"A Victim of My Own Optimism"

Like millions of American women, I have fallen in love with Elizabeth Gilbert, after being the last one of us on earth to finally get around to reading her book, Eat, Pray, Love.

I love Liz ("Liss," as the old guy in Bali calls her, and yes, I am on a first-name, nickname base with this woman) for purely narcissistic reasons--she's me. Sure, I'm not blond, nor a famous writer (working on it), nor divorced, nor formerly suicidal, nor at a point in my life where I could take a whole year just to, well, eat, pray, and love, but Liz and I both have the same problem. Yet, while she seems to have solved hers, having found an older Brazilian lover, I'm over here flailing around in a void.

I've always considered myself an optimist. I’m quite cheerful. I'm peppy. I earned the nickname of "Energizer Bunny" in college due to these qualities. But being an optimist comes with a burden of disappointment. If you shoot for the moon, you'll land among the stars, the phrase goes. But I never understood what good that did me when I wanted wanted the moon.

Liz says in the India section of her book that she has been a "victim of my own optimism," which describes me perfectly. Finding myself disappointed easily, I tried pessimism out for a while. Low expectations rewarded me with happy surprises when situations, people, or even I exceeded the squat benchmarks I’d set. Everything good that happened in my life, I examined, tore down, looked for the thunderclouds about to strike. I called this being honest with myself, being realistic.

Then, something changed and I started with the damn optimism again. And with dating, optimism is the worst. I want men to be wonderful. I want them to amaze me. I believe they can ascend whatever red flags or major emotional blockage I've detected in them, because, after all, I also see the greatness the lies beneath. My expectations shoot sky-high—not in the form of hurdles I set forth for a guy, I don’t come off as overbearing or demanding. Instead, I stupidly believe that the man in question already has reached my expectations, that he already is wonderful, forgetting reality and myself.

As Liz says in her book, I, “fall in love more times that I can count with the highest potential of a man.” This potential just needs time to unfurl.

In typical martyr form, I decide it is my job to unfurl the man in question, to lift a man’s burdens from him so he can grow into the amazing person I know is lurking underneath his aloofness or anxiety or whatever. Like Liz, I tend to lose myself in men, forgetting that perhaps not every guy I find myself infatuated with even has potential. Maybe it’s my own insecurity or perhaps I don’t have a strong sense of myself so I try to uncover someone else’s, but I’m not sure either of those are it exactly. I do know that Liz described me when she described herself: “If I love you I will carry for you all your pain, I will assume for you all your debts, I will protect your from your own insecurity, I will project upon you all sorts of good qualities you’ve never actually cultivated…until I get so exhausted and depleted that the only way I can recover this energy is by becoming infatuated with someone else.”

Awesome. Thankfully, as I live and read and learn, I am discovering so much about myself and the way my mind works. I can catch patterns like this one before I am divorced, suicidal, and in my 30s. Now, I must move forward in my life as a more careful optimist, carrying the wariness of a pessimist with me as I navigate single life. As Liz’s friend Richard from Texas says to her in the India ashram, I gotta stop wearing my wishbone where my backbone outta be. That’s my new mantra.