic in the breakdown.

For it was upon my bathroom floor in the middle of the night, keening over my failed marriage and doomed love affair, that I first heard the sound of God’s voice (or what I came to believe was God) offering me this simple, loving instruction: Go back to bed, Liz.

I went back to bed.

And from that day on, I began following that God voice whenever I could hear it.

After my divorce and my breakup, I quit my job, sold everything, and followed the God voice around the world.

I was searching for something—anything—that would heal my heart and restore meaning to my life.

At the end of my travels, I met a charismatic Brazilian man who poured love, attention, validation, and approval upon me with lavish abundance.

I gave myself over to him without restraint.

He gave himself over to me, too. We moved back to America and got married.

I wrote a book about my travels.

That book became Eat Pray Love .

Suddenly I had a shit ton of money.

This is important to the story.

Because here’s what happens when you give a lot of money to a crazy codependent person: They do crazy codependent things with it.

When those big, fat Eat Pray Love royalty checks started rolling in, my distorted thinking informed me that I was undeserving of all this abundance: Why was I so blessed when others still struggled?

A solution arose in my imagination: I must give all my money away!

I must immediately give this money to people who were either more worthy than me or more needy than me—preferably both!

I must save everyone! I must change everyone’s lives!

Codependents have terribly low self-esteem, you see, and we don’t know how to take care of ourselves.

We also have a need to take responsibility for other people, because we live in certainty that nobody else out there can take care of themselves, either—or, at least, not without our constant and anxious interference.

Throwing away our time and treasure is what we do , and fostering dependency in others makes us feel safe, valuable, and in control.

Significant and sudden affluence, therefore, created a perfect firestorm within me: My innate lack of self-worth and inflated sense of obligation collided with overnight wealth—and pretty soon I was hurling cash at people exactly the way I used to hurl my body at them.

I paid off the credit card bills and school loans of my family members and friends; I bought them clothes and jewelry and houses; I invested in their businesses; I supported their artistic projects; I paid for their weddings; I sent them on dream vacations, subsidized their therapy, financed their home renovations, and covered tuition for their children.

I donated to everyone who came knocking at my door—supporting every fundraiser, charitable cause, and political campaign within arm’s reach.

I paid the medical bills of strangers, and I bought cars for neighbors who were going through tough times.

I launched businesses in order to keep people employed, and I sent checks to random women who I’d heard were going through divorces.

I invented endless work projects around my home in order to give jobs to various local craftspeople.

I tithed to churches I did not even attend.

If you’re reading this and thinking, Well, that was very nice of you! , I wish to clarify that some of it was indeed very nice of me. And some of it was fucking insane.

Allow me to offer an example.

One morning in the late autumn of 2008, I woke up feeling a familiar sense of dread—what the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous perfectly describes as “restless, irritable, and discontent” (the hallmark emotional cocktail of the unrecovered addict).

Because I was eager to stay faithful to my husband, I wasn’t acting out in my sex and love addiction—which meant I needed to find new and creative ways of settling my nerves and avoiding my feelings of emptiness and anxiety.

That morning, I landed on a terrific way to distract myself.

The stock market had collapsed only a month earlier, and I knew that people were suffering exceptional financial insecurity.

So I went for a walk down the main street of my small New Jersey town, marched into nearly every business on the strip, and asked the proprietors if they needed any money.

“Could I maybe give you some kind of grant? Can I write you a check? How much money do you need? Just ask! And you never have to pay me back!”

I believe in my heart that I’m a generous person by nature, but this was not an act of generosity; this was mania.

This was me saying to an entire town: “Love me, love me, please love me, please see me, please help me, please save me, let me save you, I’m crawling out of my skin, I’m in over my head, I’ll rescue all of you, I’m so lost! ”

Needless to say, my extravagant benevolence did not end up how I’d imagined it would—with everyone grateful and prospering and all of us acting like a big, happy family.

Instead, my impulsive acts of overgiving stirred up a tornado of mutual resentments, misunderstandings, hurt feelings, and even legal issues.

And if my plan had been to force everybody to love me by giving them handouts, the results were decidedly mixed.

Some people loved me, sure—but those were the people who had always loved me, and for free.

With many others, it got messy. I estimate that about half the people I “helped out” during those years now cross the street when they see me coming, because my financial interference in their lives completely contaminated the delicate pH balance of our relationships.

I was somewhat out of my mind back then is what I’m saying.

Stay with me, dear reader—this all brings us back to Rayya.

During this time, I kept driving into the city to get monthly haircuts from her—coming to know her better as time went by, and always enjoying her company.

Rayya’s life was in session, too. Her destiny was having its own play.

For a while, things had been going great for her.

She had settled down with that chick who had hair exactly like mine, and they were attempting to build a stable life together.

Same-sex marriage was not yet legal in America, but Rayya and Gigi had registered as domestic partners in New York City and were trying their best to be responsible, married grown-ups.

Rayya was attending twelve-step meetings, going to the gym, keeping out of trouble.

She managed to accumulate some clean time and—for the first time in her life—some savings.

Then she got into real estate and bought some investment properties.

Rayya liked selling real estate, she said.

It reminded her of the thrill of selling drugs.

(“Slinging and banging is slinging and banging—whether it’s cocaine or apartments!

”) And Rayya was making art again at last. She wrote and directed a few independent short films, wrote some songs, produced some music.

But she was getting bored with her twelve-step meetings, she admitted to me.

The initial exuberance of sobriety was waning.

It was slowly dawning on her that she was expected to do this recovery work forever, and she didn’t like that feeling—the feeling that staying sober was now, like, her job .

She had never wanted a job, and she didn’t want this one, either.

She was chafing under the guidelines and discipline of the sober community, tired of the repetition of the same old prayers, irritated by all the personalities in the rooms. But she was still sticking with her program, more or less.

And for the most part, she was stable.

We were both fairly stable during those years, all things considered.

More stable, to be sure, than either of us had ever been before.

Then Rayya’s relationship broke up—not over any betrayal; it was simply that she and her partner wanted different things in life, and, as Rayya said, “We were starting to squish each other.”

While Rayya believed the separation was for the best, she was still sad about it.

She had knee surgery around that time, as well, and her leg didn’t heal quite right.

She was in pain. Her hepatitis C—a souvenir of her old intravenous drug use—kept flaring up, too.

She put on weight, which made her miserable.

What’s more, the financial markets had collapsed around the same time her relationship ended, and the real estate market had tanked.

Money was now an issue. Rayya was forced to sell her beloved little house in Asbury Park.

She also had to move out of the sunny two-bedroom East Village apartment she’d once shared with her partner.

She was now living in a humble Chelsea studio with no light.

The place depressed her: How had she ended up in a 350-square-foot walk-up apartment with a view of a brick wall, at her age?

Then one day I received an email from a mutual friend saying, “Rayya Elias is having a really rough time right now. She’s lonely and in pain, and she needs people to check on her.”

To a codependent like me, a message like that is a dog whistle.

I heard these words across the cosmos— a cry for help! somebody needs me! —and my disease woke up.

And that’s when I began strategizing how I could save my hairdresser’s life.