Elizabeth Gilbert on Losing the Love of Her Life

Summary

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Podcast Summary: Elizabeth Gilbert on Losing the Love of Her Life

We Can Do Hard Things | Hosted by Glennon Doyle (with Abby Wambach & Amanda Doyle)
Guest: Elizabeth Gilbert | Date: September 9, 2025

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Overview:

In this raw and searing episode, Glennon Doyle sits down with bestselling author Elizabeth Gilbert to discuss her new book All the Way to the River—a “brutiful” memoir of love, addiction, profound loss, and brutal honesty. Elizabeth recounts her love affair with Raya Elias, their intertwined battles with addiction (substance, love, codependency), the devastation of Raya’s illness and relapse, and the hard-earned recovery and wisdom that followed. This episode is a masterclass in vulnerability, truth-telling, and the painful beauty of loving and losing someone at the center of your soul.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights:

1. The Sacredness (and Terror) of Telling the Truth

• Glennon opens with a reflection on how personally invested she is in Liz’s new book, calling it “the most brutiful, the most beautiful and brutal and transcendent love story that I’ve ever read.” (03:10)
• Both women discuss the fear and pressure of having honest, sacred conversations, especially about life-altering personal loss.

Elizabeth Gilbert [04:35]:
“This is an incredibly sacred conversation. So you better relax about it. You better not prepare.”

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2. The Anatomy of Elizabeth and Raya’s Relationship

Liz shares the evolution of her relationship with Raya:

• Started as hairdresser–client, became close friends and eventually “each other’s person.”
• The relationship was complex and “inconvenient” because Liz was married, and her love for Raya didn’t fit existing categories. She kept it a secret, likening the secrecy itself to addiction.

Elizabeth Gilbert [11:11]:
“This is my little thing that nobody needs to know about. Which I now recognize as being the definition of addiction.”

• The “secret” is exposed when Raya is diagnosed with terminal cancer, forcing Liz to choose honesty and love over secrecy and comfort.

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3. Addiction, Love, and 'Bad Math'

• The conversation shifts to addiction: Raya’s lifelong struggle with substance use, Elizabeth’s realization of her own addiction patterns (love/sex/codependency), and how both their “secret lives” governed their behavior.
• Elizabeth describes how both she and Raya were run by underlying, often unconscious fears and traumas.

Elizabeth Gilbert [14:14]:
“I am going to take all the love that I possess and I’m going to pour it into you with the hope that you will give me a crumb of it back... It’s bad math.”

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4. Public, Private, and Secret Lives (19:26)

• The pair revisit a line that struck them: “Everyone has a public life, a private life, and a secret life.”
• Liz discusses how the “secret life” is the programming built in childhood—an undercurrent that may result in finding “heroes” (substances or people) to rescue us, but ultimately leads deeper into pain.

Elizabeth Gilbert [21:25]:
“When I look back at my younger self, I’m like, oh honey, that was such a good guess... It seems like it should work.”

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5. The Mechanics of Love & Sex Addiction

• Liz shares the pattern of using people (as others use substances) to regulate her own nervous system: seeking “lava”—love, attention, validation, affection.
• She describes the cycle between “sedative” relationships (safe, steady) and “stimulant” relationships (drama, risk), and how true emotional sobriety means not using people to self-soothe.

Elizabeth Gilbert [28:50]:
“For me, emotional sobriety is I don’t want to use another person to regulate my nervous system anymore because that makes me into a vampire... My soul did not come here to use people.”

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6. Raya at Her Best—and Worst (29:44)

Favorite Raya Story

• Liz recounts a moment at a funeral when Raya showed deep compassion toward a troubled, possibly dangerous young man—seeing and protecting his humanity even as others feared him.

Elizabeth Gilbert [31:50]:
“She walks right up to him, in absolute ease, with such mercy... and she would just tap his heart and say, ‘How you doing in there?’”

Descent Into Addiction

• After leaving her recovery program, Raya’s ego and addiction returned; she began drinking, then using drugs, spiraling into manipulation and chaos.
• Liz describes witnessing Raya’s “slow, then quick” loss of integrity and decency, and how the love story became a nightmare.

Elizabeth Gilbert [35:24]:
“First slowly, then quickly, she started to lose all her attainments... now I’m going to start keeping secrets... now I’m going to start using people.”

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7. The Hidden War: Raya’s Journals and Internal Pain (40:58)

• Liz shares the gift of Raya’s private journals, which show the difference between her public bravado and her inner anguish.
• The journals reveal: while Raya outwardly dismissed sobriety, inwardly she agonized over her drinking and failures, mirroring the “Jonah in the whale”—the suffering unseen by others.

Elizabeth Gilbert [43:00]:
“She was writing in her journal, ‘Am I losing my sobriety?... I’m a loser and a fuck up. Why can’t I do life?’ ...she said, ‘I go out there in the world and put on this persona of mightiness, but secretly my insides are rotting.’”

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8. Codependency, Denial, and the Road to Recovery (46:00)

• Glennon asks how Liz moved from seeing Raya as the sole problem to realizing her own complicity and addiction.
• Liz details the slow, painful process of recovery and accountability—how she learned to ask “What is my part in this?” and stopped blaming Raya.
• She describes how their destructive but co-created dynamic only became clear after long reflection and recovery work.

Elizabeth Gilbert [47:20]:
“We together, brick by brick, built a world in which...round the clock, teenagers are showing up with feed bags of cocaine... This is our—we built this. This wasn’t done to me. It wasn’t done to her.”

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9. Cliffhanger and Look Ahead

• Glennon announces the conversation will continue in the next episode, focusing on recovery, power, codependency, and reclaiming selfhood.
• The episode ends with hope that honesty, community, and vulnerability can eventually loosen the grip of even our most destructive secrets.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Preparation vs. Presence:
  “This is an incredibly sacred conversation. So you better relax about it. You better not prepare.”
  — Elizabeth Gilbert [04:35]

• On Secrets as the Root of Addiction:
  “This is my little thing that nobody needs to know about. Which I now recognize as being the definition of addiction.”
  — Elizabeth Gilbert [11:11]

• On the Cycle of Codependency:
  “It’s bad math. And then you become… somebody who has taken my entire treasure, given it to a pawn shop, and then stands outside the locked doors at night being like, can I have one tiny bit of that back?”
  — Elizabeth Gilbert [14:29]

• On the Innocence of Trying to Feel Okay:
  “Honey, that was such a good guess... It seems like it should work.”
  — Elizabeth Gilbert [21:25]

• On Recovery and Personal Integrity:
  “For me, emotional sobriety is I don’t want to use another person to regulate my nervous system anymore… My soul did not come here to use people. My soul came here to serve.”
  — Elizabeth Gilbert [28:50]

• The Heart-Tap Gesture:
  “She would just tap it on my heart and she would say, ‘How you doing in there?’”
  — Elizabeth Gilbert [31:54]

• On Co-creation of the Addictive World:
  “We built this. This is our… this wasn’t done to me. It wasn’t done to her.”
  — Elizabeth Gilbert [47:20]

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Key Timestamps for Major Segments

• 03:10 – Glennon’s emotional introduction & praise for Liz’s book
• 04:35 – Liz on the sacredness of the conversation
• 08:29 – Overview of Liz and Raya’s evolving relationship
• 11:11 – The role of secrecy in addiction
• 14:14 – Love addiction as “bad math”
• 19:26 – “Public, private, and secret life” discussion
• 21:25 – Innocence of addiction and failed solutions
• 28:50 – How Liz used people to self-soothe
• 29:44-35:55 – Favorite story about Raya & the funeral
• 35:24 – Raya’s descent after leaving recovery
• 40:58-43:20 – The reality shown in Raya’s journals
• 46:00 – Liz on taking responsibility and the path to recovery
• 47:20 – Realization of mutual creation of chaos
• 49:31 – Glennon previews the next episode’s topics

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Tone & Takeaway

The conversation is candid, compassionate, often wrenching but threaded with hope and humor. Elizabeth and Glennon hold space for brutal honesty—recounting not just suffering, but the growth and connection that can come from telling the unvarnished truth. The real gift is in witnessing these two women “do hard things” side by side and refusing to look away from what hurts. The episode is an act of service for anyone grappling with love, addiction, loss, or the ache of being profoundly, imperfectly human.

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Transcript

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[Podcast Host (Main Interviewer)]

It's the beginning of a new school year and also the classroom sniffles and sneezes that go along with it from home to school and back. Stock up with Kleenex Ultra Soft Tissues. Start the school year off the right way by preparing for the messes that come with it. You don't want to be caught without a tissue on hand to help. Kleenex Ultra Soft Tissues are soft and absorbent to stand up against runny noses to keep you and your family clean and comforted. As the school year starts this back to school season, make sure to get the classroom essential that teachers and students can rely on for whatever happens next. Grab Kleenex. Well, POD Squad, here we are. I want to start by saying a couple things. First of all, in thinking about doing this interview, this conversation I have had, you will be shocked to know that I've been feeling big about it. And I have been thinking about over preparing and obsessing about it for a couple reasons. One being today we are talking with Liz Gilbert, which is already important to me because I love you and respect you so much. You are just like if you looked at my heart, a big portion of it would just be dedicated to you. Okay, so already it's important to me. But on top of that, what we're talking about today is your new book, which it's called all the Way to the river. And this is an early interview, but I'm certain that even by the time it comes out everyone's going to already be talking about it because it's the most brutiful. It's the most beautiful and brutal and transcendent love story that I've ever read. And it's the most honest and affecting thing that I've ever read, which I always think about every new book you put out. But this time I'm really serious. And because it is, I got to.

[Elizabeth Gilbert]

Be.

[Podcast Host (Main Interviewer)]

Close ish to a lot of this. While it was going on, we were kind of all in it together. Although there is so much, as I've told you, I read it three times because there's so much that I didn't know that reading it felt.

[Elizabeth Gilbert]

I read it.

[Podcast Host (Main Interviewer)]

The first time I read it, I read it like. Like I wasn't even taking it in because it was. It made me feel sympathy for my close people who read my books when they don't know all the stuff going on behind the scenes and how. So this weekend I said to myself, glennon, this is the most sacred talk you've had on this podcast. And the way I used to, I would have completed that sentence was so you better get your shit together, you bitter.

[Elizabeth Gilbert]

Freak out.

[Podcast Host (Main Interviewer)]

You bitter. And so what I changed it to, because I imagined you in my head was this is an incredibly sacred conversation. So you better relax about it.

[Elizabeth Gilbert]

You better not prepare. Yeah, you better not prepare.

[Podcast Host (Main Interviewer)]

So here we are.

[Elizabeth Gilbert]

Oh, sweetheart, thank you for that. The part of my heart that has your name and face and essence in it is exactly the same as the part of your heart that has mine. And how do we even prepare for this conversation? I mean, this book is about stuff happening. Like this is where I think everyone can relate to this. Ultimately, I think this book is about what happens when you find yourself in a situation despite all your preparation and all your, like, I'm doing really well here at Life and I'm going to handle this really well and I'm going to be good at this and I'm going to make sure I'm good at this. And this is really important. So I better prepare. And then you look down and there's no ground under your feet. And then underneath the no ground there's like lava. And underneath the lava there's. There's crocodiles. There's lava proof crocodiles.

[Podcast Host (Main Interviewer)]

God, this damn lava.

[Elizabeth Gilbert]

I hate those lava proof crocodiles. And you're like, how did this happen? You know, how did this happen? I made a whole bunch of choices because I thought that those choices were going to lead me to happiness, success and well, being. And instead I'm here with the lava proof crocodiles and I am at a point in my life where I actually do not believe that anybody gets to go through their tenure of life of Earth School without this happening. It might not be this exact thing, but, like, oh, my God, I thought this was going to be A, B, C and d and it's 19 green and barf. It's like, not even. It's so far off the Alphabet, you.

[Podcast Host (Main Interviewer)]

Can'T even use letters to describe it.

[Elizabeth Gilbert]

So, yeah, I bet it was shocking to read it. The people who love me have been shocked to read it. I was shocked to live it. And then I spent seven years trying to figure out what I could do to not have to write this book. And then it was just so obvious that it had to be told. And the only way to do it was the way you have to get through everything, which is just by telling the truth.

[Podcast Host (Main Interviewer)]

Okay, so we'll start with telling the truth. First of all, I know. I mean, you lived this story. You lived it, your love story with Raya and then losing Rhea and then you wrote about it. But I know you and I know that you've also thought about how to talk about this. So where is the place that you would want to start? If somebody were, let's say they weren't going to read the book and only listen to this interview, how would you start to explain this situation?

[Elizabeth Gilbert]

I think you just have to tell the story of what happened. Right? I mean, that's the thing I always tell people when they want to write something, is just say what happened. And this book begins with a sort of vision dream that I had on my 54th birthday where Rhea kind of appeared in my mind with a list of instructions from beyond the grave, saying, essentially, just say what happened. Just write this book and just say what happened and tell the people everything that happened. I mean, that was always her gift when she was sober and when she was in her sanity was this sort of fearlessness around. Just say it. Just put it on the table so we can unpack it and take a look at it. So I would start this interview by just introducing who I am and who she was and what we were to one another and what happened.

[Podcast Host (Main Interviewer)]

Great. Do that.

[Elizabeth Gilbert]

So I'm Elizabeth Gilbert.

[Podcast Host (Main Interviewer)]

Yes, you are.

[Elizabeth Gilbert]

I'm an author.

[Podcast Host (Main Interviewer)]

Yes, you are.

[Elizabeth Gilbert]

Some of you, if you know the story Eat, Pray Love, know that at the end of the Eat, Pray Love, I fell in love with this kind and charismatic Brazilian man. And we came to the United States from Bali, where we met and got married. And I was like, great, I've Got my life sorted out now. Like I went on the Eat Pray Love journey. I think I got quite a bit sorted out there. But I was like, I'm 34 and I've figured everything out.

[Podcast Host (Main Interviewer)]

That's what 34 is for.

[Elizabeth Gilbert]

Thinking I know how life works now. And I have had my spiritual awakening and I've met this lovely person and then there. So then who Rayya was. So Raya was somebody who I met because she was my hairdresser. She started as my hairdresser. I met her long before the Pray Love Journey. When I met her, I was in my first marriage. She was in a relationship with a woman who she would be with for a long time. We liked each other. We thought the other one was hilarious. No love at first sight story there. She was my hairdresser. And then over the years she became a social friend and then she became a better friend. And then she moved out to New Jersey where I lived. She became my neighbor and then she became my. I sort of became her mentor for writing. She became my mentor for living because of all the recovery that she had as a drug addict in Recovery. Her 12 step program was kind of the closest intimacy I'd had with what recovery looks like. And I was awed by it. The honesty, the self accountability, the weeding out of your character defects. I loved all of that. And she was my guide in many ways to how to tell the truth because she was extremely good at it. So we became very reliant on each other and then we became best friends. I mean, all of this is over the course of 13, 14, 15 years. We became best friends. And then we became something that we no longer had a word for because we became each other's person. I was married to someone who I loved very dearly. And then that she's my person thing was starting to melt for me into this is the love of my life. This is who I love in a deeper way than I've ever loved or trusted anybody. And that was extremely inconvenient and heartbreaking because I also loved my husband. And my decision for what to do about that was nothing, which was as good as I could do at that time. And so I just was like, this is. This is my little thing that nobody needs to know about. Which I now recognize as being the definition of addiction. This is my little thing that I do that nobody needs to know about. You know, I do know. I think a lot of people know because it would be very disruptive to everybody if they knew about this and they wouldn't get it. And I don't want to give it up. So just that little thing.

[Podcast Host (Main Interviewer)]

So just a secret thing in your mind, this little secret thing was like.

[Elizabeth Gilbert]

I love that I have that. No. That I'm going to take to my grave. That nobody is going to know about. The universe dislikes secrets. Yeah. And tends to do anything it can to blow them up. And the way this secret got blown up was that Raya was diagnosed with terminal pancreatic and liver cancer and given six months to live. And now this little secret that I had of you are the love of my life could no longer be contained within my body and my spirit. The thought of her dying. And I knew I was gonna be her person through her death. I knew I was. And I ended up being at her bedside holding her while she died. The thought of her leaving without me ever having said, you are the love of my life was so appalling. That's the word that my soul chose. This is appalling. I cannot permit this. That I had to do the thing that my little secret self hates doing the most, which is to tell the truth. And so I told the truth, and I left my marriage very swiftly. And I went to be with Raya until she died. And the thought that we both had was, we've got six months. We are going to have the greatest love story that was ever told in that six months. And we did have that for about six months, but she lived for 18 months. And the secret. So if I had a secret engine, I feel like there's a line I quote in the book by Garcia Marquez, who said, everybody has a public life, a private life, and a secret life. And the secret life is the sort of operating system that's governing you that you have no power over, that is often driven by trauma and pain. So my little secret underbelly life was. I'm terrified. The world is the most frightening thing in the world. People are horrifying. Who's got me? Who's going to love me and hold me and protect me? And that's what has governed my life. Is that that story? Right. And Reyes was. I am so uncomfortable in my skin. I hate having a body. I hate myself. What substances are out there to make me not have to experience that? That's what governed her underbelly, her underworld. Right. So her underworld came to the surface. My underworld came to the surface. And for her, what that meant was a return to active drug addiction at the end of her life. And I remember her nephew at the time saying, I wish Raya was a nicer junkie. She wasn't a very nice junkie. She's really mean. She was really, really mean and. And vicious and awful. And so this beautiful love story turned into this absolute nightmare of degradation where she went into her most awful incarnation, which was vampiric, manipulative, drug addict. And I went into my most degraded incarnation, which is desperate people pleasing, codependent who has no self other than to serve someone else with the hope. The way I've described love addiction and codependency is that it's this terrible mathematic equation which is, I am going to take all the love that I possess and I'm going to pour it into you with the hope that you will give me a crumb of it back.

[Podcast Host (Main Interviewer)]

Yeah. So it's so inconvenient.

[Elizabeth Gilbert]

It's not direct. It's bad math. Yes, it's bad math. It's just bad math. And then you become in that. I become. I'll keep it on the I in that equation. What I become is somebody who has taken my entire treasure, given it to a pawn shop, and then stands outside the locked doors of the pawn shop at night being like, can I have like, one tiny bit of that back? Can I have back, like, one tiny bit of the love that I have poured into you? And so that's what we turned. That's what it turned into. And it was a nightmare. It was a nightmare that escalated to the point where I actually gave serious thought to trying to kill her. Yes, it was. So it was. The nightmare that I was in was so awful. I was like, I think I need to murder. I think I need to murder her because I won't be able to survive this. And that's the book.

[Podcast Host (Main Interviewer)]

Okay. So I'm just. This is.

[Elizabeth Gilbert]

So it's about addiction. The book is about addiction, and it's about love addiction, and it's about drug addiction, and it's about codependency, and it's also about recovery.

[Podcast Host (Main Interviewer)]

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[Podcast Host (Main Interviewer)]

I'm now thinking because the line that you just first quoted is something that jumped out at me hard. Which is the. Everyone has a public life, a private life, and a secret life. Are you saying that the secret life is sort of your programming that you got as a child? It's your story about what you're doing on this planet. And does everyone have. Is the hero of your secret story something that you make that then ends up fucking up your life? Right. So, like, is the hero of. Rhea decided that the one that could save her from this awful story she had about her place on the planet was drugs. You decided that the one that could save you from this terror that you had living on this scary planet Was Rhea. Was Rhea. So there's like something that you're putting all. You create a hero of your secret story. Does that sound right?

[Elizabeth Gilbert]

That is so. I mean, Rhea wrote a love song to. She wrote a love song to heroin once.

[Podcast Host (Main Interviewer)]

I understand that. I understand that in my body. So tell us about that. That was her savior.

[Elizabeth Gilbert]

It was her savior. And the thing about addiction of any kind and the compassion that I feel toward an addict of any kind, including me, who is a sex and love addict and codependent skid row, codependent blackout, codependent in recovery. Raya said something one time that I thought was so moving. She said I needed every gram of heroin I ever ingested or I would not have been able to survive on this planet until the moment that I didn't. Right. And the moment that she didn't was when she entered into recovery and found a spiritual solution. The secret life cannot be solved by the things that are available of this world. Right. It just. It seems like such a good guess. It seems like.

[Podcast Host (Ad Read 1)]

Like, that's the thing.

[Elizabeth Gilbert]

I always think when I look back at my younger self, I'm like, oh, honey, that was such a good guess.

[Podcast Host (Main Interviewer)]

Yeah, it was close.

[Elizabeth Gilbert]

Ooh.

[Podcast Host (Main Interviewer)]

It seems.

[Elizabeth Gilbert]

Seems like it should work. If you feel like I'm terrified. People are scary. Who's going to save me? And you meet somebody who presents as really strong and they love you. It just seems like that should do it. Right? It seems like it's such an innocent guess, and it. It does it in that it Band aids it, you know, and the way that I explain what sex and love addiction feels like in my body is that I use people the way other people use substances. So my entire. I hesitate to even call it a romantic history because it's not very romantic. My entire using history. For 35 uninterrupted years. I had one little teeny break in the middle of Eat, Pray, Love, where I Put it down. But then I picked it back up again. But from the age of 15 until the age of 50, what I was doing was trying to get my levels right and using other people to try to get my levels right. And living, as I did for a few months with an active drug addict, it was really. I can now see it's very interesting to watch how addicts are constantly trying to get their levels right. Watching Raya. What's the exact dosage she became such a chemist. What's the exact amount of cocaine that I can mix with the exact amount of. In her case, morphine, and the exact amount of fentanyl and the exact amount of alcohol and the exact amount of cigarettes and the exact amount of sugar so that for, like, a minute, I'm gonna hit that thing where it just. I just feel good. Right. So I did that, but I did it with people. And there were people that I used. And I use that word very openly. There are people that I used as stimulants, and there were people that I used as sedatives. So some people, for me were like a cocaine high, and other people, for me were like a Xanax. And I just went back and forth between stimulant and sedative and stimulant and sedative, trying to find the person who could orchestrate my chemistry for me so that I would not have to suffer. Right. And it's such a good guess because it works like all addictions, until it doesn't. Until the cost of using becomes greater than the benefit of using.

[Podcast Host (Main Interviewer)]

Okay, give us an example. Like, for somebody right now who's trying to figure who's. Some. Some bells are going off if you are a person who uses drugs to be okay, and then that okayness is actually hell. We get that. We've seen that. The beauty of this book is that not a lot of people talk about sex and love addiction.

[Elizabeth Gilbert]

Yeah.

[Podcast Host (Main Interviewer)]

So this is gonna help a lot of people. What might that look like in. In your past life? How does one use a person.

[Elizabeth Gilbert]

Yeah.

[Podcast Host (Main Interviewer)]

To make themselves be okay.

[Elizabeth Gilbert]

So I'll give you an example of, like, what my pattern could look like. I'm in a relationship. I mean, not in a relationship right now, but let's just say. And you can point to this, at various moments in my life, I'm in a relationship with somebody who my nervous system feels secure with. So this is somebody who is a reliable source. Source of attention. So the What? The. One of the terms we use in my recovery program is lava, love, attention, validation. And affection, right? So that's what I'm seeking. I'm seeking the right chemistry of lava. Interesting that our conversation began talking about lava, how lava can become very dangerous. Right? But that's what I'm looking for. So let's say I've found somebody. And when I'm with them, I feel. My nervous system feels settled and sedated because I know that they're never going to leave me. I know that they think I hung the moon. Like, I know that I can count on them to be there, right? And so I'm like, oh, this is good. I can actually function. Like, this is a good drug for me. This person is a good drug for me. It's a steady source. It's not a methadone drip. So that aching, empty, hollow place within me that is like, who's got me? Who will love me, who will see me, is being met. But because I have a disordered nervous system, a trauma, informed disordered nervous system, and I, like many people who grew up feeling very insecure and anxious, my system is accustomed to enormous amounts of cortisol and. And adrenaline that also feels normal to me. So if I go too long without having huge dumps of cortisol and adrenaline, the excitement, drugs inside my body, I start to feel unrecognizable to myself. I start to feel a little dead. I start to feel a little scared. I start to feel overly sedated and hungry for drama, because drama is home. And remind me to say something about home when we're done with this. Okay? So drama is home. So now I'm gonna go out there in the world and all this is happening below the level of consciousness, right? Like, I always want to reiterate innocence, innocence, innocence. But below the level of consciousness, there's this engine that's like, I need stimulation now. This is not stimulating enough. And then I'm going to find somebody who is dangerous and who is exciting and who has the possibility to annihilate me. Because there's a level at which my nervous system, there's a level of connection that it can't get unless there's a high that I can't feel. Unless I'm pretty sure you might kill me. That's the ride that my nervous system needs to go on after a while where it's like, this is not a high. This is this. I'm not getting high. Like, I'm getting soothed by this person, but I'm not getting high on this person. So now I'm gonna go find somebody to get high on. And it's like, let's get on the motorcycle, like, go all the way to the Pacific Ocean, baby. Let's like, you know, like, let's just ride or die. Let's go off this cliff together, right? And then we're gonna go on that ride, which is usually short and devastating and ends with me wanting to kill myself because my nervous system gets used to these levels, these adrenaline dumps, this cortisol drum, this excitement, the drama. I'm a drama addict, right? So it gets used to these high levels of drama. And then I need bigger and bigger and bigger, bigger reward in order to get high. And now I'm not getting high off this person anymore. And then I have withdrawal. Then I want to die. Now I'm going to go find another sedative. And who's going to comfort me now? Who's going to reassure me and be like, I won't kill you. I won't leave you. I've got you. I'm your secure attachment. Oh my God, I'm going to fall with relief into you. Thank you. Now you're going to sedate my nervous system for me. And we're going to have a little run. And then it's going to be like, but I need to get high. Back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. And for me, what a sober day looks like is when I am not using anybody. For me, emotional sobriety is I don't want to use another person to regulate my nervous system anymore because that makes me into a vampire. It makes me into somebody with no integrity. And it's the exact opposite of who my soul wants to be. My soul did not come here to use people. My soul came here to serve. And I can't be of service when I'm using. And that's where my recovery comes in.

[Podcast Host (Main Interviewer)]

So how, before we get to the recovery of it all, what is a story that you can tell us that. What's your favorite story to tell about your love story with Raya? And then I want you to tell us a story that will explain to people where you got, uh huh. You know, like the love and then the rock bottom.

[Elizabeth Gilbert]

I'll tell the story I told at her memorial. And you were there. And it's my favorite story about Raya.

[Podcast Host (Main Interviewer)]

It's my favorite story about Raya too.

[Elizabeth Gilbert]

So we went to a funeral for the mother of a friend, and at this funeral there was a drama happening. What I loved about Raya was her ability when she was insanity, sobriety, and recovery to be able to enter into any situation and meet it in this very simple, relaxed, courageous way that allowed the humanity of every person in the story to be represented while at the same time holding boundaries and being protective. This is why she felt to me like the human embodiment of safety. And this story exemplifies it. So we went to this funeral for the mother of a friend. The drama that was happening was that a grandson of the woman who had died was a very troubled family member of this family. He was a young man in his early 20s who was a meth addict. He had recently gotten out of prison. He had a history of violence. He had a history of drug addiction. And the family did not want him to come to this funeral because he was a disruptive agent who everybody was afraid of. They hid the information from him about his grandmother dying and about where the funeral was so that he would not show up. He found out about it, and he showed up. And you know who's really scary? That guy. So for me, as somebody who's terrified of humans and their unpredictability and their danger, this is a code red. And, like, for a lot of people who are at that funeral, this was a code red. He was high when he got there, and he was enraged and he was in grief. So all of that was happening. So he's like this nucleus of disruption, unpredictability, chaos, and possible assault. This is like the scariest person in the world to me, and he's the scariest person in the world to every single person there. Raya takes a look at him and is like, oh, hello, my brother. Right? Hello, my fellow drug addict. Hello, my fellow lost soul. Like, I see you. She walks right up to him, like, in absolute ease, with such mercy, without being pitying. Just this, like, I know you, and I know who you are. And she does this thing that she used to do with people that I loved, and it makes me tear up now, where she would take her fist very lightly, and she would tap it like, I'll do it right now in my heart. She would just. When she saw me, she would just tap it on my heart, and she would say, how you doing in there? Right? How you doing in there? I used to see her do it with her nieces, her nephews, her friends. How you doing in there? Like, she'd go right into the center because she could see. She was so good at intuiting when somebody wasn't doing well in there. So she walks up to this guy and she does a little tap on his heart and she goes, how you doing in there? And he just softened for a moment and looked like he was going to fall into her arms in tears. And I wish he had. And he was a little confused because he's like, I don't know who you are, but I also do. And then he just had this like. Like exhale. And then it all came back. All the crazy came back, and he kind of pushed her away, and he walked away, and she came back to me, and she was really thoughtful, and she's like, babe, I want you to take all of our valuables and lock them in our car and give me the key and lock the car and then help me. We're going to go around this gathering, and I want you to tell everybody here, don't leave anything that you have that's valuable unattended today. Keep your purse on you, keep your wallet on you, keep your car keys on you. Lock everything valuable in the car. Don't make a big deal out of it. Just tell everybody. So we did that, and then the funeral went off without incident. So that night, we're at dinner, and I said to her, thank you so much for protecting everybody from him today. And she got tears in her eyes, and she was like, oh, did you think that I was protecting us from him? She's like, no, no, no, honey. I was protecting him from the very worst things that he could have done to himself today. She's like, he's probably going to die. He doesn't have any support. He's really far gone. But there's still a window of hope that he might someday recover and get well. And if he does, as part of his recovery, he's going to have to make amends to every single person he ever harmed. And I don't want that. She just started crying. She's like, I don't want that poor kid. In addition to everything else he's going to have to face to have to face that he stole from people at his grandmother's funeral. So we were just helping him not do that today. That was my Raya. Like, at her most sane, at her most compassionate. That's the woman who I loved and still love and who still guides me, right? Who is able to protect not just victims, but they're predators, right? Like that. That's why I loved Raya. And now the dark counterpart to that is when she made the decision, let me go back here. Long before she reintroduced drugs into her system, she made a decision to leave the rooms of 12 step recovery. After maybe 13 years of sobriety because she was bored with it. Here's the dark side. Because she thought she knew better than everyone in the room, because she thought she was cured, because she thought she didn't need anyone. So that same person who had that beautiful strength that could, with such composure, go into a room and hold everyone also had this ego that was like, I don't need anybody. I'm the toughest, coolest, most badass. She was believing her own press, essentially, right. Which I fed into and a lot of people fed into. And she was like, I'm not an addict anymore. You know, I'm cured. I don't need a community. I don't need a program of recovery. I don't need a higher power. I am the highest power in the universe. I'm Raya fucking Elias. So she left the rooms, and I don't know which one came first, but she started drinking and decided that she could handle it because she was so good at handling so many things. She was like, I can handle a reasonable. A reasonable amount of alcohol. And she started drinking, first secretly and then in a very challenging way publicly and. And deciding that she. That she could handle substances because she could handle a crazed meth addict. Why would it seem to her that she could not also handle intoxicating substances? And that's when she started her decline, which turned her. At first. What's that F. Scott Fitzgerald line? First slowly, then quickly. At first slowly and then quickly, she started to lose all of her attainments. All the dignity, integrity, compassion and decency that she had built up in this sort of bank of her soul over years of recovery started to drop. So it's like, now I'm going to start keeping secrets. Now I'm going to start judging people. Now I'm going to start thinking I'm the fucking coolest thing in the entire universe. Now I'm going to start using people. Now I'm going to start being manipulated, manipulative. Now I'm going to start telling myself that it's okay if I do a little cocaine. And. And now I'm going to. I'm going to command, because she was very commanding that somebody who I would have five years ago killed for, somebody who I would have protected, who I would have killed, anyone who harmed. I'm going to demand that that person drive across city lines and get me a felony's worth of cocaine and bring it to me with money from their atm. And if you don't do that, I'm going to attack you. So that's who she became in her addiction. So I got to see Raya at her finest and I got to see Raya at her worst, and she got to see me at my finest and she got to see me at my worst. And I feel like that was a contract that our souls made with each other long before the earth's crust cooled. That we were going to come here and do this and we were going to play this story out all the way to the end, all the way to the river. And then we were going to have to get very, very, very honest. And then one of us was going to have to tell everybody this story. One of us was going to die and the other one was going to tell this story. I mean, this is the deal that we made and that's what brings us to here.

[Podcast Host (Main Interviewer)]

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[Podcast Host (Main Interviewer)]

It's interesting, the public, private and secret part, because it's such a. One of the gifts we have in this book is Raya's journal. Because while she's outwardly I've got this and she. She is blustery and she is her ego filled and she thinks she's better than everyone. You share some. Some things she wrote in her journal during that time that speak of a different secret. Raya, while she's saying all these things, I've got it. It didn't seem from her journals that she felt like she had it.

[Elizabeth Gilbert]

Not even a little. I have this story in my mind. Some man who was having tremendous mental illness shot himself in the heart and said to his wife, make them study my brain tissue. Something is wrong. And he was correct. I feel like. And through that, there was so much that was learned about traumatic brain injury from concussion. He sacrificed himself to say, like, make sure someone sees this. I feel like when Raya gave me those journals, she was essentially doing that and saying, like, connect the dots. I'm giving you the clues so that you can see and then you can show what it looks like when you keep your secret self secret, you know? And those secret. And those journals were full of. It was years of. I mean, while she was out there saying she had no problem with alcohol, that it was no big deal for her to drink, that alcohol and drugs are not the same thing, that she's totally got this, that all these, in her words, rigid bitches from the room needed to see calm the fuck down and stop being, you know, like, let her just do her thing because she was doing it great. And while I was deifying her and making her into my higher power, as she was also making those substances into her higher power, she was writing in her journal, am I losing my sobriety? Is it. Is it drinking? Is it. Is it as bad as heroin that I'm using alcohol? I'm a loser and a fuck up. Why can't I do life? Why? Why can't I do life? And then she just identifies it. She said, I go out there in the world and I put on this Persona of mightiness, but secretly the insides are rotting. And she was the one who taught me that we are only as sick as our secrets. But I think it's such a slippery slope, you know what I mean? It's such a. The big book Of Alcoholics Anonymous describes addiction as cunning, baffling and powerful. And one of the things that addiction does is it's a disease that lies to you and tells you you don't have a disease. And one of the things that recovery does is it brings you into a room of a circle of people who start off by saying, I have a disease. I am an addict, not was, am. And that continual reiteration so that I can remember. Don't start thinking that you're a normal person who can do things that normal people do. You can't. There's a lot of things that I can do really well. And there's some things that I cannot do at all because this is what will happen.

[Podcast Host (Main Interviewer)]

Like what. What can you not do? And also, I just want to say what a service I felt when. When I read the parts with Raya's journal is that it was another service that Raya was doing for addicts. Because I remember sitting with so many people during my addicted years where they were looking at me and asking about, couldn't believe my behavior. And I remember thinking, but I'm in here having the feeling of Jonah and the whale. I know all you can see is this behavior, but I know I'm in here. And I. I felt like when I read those journals, it just made me emotional because I thought it was a way of Raya helping people who love addicts see that they're in there. It was just. I don't know, just felt like another. Tell us, how did you. We now see Raya's rock bottoms. I know that what I knew at that time, I didn't know she had been drinking. I didn't know any of that part. I didn't know it was a slippery slope. I thought that the pain from the cancer led her to. I thought we went zero to cocaine.

[Elizabeth Gilbert]

Right.

[Podcast Host (Main Interviewer)]

I didn't know it was a slippery slip. That was interesting.

[Elizabeth Gilbert]

Yeah. When the cocaine was introduced, the drama escalated very quickly.

[Podcast Host (Main Interviewer)]

Right.

[Elizabeth Gilbert]

You know, within like three days, when cocaine was in her system, she. The secret life was the only thing she was. The public life and the private life were gone. And it was just that monster or came out, you know, but there was a. There was a lead up to it.

[Podcast Host (Main Interviewer)]

So you're looking at the love of your life. She's dying of cancer. She's now completely full out addict, drug dealers, the whole cocaine everywhere. You're living in an apartment. How, Liz, do you shift from my partner is a raging addict and that's my problem to I am a raging addict. And my partner's a raging addict.

[Elizabeth Gilbert]

We have a double problem.

[Podcast Host (Main Interviewer)]

Right?

[Elizabeth Gilbert]

Not swiftly, you know, because I didn't, you know, so much of what recovery looks like in the relationship programs. And I'm in all of them. You know, there's like 12 step recovery rooms for people who are in relationship with people who are addicts. There's 12 step recovery rooms for codependency. There's 12 step recovery rooms for sex and love addiction. There's 12 step recovery for like trauma, family of origin stuff. I'm in all of them because relationships are where I get lost, you know. But the, the main thing that runs through all those programs is sort of these two questions. What is my part in this? And what can I do today for myself? Like, that's. That's what. Those are the questions, right? So where I was in this maelstrom of insanity with Rhea during that time was that I wasn't asking either of those questions. I was like, she's the problem and I have to fix it. Which is those two things are the exact opposite of what is my role in this and what can I do to take care of myself. Right? That's the thing. It's like constantly turning the attention back to what has my energy field done here to co create this situation. And part of the reason that it took me seven years to write this book was because I couldn't see those things. You know, it took me. They say in the rooms that it takes five years of sobriety to get your marbles back. Like, it took so long to pierce through the veils of misunderstanding and chaos in my mind to be able to be like, oh, we co created that situation. We together, brick by brick, built a world in which we were living in this fancy penthouse apartment in the East Village in New York City that I gave to her as a gift so that she would have a beautiful place to spend the last months of her life. And round the clock, teenagers from the neighborhood are showing up with pagers and feed bags of cocaine that I'm paying for. Like, we did this. This is our. We built this. You know, this wasn't done to me. It wasn't done to her. It's like, oh, wow, look what we made. You know? But it was a lot easier for me to see what she was doing than it was for me to see what I was doing. And so that's a slow recovery for me. It didn't. It didn't necessarily. I mean, I kind of got it enough as it was going on to pull back a bit, but I was still blaming her a lot. I was still a lot of angry after she died, too. Like, years of angry. Of like, you stole our love story from us. We had this beautiful love story that I was entitled to, and you took it and you shoved it up your nose and shot it up your veins and in your feet, neck, and eyeballs. Like, you know, when. When we were supposed to be having this other story. And I don't see anymore that I am entitled.

[Podcast Host (Main Interviewer)]

Okay, we're gonna pause this gorgeous conversation right now. But don't worry, we're gonna return to it on Thursday. And on Thursday, we're gonna start by discussing the role a love addict plays. Plays in creating the very trauma and drama that is ruining their lives. And from there, we'll talk about power, what it means to relinquish it, and how to honor the tiny but precious margin we're each given. We'll look at how codependency reverses the sacred order of things, putting other people first, and how recovery is about turning that order back around. We'll see you on Thursday. We can do Hard Things is an independent production brought to you by Treat Media. We make art for humans who want to stay human forever. Dog is our production partner, and you can follow us at We Can Do Hard Things on Instagram.