For the past few months, people have been telling me to read Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love. Like, literally once a month someone would recommend it to me. So I finally bit the bullet and put my name on the waiting list. I got my copy a few days ago, and I have to admit that so far I’m really enjoying it. A lot of her experiences speak to me, since she studied at an ashram (which I would like to do) and traveled to Bali, which I am doing next month! I’m only about halfway through, but so far there have been two passages that really caught my attention.

• What was the root of all this despair? Was it psychological? (Mom and Dad’s fault?) Was it just temporal, a “bad time” in my life? (When the divorce ends, will the depression end with it?) Was it genetic? (Melancholy, called by many names, has run through my family for generations, along with its sad bride, Alcoholism.) Was it cultural? (Is this just the fallout of a postfeminist American career girl trying to find balance in an increasingly stressful and alienating urban world?) Was it astrological? (Am I so sad because I’m a thin-skinned Cancer whose major signs are all ruled by unstable Gemini?) Was it artistic? (Don’t creative people always suffer from depression because we’re so supersensitive and special?) Was it evolutionary? (Do I carry in me the residual panic that comes after millennia of my species’ attempting to survive a brutal world?) Was it karmic? (Are all these spasms of grief just the consequences of bad behavior in previous lifetimes, the last obstacles before liberation?) Was it hormonal? Dietary? Philosophical? Seasonal? Environmental? Was I tapping into a universal yearning for God? Did I have a chemical imbalance? Or did I just need to get laid?

• For instance, when I told a friend back in New York City that I was going to India to live in an Ashram and search for divinity, he sighed and said, “Oh there’s a part of me that so wishes I wanted to do that…but I really have no desire for it whatsoever.”

These passages struck me because they represent what I’ve been struggling with lately. What is the root of my melancholy? And why am I so disinterested in everything lately? I’m not sure of the answers, so in addition to my amazing upcoming vacation (along with Bali, I’m also going to Singapore to see my family) I have also embarked on a new health journey with a holistic doctor. It’s not easy; I’m taking vast quantities of supplements, some of which are NOT vegetarian friendly, which is freaking me out, but after years of feeling depressed and icky, I feel that this is something I need to do. I can’t wait to see how the book ends; maybe the answers that Gilbert found will help me too.