Day Forty-Four: Found Myself I Have, Now How to Live With Me

I watched Eat, Pray, Love tonight when I got home from an extremely long and tedious road trip back from Christmas in Indiana. It's not a bad movie and I'm sure it's a lovely story, but it did not quite resonant with me in perhaps the way it was intended. Then again, that is beauty of stories, there is room for many interpretations and we get to choose the one that speaks the most clearly to us.

There is a scene near the beginning in which the main character tries to pray. It's a touching actually, heartfelt and raw and yet I laughed. The laughter came from witnessing what I believe might be one of the most incredibly selfish acts that I think most of us have done at one time or another. This character, while attempting to pray for maybe the first time, praying about her marriage no less, says that it's an emergency, that it's very important. I understand, I have been that character. Praying to stay in a relationship, praying to get out of one. It is not unfamiliar territory and yet, how silly and selfish of us to pray for such a thing as if it were truly so important. That the abuses and horrors throughout the world, the loss, the brutalities, that all these things which are truly important enough to pray to a God about just in case one might exist, should be put on the same level as our trivial love lives.

So I laughed at the absurdity of any of us thinking that our love life might be emergency enough to get God's attention ahead of the true tragedies in the world. We are selfish aren't we? All of us so resolutely consumed with our own emotional struggles and daily living. I am guilty more than anyone. I have prayed to dozen different Gods, to the universe, to the winds. I prayed because it was easier than acceptance and change. Mostly, it was easier than learning to forgive myself for the failings I can no longer ignore or change.

In another scene, this one in Rome, our heroine says that ruin is the path to transformation. I feel that I have been in a constant state of transforming for many years. Maybe it is not the ruins in our life that helps us to transform, maybe it's the transformation that causes the ruin. My search, my constant struggle for change and to find myself is in itself a transformation, and not a good one. Why do I keep assuming I need to find myself, that I need to change? This is me. This sad, screwed up, contradictory, silly, flawed, slightly crazy, and sometimes hurtful person is just who I am.

Prayers answered. Ruination complete. Transformation aborted. I apologize that I am not perfect; that I can be hurtful and selfish. I apologize that I am only who I am and that the search I fear is over. This is who you are stuck with. I am no longer going to search for myself. I found me long ago, I just didn't know that I'd been found. So now, the quest becomes not who I am, but how to live and to love what I have become.

I wish I could be a better me. I know those in my life, that have loved and befriended me certainly deserve a better me. At some point, I suppose, we all must learn to accept that which we have become, flaws and all. I owe those friends and loved ones much more than I'll ever be able to give them, so since I cannot any longer pretend to not know myself, all I can do is apologize and promise to try harder to be deserving of your time and friendship. I eat all the time. I've done all the praying I will ever do. Love, however, is an eternally organic and fragile thing and one that I can continue to pursue and perfect, even if I can no longer do the same for myself.