The Art of Being Yourself: Mercy, Honesty, and Freedom

Elizabeth Gilbert doesn't think of herself as primarily a writer. This statement might land like a koan in a room full of readers, but it's the hinge upon which her entire worldview turns. On a sunlit afternoon in Chase Jarvis's studio, she sits across from the photographer-turned-podcast-host with the ease of someone who has learned, through decades of internal excavation, that the masks we wear for the world are not who we are. The bestselling author of Eat, Pray, Love—the memoir that sold over 12 million copies and became a Julia Roberts film—speaks about her new novel, City of Girls, but the real conversation is about something far more foundational: how a person actually becomes themselves.

"Mental health is my full-time job," she tells Jarvis matter-of-factly. "Writing, and being a professional creator, is a hobby."

The inversion stuns because it contradicts everything we've been told about genius, productivity, and the life of the mind. We assume that the person who writes a 12-million-copy bestseller is, by definition, someone for whom writing is the job. But Gilbert has spent her life learning that the foundation—the actual structural integrity of everything you make—is not found in the work itself. It is found in the interior architecture: in self-awareness, in the willingness to know yourself, in the refusal to pretend that pain isn't real.

Why subvert the ruined woman narrative?

This philosophy crystallizes in City of Girls, her fourth novel and a deliberate palate cleanser from the long literary tradition of ruined women. The book is set in New York City during the 1940s, in the theater world, and it tells the story of a young woman who behaves "really recklessly with their sexuality and not being ruined by it," as Gilbert describes it. This is not an easy book to find, she notes, because "all those books—Anna Karenina, all the Henry James books, Emma Bovary, Hedda Gabler—there's this whole history of books about ruined women, ending in disgrace because they dared to have sensual desire." One orgasm, and you're under the wheels of the train. Gilbert wanted to write something else entirely: "a book celebrating how you can do very stupid and reckless sensual things and actually survive yourself and turn into a really interesting, seasoned older woman."

The novel is, on its surface, about sexuality and freedom. But it is, at its core, about becoming yourself. "How do you become yourself?" Gilbert asks. "That's also what the book is about."

What made the 1940s such a pivotal moment for women?

The setting is not arbitrary. It was a moment in New York—and in women's lives—that felt uniquely open. The men were at war. The rules that governed female behavior, the unspoken mores that kept women off the streets after dark unless they were on the arm of a respectable man, simply evaporated. "When the men left, so did the mores," Gilbert observes. Women were working, earning good money, and for a brief, shimmering interval, they could exist without the constant friction of social expectation. There is a line in the novel where one character reflects: "When women are together with no men around, a woman doesn't have to be this thing or that thing. She can just be."

This "just be" philosophy is aspirational—not because it's unusual, but because it's so rare. "How many free people do you know? Like, truly free?" Gilbert asks Jarvis. "Me neither." Freedom, in her lexicon, is not about external circumstances. It's about the interior permission to stop performing, to stop managing your image, to stop trying to be the thing that others need you to be. It's the foundational work that allows everything else to follow.

How does honesty become the portal through pain?

This is where the mental health maxim becomes clear. Because you cannot write—cannot create anything authentic—if you are not doing the internal work of knowing yourself, of examining the stories you tell yourself, of being willing to look at the parts of your life that hurt. "The only way out of pain is through honesty," Gilbert says, and the words land with the weight of experience. She is not theorizing. She has walked this path.

In 2018, her longtime partner, Rayya Elias, died of cancer. The grief that followed was not a detour from her creative life. It was the curriculum. Gilbert found that creativity and writing became tools to slow the mind during the hardest times—not to escape the pain, but to move through it with consciousness. "It actually feels like pain," she says of the writing process during grief. The work became a way to honor both the love that preceded the loss and the loss itself.

This experience deepened her conviction that mercy—compassion, gentleness toward yourself—is the foundation of any creative endeavor. "I can put myself in compassionate alignment with myself," she says, and this small phrase contains an entire cosmology. It means treating yourself the way you would treat someone you love when they are suffering. It means not abandoning yourself in the hardest moments. It means recognizing, as she does, that even the most accomplished person needs to know: "You are precious unto me."

When did the real work actually begin?

The curious detail that emerges from Gilbert's narrative is that this way of thinking did not arise from Eat, Pray, Love—that famous memoir of travel and self-discovery. It emerged before it. Years before she wrote that book, she was already doing the foundational work, already treating her inner life as the primary job. The book was merely the spillover, the artifact of a life that was already organized around deeper principles. This is a reversal of the typical story we tell about success: that you do the work, and then you figure out who you are. Gilbert suggests something more radical: that you have to know who you are—continuously, relentlessly—and then the work comes from that clarity.

What does one percent of curiosity actually change?

What animates this approach is not grim self-interrogation but curiosity. "I'm 1% more curious than I am afraid," she says. This tiny ratio—one percent—is the margin in which all possibility lives. It's enough to lean toward the unknown, to ask the next question, to not shut down when things get hard. Curiosity doesn't promise safety or comfort. It promises engagement. It promises that your life will be interesting.

And it promises that you won't get trapped in the fantasy that completion brings fulfillment. "The most thrilled that you're gonna feel when you make something is day one of making it," Gilbert observes. Not day of completion. Not the moment of publication or praise. Day one, when the thing is still nascent, still full of possibility, still unmolded by anyone else's expectations. Once you understand this—once you give up the fantasy that finishing something will make you happy—you free yourself to make things for a different reason: because the making itself is the point.

What does a life oriented this way actually look like?

This is not a message that sits comfortably in a world organized around hustle, productivity metrics, and the constant pressure to monetize your gifts. But it's also not a message about retreat. It's a message about priorities. If you are not tending to your own internal weather, if you are not doing the work of knowing yourself and moving through your pain with honesty, then you are not free—no matter how many books you publish or how many millions of people read them. Freedom, as Gilbert lives it, is an interior achievement. Everything else is the hobby.

Where to go from here

If Gilbert's framework resonates, the natural next step is to reorient your relationship with your own creative work. Begin by examining: What are you telling yourself about your mental health? Is it truly a priority, or is it something you squeeze in around the edges of "more important" work? The invitation is not to abandon productivity but to invert it—to treat your interior life as the primary job, and let everything else flow from that clarity.

Read City of Girls with attention to the philosophy beneath the plot. Gilbert writes that "if you want to know who I am, read it," and she means this as an invitation to use fiction as a lens for understanding yourself. The novel becomes a mirror, not just a story.

Practice the principle of mercy in a concrete way: Pick one area where you're hardest on yourself and ask what it would feel like to treat that part of yourself the way you'd treat a suffering friend. This small shift in self-alignment can ripple outward into your creative work in surprising ways.

Finally, cultivate that one percent of curiosity. In moments when you're afraid to begin something, afraid to fail, or afraid to be honest about what you're feeling, ask yourself: Can I be just 1% more curious than afraid? That tiny margin is where all real creativity lives.