Elizabeth Gilbert at ICAN's 2011 Women's Leadership Conference

I have my phone to text everybody should be doing this it is absolutely wonderful to be here and it's been great to be here all day at ICANN and I've gotten to meet a lot of you and I was sort of wandering around the halls it just is an honor to be here in your presence so thank you for having me here so I'll begin by telling you a story because that's what I do and and I just want to talk about something that happened to me the other day at JFK at the airport in New York I don't get recognized very often but when I do it's always at airports I think people associate me with planes but these these three women came up to me and you know I they wouldn't be offended probably if I describe them as tough-talking tiny little italian-american old babes because that's sort of what they were like did you remember the Golden Girls and Estelle Getty you know that like that particular kind of Italian grandma and this was in Queens and they were obviously very much from Queens New York and the littlest toughest one with the biggest glasses and the tightest perm came marching over to me and and she just walks up to me she goes honey I got to ask you something and and I said you know ask me whatever you want to ask me go ahead and and she said do you have something to do with this whole Eat Pray Love thing and I said yes I do have something to do with this whole Eat Pray Love thing and she nudged her friend and she said see I told you I said I said that's that girl who wrote that book based on that movie absolutely absolutely true that is what happens to you if Julia Roberts plays you you become the girl who wrote the book based on that right like everything gets all sort of sideways and wonky so so I am the girl who wrote that book based on that movie and this it's been a great blessing to have been that person it also has come with these curious unexpected side effects and consequences and one of the ones that I find most fascinating is that because of the great success of Eat Pray Love and because it was a book about a journey of self-discovery and because I had a happy end I am often mistaken for somebody who has gotten her life together and and and I understand why people want that desperately to be true for the same reason that I keep hoping to find somebody who has gotten her life together because it it gives you hope that maybe you will someday get your life together as though life is some sort of a Sudoku puzzle and there are people who figure out how to solve it and then once they solve it everything is kind of gravy after that right I think we all sort of dream that someday that that will be us and the other really weird thing that happens in my life now is that people actually think I can help them get their lives together which is an even more grievous misunderstanding and and it has odd consequences like I was at a reading not very long ago and there was a line of people waiting to get their book signed and this woman approached me to get her book signed and she was I don't know how to describe it she was wearing a face of total insanity like almost as if she had put it on that morning you know like I'm gonna wear my blue dress and my pearls and my craziest face you know and that's how I'm gonna go out in the world that's what she had brought with her into the world that day and she kind of like almost impaled me with herself as she leaned in to the table and she said kind of white-knuckle lling that the table she said I know I only have like a little tiny bit of time with you and I don't want to waste your time I don't want to put you on the spot I don't want to make you uncomfortable but just have to ask you one really really quick question and I said sure go ahead ask and she said should I divorce my husband true true you know and there was a part of me that wondered what would happen if I just said yes you should you know or no you mustn't you know like just to take this like voice of total authority in this situation um and and instead of course I was like what am I gonna give to this person in this tiny little weird frame of a moment that we're sharing you know and I just following some weird impulse I sort of just grabbed her hands and I said if you think about this for even 10 seconds I know that you will realize why I can't answer that question and you could see her shut her eyes and she gave it a 10 second think and then she opened her eyes and all this realization dawned and she said oh right because you don't know any of the people in that story and I said right I don't know any of the people in that story and even if I did I couldn't answer this for you even if I was your closest confident even if I was your sister I couldn't answer this for you and then something happened and I still sort of get chills remembering it the all the crazy tude just drained away from her and I was left looking at her actual face that had been hidden underneath that and it was the face of somebody who had obviously not slept in about six months who was exhausted and lost and depleted and who was so desperate that day to find somebody to whom she could hand over the entirety of her power and just have them give her an answer she was clearly right in the center of a dilemma in the Greek ancient definition of the word dilemma meaning a circumstance where you have two choices and both of them are equally horrible and she clearly had not been able to find her way through this and I was so sympathetic because I've seen that face I had that face I've seen that face on myself at 3 o'clock in the morning and I know how much you want along for somebody to answer it for you to sort of put you on your path that you have lost your way from and of course I couldn't do that for her that day and I just sort of took her hands and I say I've been where you are I'm on the other side you'll find your way through and that was serve all I could give her and had to send her away with no clearer of an answer then she had come with and and I just was thinking about that so much about those moments of terrible indecision those grieving moments of terrible and decision that we all have to face in our lives and the great uncertainty of it and the fact that we live not only on a planet that is constantly in upheaval we live in a mind that is constantly in upheaval and we live in a culture that encourages indecision because we're surrounded by so many tens of thousands of choices every single day you know how are you gonna figure out your marriage or your life or your career when you can't even go to the grocery store without being like paralyzed looking at the deodorant section and wondering I don't know which one of these 158 deodorants is going to bring me personal contentment and happiness you know like you don't know and you know and and and that decision sort of gets doubled and doesn't again and again and and you can so easily sort of get lost in that I think that women in particular at this moment in history are liable to fall into that miasma of uncertainty for reasons that are very specific to this moment of history and that is mostly what I want to talk about here today which is to remind all of you as you're going out there in the world and trying to make stupendous changes and do fabulous things which I know you want to do to remind you to be very gentle with yourself in recognition that we are living as women in a very interesting moment of history and namely what that is is that we are all all of us of this generation and by this generation I mean any woman born in the Western industrialized world in the last 80 or 90 years in terms of human history I call that one generation and something very recent we are all the subjects of a vast and enormous Lee historically unprecedented social science experiment and that social science experiment is what happens if you give women autonomy what happens if you give them literacy what happens if you give them education what happens if you give them legal protections political rights access to their own money chances power opportunity all these things that women have never ever had suddenly we have immediately almost overnight like pansies raised in cages released into the wild you know like all the sudden we're all out there in the jungle trying to solve it and it's tricky and one of the reasons it's tricky and I would say trickier for us than for men is that we don't have unlike men thousands and thousands and thousands of years of role models of autonomous powerful independent literate women who had that sort of control over their own destinies we don't have those kind of examples not only do we not have them mythologically and classically and throughout history we often don't have them in our own families I can't look to my grandmother's life or even to my mother's life for very many clues on how to live mine because my life is so radically different from theirs that it's almost as if I come from a different species my grandmother who's still alive she's an amazing woman her name is Maude Olsen she's 97 she lives in Brainerd Minnesota she was a Dust Bowl depression-era farm wife whose life was nothing but rigor and difficulty for the entirety of her existence and she had seven children probably a great deal more pregnancies than that she was poor she was struggling and every single day the only challenge on her plate was sort of how to get through that day her life looked exactly like the lives of every woman who had come before her from that moment to the beginning of time and it looked exactly like the lives of every single woman she saw around her and she and I talk about this all the time and we talk about this odd fact that in every possible measurable conceivable way her life was so much harder than mine with one notable exception she wasn't neurotic she didn't wake up at 3 o'clock in the morning and wonder if she should have moved to Boston and go to art school she didn't wonder if she should have gotten a master's degree she didn't wonder if she should have had a kid if she sort of stayed married if she there was no point in her wondering any of these things because she lived in this very narrow rigidity of walls of choicelessness and so with all the difficulty that she had the one thing she didn't have to suffer through was wondering if she was making the right decision and that is what my life is every day a huge amazed she lived in this big narrow walls I live in this vast kind of topiary maze of choice after choice after choice and we all do as in keeping with the idea of a social science experiment right we're all in our maze and every woman is in her own one my life doesn't look like my neighbor's life or my sister's life from my aunt's we're all taking different paths in different ways we're all experimenting with this freedom in different ways and it can be enormous ly confusing and sometimes you feel like you found a straightaway in the maze and you're going down that straightaway and then you win right into a brick wall and you're like whoa you have to back up and take a right turn and then there's a lever and you think it's a pleasure reward and you push it and it was like an electric shock and you didn't know that and you have to back up and try again and it's all this like maneuvering and and second-guessing almost as though we have doors in front of us all the time in the modern life as women and and like each day you've got like door one two and three and have to choose which one you go through and there's that terrible heart sickening fear that by going through door number two you are murdering some essential part of yourself that could only be actualized by going through doors number one or three you know and and maybe you're gonna regret it and you're gonna end up like my friend Annie whose husband says that she's gonna someday write an autobiography called I should have had the scampi the Ann Ryan story a lifetime of second-guessing right this is the big danger that we all live in and it's a very real one and how do you navigate that you know and sometimes you look over your topiary into some other woman's maze this is why we live in the age of memoir right we want to see how other women are doing it and sometimes that's edifying and helpful but other times it just makes you more confused because just when you thought you had it figured out you see someone who did it completely differently and you have to throw it all into doubt again and wonder if you should have taken that route and it can lead to Leoben schnide this terrible German word that means life envy the sense that somebody else figured it out and if you just had her life or her house or her job or her car her kids then you would be happy but she's doing the same thing into peeking into somebody else's life and we're all like in this miasma right how do you get out of it the great Martha back who writes for O Magazine wrote one of the most memorable columns I have ever seen in my life about this subject and she said that in her explorations of the modern world and in women's lives she has discovered that there are only four types of women and they go into these categories women who chose career over family and who feel conflicted about it to women who chose family over career and who feel conflicted about it three women God helped them who chose career and family and who feel really conflicted about it and for the Mystics so what are the Mystics the Mystics could be in any one of those previous three categories a mystic is a woman who has somehow figured out a way to drown out all the commotion and that sort of commuter mind of a million different inspirations and aspirations and other people's goals and what you think you're supposed to do in regrets and second-guessing and drown it all out and has found a way to follow some deeply true inner voice that takes her very much in her own direction now I would argue that anytime of history that requires that you must become a mystic in order to have a contented life is a tricky time in which to live in the past you only need like one mystic in each village and everyone else was able to march in lockstep but we don't have the lockstep anymore so we all have to do it how do you do it I mean I know I know how I do it because it matters to me to try to stay in concordance with my own journey I get up every morning at 4:30 in the morning and I meditate for about 45 minutes and then I follow that up with about an hour of yoga to try to like keep my body from being a distraction in my life and then because cardio is important I go running for a couple miles and then throughout the day I I make a point to only eat things that are nourishing and healthy for me in very small amounts and I spend the rest of my afternoon in my many charitable pursuits are you buying Duna buying this I was like how far am I gonna go before they start laughing like you don't actually think I I don't do any of that stuff I don't I don't do any I hope you do you should you know taking notes like I have to get up at 4:30 in the morning and check my violin you know like I make it even worse no um I do get up at 4:30 in the morning but it is just to pee and go back to bed but I I don't think that is the way you know I don't think that like more rigor is the way I'll tell you what my daily schedule actually is because it's probably precisely exactly like every single one of yours I get up every single day and I I do my best with that day I do my best with what I have there and and sometimes I fell very short of my aspirations for myself for what I wish I could be or accomplish and I'm sorry to say this and I and I suspect that it might sound familiar to some of you I am sometimes very very very hard on myself when I fall short of those aspirations and and who I thought that I was supposed to be that day or in this lifetime and I can say things to myself that are so evil I wouldn't say those things to a mugger you know I'm like there are ways that I can do that I can talk to myself that are so nasty and demeaning you almost wouldn't believe it especially in in what the Australian poet les Murray calls the 3 o'clock in the morning show you know where you wake up in the middle of the night and start running through your failings and wishing that you know none of you have ever done that so you're just gonna have to take my word for it that it happens to people sometimes and I feel like what I want to send you away with today I know that you've been given ample inspiration and and motivation to go out and do extraordinary things and and looking out on you I am not fearful that you won't try to do extraordinary things I am NOT fearful that you aren't extraordinary people that you're not generous and ambitious and and smart and all these things I fear only one thing and that is that or perhaps not often extremely kind to yourself and I think that this age in which we live requires that more than ever and especially for women it is the one prayer that I have to offer to you if there is a secret to the Sudoku puzzle at this moment in history for people like us and there have never been people like us before then I think that secret has something to do with acting in a spirit of unconditional self friendship your true life begins and everything becomes possible the day that you drop the knife that you have been holding to your own throat and I would ask all of you whatever shame and blame and fear that you and remorse and regret and I should have had the scampi blues that you might be carrying with you or that might be holding you back we have to let go of it there is indeed no time for it and and I do think that it's the only way to get through the maze and to find your way so I just wanted to impart that on you you are all beautiful be very very gentle with yourselves today and from this day forward and everything is going to be fine thank you

Channel: ICANleaders

Views: 46,237

Rating: 4.9815669 out of 5

Keywords: ICAN, Elizabeth, Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love, Institute, Career, Advancement, Needs, Women, Leadership, Conference, meeting, work, Julia, Roberts, Movie, Committed, Omaha, International, Youth, Woman

Id: c5f9MGxd5Xo

Length: 17min 36sec (1056 seconds)

Published: Sun May 01 2011