Radically Honest: A Guest Post by Elizabeth Gilbert

Covering the full spectrum from love and loss to hope and healing, Elizabeth Gilbert can always be trusted to deliver soul-searching personal narratives with invaluable and universal takeaways. Read on for an exclusive essay from Elizabeth on writing All the Way to the River.

I have actually been trying to write a book about Rayya since the day she died, back in January 2018. I think it took me so long to tell our story because it took years of therapy, grief, confusion, recovery, and sobriety for me to even be able to understand all that had happened between us, and why. And while it was often harrowing to go back and relive that story — especially the forensic dive back down into the more chaotic and devastating parts of our journey — it was, in the end, incredibly healing to be able to come to peace with the past, and to feel that Rayya (who loved the truth more than anything) would have approved of this narrative, too.

I believe that all of us — at some point in our lives —will find ourselves in situations that have become overwhelming, unmanageable, or even just plain embarrassing. Chaos and failure can arise in relationships, in work environments, through family troubles, financial hardship, the collapse of mental or physical health, natural disasters, or other scenarios of extreme upheaval. I think it’s a natural human instinct to attempt — for as long as you can — to keep projecting to the outside world that everything is absolutely fine, that you are still in control, and that (as my mother used to say) all your ducks are in a row.  But sometimes the ducks really go flying — and then comes the shame: Why have I failed so miserably at creating a decent, stable life? Nobody wants to be exposed as a failure! Therefore many of us learn keep secrets about our troubled realities — even from our most trusted friends and confidantes. Secret-keeping and truth-bending are particularly common components of both addiction and codependency, and I explore this idea deeply in the book. Rayya was an unrecovered drug addict, and I was an unrecovered codependent, and so it is not surprising that we fell into a double-life scenario with each other — both of us scurrying to hide the truth from ourselves, each other, and the world about what we were actually up to, and how dark our lives had become. It stands to reason, then, that the remedy for both addiction and codependency is to take the opposite action: You must become radically honest. 

You must lay it all on the table and allow yourself to be seen — no matter what it does to your preciously-guarded reputation. I believe it is also necessary for anyone who is seeking spiritual or emotional transformation: Only the truth can get you there. In order for me to tell this story in a manner that would be both healing and honest, I had to completely give up on the idea of protecting either my reputation or Rayya’s, and allow both of us to be seen in in all our desperation and degradation — as well as in all our beauty and glory. Rayya would’ve approved of this extreme candor, without a doubt. When she was in her sobriety and sanity, she loved the truth more than anyone I have ever met, because she knew that is only by facing the darkness that we are able to find our way back to the light.