Page 55 of All the Way to the River

I do not have the heart to write out the excruciating details of the binge that I went on, less than a year after Rayya died, when my addiction instructed me to go out there and find someone.

I do not want to put myself through the pain of that time all over again, nor do I wish to breach the privacy of anyone I pulled into my disease with me, nor do I have any desire to drag my readers through even more drama.

I can tell you, however, that the tiny part of my brain that could still function with sanity knew that it was unwise for me to get romantically or sexually involved with anyone at that point.

First of all, I was sick with grief—and that is no condition in which to engage in romance.

Also, I had sworn to myself after Rayya’s death that I would spend a considerable amount of time alone, and that I would learn how to stand on my own two feet, just as Rayya had instructed.

I had never lived on my own for any substantial amount of time, and I knew that I needed it.

Building a good and stable and esteem-worthy life for myself was my sincere and earnest plan after Rayya died.

But you can’t give an addict a plan, because we can’t follow a plan—not even our own plans. (Especially not our own plans!) Until the miracle of recovery happens, we addicts only ever have one plan: Use.

So that’s what I did.

And how did that work out?

Well, I don’t even need to find words to describe how my binge ended up—because I already wrote this part , twenty years ago, in the pages of Eat Pray Love :

“Addiction is the hallmark of every infatuation-based love story,” a much younger Liz Gilbert wrote back then, discussing a much earlier doomed relationship.

It all begins when the object of your adoration bestows you with a heady, hallucinogenic dose of something you had never even dared to admit that you wanted—an emotional speedball, perhaps, of thunderous love and roiling excitement.

Soon you start craving that intense attention with the hungry obsession of any junkie.

When the drug is withheld, you promptly turn sick, crazy, and depleted (not to mention resentful of the dealer who encouraged this addiction in the first place, but who now refuses to pony up the good stuff anymore—despite the fact that you know he has it hidden somewhere, goddamn it, because he used to give it to you for free ).

Next stage finds you skinny and shaking in the corner, certain only that you would sell your soul or rob your neighbors just to have that thing one more time.

Meanwhile, the object of your adoration has become repulsed by you.

He looks at you like you’re someone he’s never met before, much less someone he once loved with high passion.

The irony is, you can hardly blame him. I mean, check yourself out.

You’re a pathetic mess, unrecognizable to your own eyes.

You have now reached infatuation’s final destination—the complete and merciless devaluation of self.

I wrote those words in the early autumn of 2004, but I could just as easily have written them in the early winter of 2018.

For that matter, I could just as easily have written those words thirty years ago, or ten years ago, or forty years ago—because this sort of behavior is not something that I once did; this sort of behavior is something that I do .

Fantasy, followed by infatuation, followed by seduction, followed by enmeshment, followed by complete self-abandonment, followed by obsession and desperate need, followed by despair and collapse and loneliness—over and over again.

Why do I keep doing it, though?

Why do I never seem to graduate from this storyline, no matter how old I get, how intelligent I am, or how hard I try to control myself?

“I just want to be normal !” I remember Rayya saying in tears when she started drinking again after her many years of sobriety. “I just want to be a normal person who does normal things that normal people do!”

Yes, my love, I get it.

I very much understand that bewilderment: Why can’t we just be normal?

The answer to that question, for me at least, was written right there in the pages of Eat Pray Love , staring up at me in black and white, rendered blazingly obvious through my use of these unflinching words: addiction , hallucinogenic , speedball , intense , obsession , drug , sick , crazy , depleted , pathetic , mess , complete and merciless devaluation of self.

Here’s the thing, though: When I wrote those words over twenty years ago, I thought I was using the language of addiction metaphorically.

But it wasn’t a metaphor; it was the absolute, bald-faced reality.

I was diagnosing myself with perfect accuracy as a sex and love addict, without even knowing it.

Meaning the reason I can’t do normal things that normal people do is because I’m an addict.

So there I was, back in the same situation all over again.

Back on the bathroom floor on my knees, all over again.

Lost, all over again.

The only difference was that this time I knew—by which I mean to say, thank God I remembered —that there was someplace I could go for help.