Bon Appetite!

I finally watched Julie and Julia tonight. It has been 8 months since I saw the first preview, 7 months since I read the book, 6 months since I started my life over; and I am so glad I waited.

I think the first step toward the life I always wanted, toward "The Experiment", was the moment I opened My Life In France, Julia Child's memoir. Julie Powell wrote, and was quoted in the movie as saying, that she was drowning and Julia Child reached out through her books and saved her. It seems dramatic, but I feel precisely the same way. Reading about that phenomenal woman who lived with joy and passion so infectious that she brightened every room she entered, reading about finding destiny so much later in life, reading about following your heart and being loved so completely for it; this brought me back to life, showed me the way home.

After reading Julia's story, I moved on to Julie's. As I flipped through the pages, learning about this lost woman finding her way, I saw only myself. My life has changed now too. I am no longer lost, I may not always know where I am going, but I trust in life and beauty and happiness as I have never dared to before. At the end of her book, her life looks to be coming together perfectly. Book deals, movie deals, leaving her horrible government job; but I know what comes next. Just when you think you have finally gotten things figured out, life throws you a curve ball.

I am currently reading Julie Powell's newest biography; Cleaving. Obviously, she has been published and is successful, but now her marriage is falling apart. When I saw the book jacket, read what it was about, my heart nearly jumped out of my chest. How can someone I have never met be living such a parallel life? Clearly there is a great deal of projection going on here! I know there are differences, she was having an affair whereas I was just fighting dissolution. But the death of a dream on the heels of a dream come true resonates with me.

I bought the book to try and look into my own future. I put it down only a day later. Not she, nor anyone else, could tell me what I already knew. It was already scorched into my tongue, the one thing I could not say: Goodbye. I said it without the benefit of reading my future, I said it because it seemed to be the only thing left in my mind to say. My lips are still singed from speaking it into existence, my heart still aches. I digress, I began writing about the women and stories that saved my life because no matter how hard it is right now, thanks to them, I know it will not always be so.

The most peculiar thing comforts me these days, brings the devious smile back to my lips; it is the knowledge that I am me. I am joyful and passionate and bravely myself! The life I created for myself was not a matter of dinner parties and career paths, it was finding that woman inside of me. She may have tears in her eyes, but the playful smile still lingers.

The universe aligns sometimes to affirm some of the harder decisions in my life. In one such cosmic turn, authors of the present and long ago whisper to my soul. I stumbled across one such whisper by Katherine Mansfield:

"Risk! Risk anything! Care no more for the opinions of others, for those voices. Do the hardest thing on earth for you. Act yourself. Face the truth."

I have faced the truth, done the hardest thing on earth for me, and I will be myself. Therein lies my comfort, therein lies my hope, therein lies the key to the life I have always dreamed of. Who knew that all this time it was simply a matter of throwing caution to the wind and accepting joy? Who knew that all this time I was enough?

Loss is part of life, but joy is a choice independent of pain and circumstance. Thank you Julia, for showing me the way. Thank you Julie, for showing me that happy endings are never quite what we imagine them to be. Thank you God, for giving me the strength to keep smiling and the tenacity to choose joy.