LOVE SICK

Why Liz Gilbert is making a mess of love addiction...

I am reading Elizabeth Gilbert. The world is reading Elizabeth Gilbert. Or at least it seems everyone in the addiction space, who cares about understanding the compulsions that create the insanity, is. Or if they’re not, they’re likely pointedly, not.

So still then, ironically, centering it. Either way, the memoir – All the Way to the River – is a recovery sensation right now, and everyone is either losing their mind or having it restored. Our collective conscience is hooked.

In terms of the book, as I wrote to a friend, it is prose, poetry, doodling, and journaling all rolled into one. It is memoir at its jumbled, mumbling, honest best. Messy and incomplete, while acknowledging the incomplete mess of it.

I enjoy that it does not attempt to not be messy as fuck. It doesn’t attempt to sanitise addiction. Because. Well, because it’s like that. Addiction is brutal. Uncomfortable. Gross. It’s art mimicking the human condition. Dark art. There are those bewailing Gilbert’s too-muchness; this appropriation of her dying soulmate’s story for her own. Many who want to look away. That it’s crass and a tad disrespectful and distasteful—all this telling-the-truth, bringing-it-out-the-shadows business. Eww. Stop already.

But there are enough middle-aged white lady wo-wo crone witches out there with hagitude and no fucks to give to be circling Gilbert in applause. I am one of those with sore hands.

That said, this book does need a trigger warning. It doesn’t contain the beautiful one as featured in Stephanie Foo’s complex-ptsd recovery memoir What My Bones Know:

“For my fellow complex PTSD darlings: I know that trauma books can be triggering and painful to read. I’ve struggled through a number of them myself. But I felt that it was necessary for me to share my abusive childhood in order for the reader to understand where I’m coming from. Part I of this book might be tough for you, though I ask that you at least give it a shot.
But I won’t judge you if, at any point, you need to skip ahead a few pages. And I’d like to promise you this, even if it is a bit of a spoiler: This book has a happy ending.”

This warning, astute and thoughtful, immediately makes you feel, as a fellow complex PTSD survivor, that you can trust the author. That I can turn the page gently and confidently in search of my post-traumatic growth. We are never fully cured from complex PTSD; like all deep grief, we just grow around it, and gain new layers, not permanently on fire, so different planes of existence can be reached.

By beginning her book on C-PTSD with this sensitive observation of her readership, Foo instills faith to read, or and permission to skip on, as needed. I will be sure to do the same at the beginning of my currently in progress memoir – LOVE SICK: A Memoir of Longing.

I am taking a fair old time to get through All the Way to the River, to reach its edge shall we say. And that, my friends, is good self-care.

Most importantly, the book is making me want to tell the truth. The whole truth and nothing but the truth. Because as Gilbert’s partner Rayya Elias pronounced:

“The truth has legs; it always stands. When everything else in the room has blown up or dissolved away, the only thing left standing will always be the truth. Since that’s where you’re gonna end up anyway, you might as well just start there.”

So this is the part in my healing—as documented in my memoir, and starting here in this post—with all the mountains of understanding and awareness scaled, that I fully tell some hot-mess love misuse disorder truth.

All my attachment addiction, disordered loving, over-loving, love binging—it’s all been in the wrestling ring with me the whole time. I know it’s addiction because:

• Each acting-out episode gets progressively worse—more delightful, then more searingly painful.

• Some parts are hidden from other people. Thankfully, not all parts are secret to all people. There will be parts I am hiding even (mostly) from myself, though.

• It’s compulsive. I seem to not be able to stop myself from going there.

• I want it to change but am finding that change is nigh on impossible. I am ergo, in the lexicon of recovery, powerless, insane, unmanageable—and in the vocabulary of everyone else, bat-shit crazy lady.

And to all those who are normal, or who have normal attachment styles or normal nervous systems or normal brains—I am behaving unfathomably and against good judgment, irrationally and bonkers—just the hell why would you?

For anyone reading addiction books, and especially All the Way to the River, I suspect you’re slow-nodding your head, eyes a little wide, mouth pursed slightly, saying, “Yep. I get it. I see you.”

It makes no sense. Addiction. Love addiction. Any addiction.

There is a big part of me that is that rational soul too—who sees it for what it is. Who is able to write about it. She’s the one with her fingers on the keys.

Then there is the addiction princess who is holding the reins of the chariot, making the charge to a castle of promise-on-high. A castle in which she is sure, this time, lives her redemption-giving, lifesaving, fantastical Prince Charming. If she can just get there fast enough to suck his dick, she’ll be good and proper saved. (And if that made you go double eew—that’s exactly why we don’t talk enough about love addiction, love misuse disorder, limerence—because it’s yucky. Tragic. Distasteful. It makes me want to throw up in my mouth. And that, princesses, is exactly why we must.)

Credit: Alamy

It’s so like drinking. The cycle of I am absolutely not going to do that. I appear to be doing exactly the thing I said I would not do.

Take this latest incident: I tell him on Monday that I wish to free us from the bind we are in, where we are neither getting what could be described as nourishing, sober, right-minded love and companionship and connection. It is painful, sporadic, and uncertain loving. Disordered. Unsober. Drunk, then.

I feel so empowered when I step outside into the garden, having delivered my proclaimation, I want to feel the light on my face. I let out a big cry. There is literally a dragonfly waiting on the lounger. As I step out he flies up. Flies back down, lands literally on my heart. I can hear his (or was it a her) steady buzz. I look down at the dragonfly’s eyes. The dragonfly’s head moves. She looks up at me, then down. Literally fucking nods.

There can be no clearer sign from the universe that, for my own rebirth, transformation and recovery, I have done the right thing. I need to be free.

Messy stories like Liz Gilbert’s All the Way to the River are necessary and trailblazing.

Thank fuck she writes what she does. They deliver the nod to us all so that we can speak.

Speak of what is hidden. Shameful. Sick.

I, for one, am standing in salute, while half hiding my face…

I hope too, that soon I can turn it fully to the light.

Subscribe for more updates on my forthcoming book on love addiction, limerence, attachment trauma and recovery – LOVE SICK: A Memoir of Longing.