Elizabeth Gilbert’s Letters From Love
October 29, 2025
Writer: Paige Schachtel
Editors: Sydney Miller and Coco Laska
Tolstoy once told the story of a beggar who spent his life beneath the same tree, hands outstretched in endless plea, begging for scraps without ever suspecting that beneath the very roots where he lay sat a pot of gold that could have freed him from want forever. That image has always haunted me. Because isn’t that what so many of us do with love? We beg for it, bargain for it, and mold ourselves into whatever version we think will finally be enough, all while ignoring the treasure buried inside of us that is waiting to be unearthed.
This pattern of desperate searching isn’t just a personal struggle, rather, it is reinforced by the world around us, as the normalization of self-loathing in our society has perpetuated the dangerous myth that love must be earned. That, to become whole, or someone worthy of being loved, we must constantly chase and cling to any semblance of love before it slips away.
But what if the love we've been frantically searching for has been within us all along?
As an avid podcast listener, I stumbled across Elizabeth Gilbert’s work in Glennon Doyle’s We Can Do Hard Things in a time when I was desperate for guidance. In the episode, Gilbert shares a practice she found at one of her darkest moments: writing letters to herself from unconditional love, a notion predicated on the radical belief that love can speak to us. She tells listeners that what love told her wasn’t complicated or poetic. “It was simple, yet devastatingly healing.”
“I am right here. I have always been right here. There is nothing you can do to lose me. Nothing you can fail that would make me stop loving you. You don’t have to earn me. You already have me.”
For years, I worked so hard to try to squeeze these words out from other people, shape-shifting into someone I thought they might love. Yet, when they finally did say these words, the relief never seemed to stick. Looking back on these days, I don’t think they were meant to. Perhaps it is impossible for that kind of anchor to come from the outside.
Gilbert calls this process “spiritual reparenting,” the daily practice of waking up and asking ourselves, “Love, what would you have me know today?” This is essentially the archaeological work; we are excavating the gold that has been buried beneath the noise of our own self-criticism.
But that critic is relentless. As someone who has grappled with questions of faith and what it means to believe in something beyond ourselves, I recognize how this concept can sound silly. Gilbert herself acknowledges this, but here is the reality that I’ve come to understand: we rarely pause to question the harsh inner critic that lives within each of us. We never stop to ask, “What if it isn’t true that I’m a failure, a burden, a mess?” Instead, we accept this narrative that says we aren’t doing enough, that labels us as unworthy, while simultaneously harboring skepticism about the possibility of a loving voice coexisting alongside this critic.
I’m starting to wonder why it is so much easier to believe in our unworthiness than in our inherent lovability. Why do we grant our inner critic such authority while dismissing the possibility that love might be the truer voice inside of us?
This question forces us to consider whether true healing is perhaps less about waiting for the right person to come along and fix us, but instead, learning to speak to ourselves with the tenderness we’ve been craving.
If a desire for love is the relentless pursuit for validation from other people and other things, wouldn’t the antidote be to return home to ourselves and find it from within? Perhaps a hunger for love can only be truly nourished by the infinite love that exists within, the kind that doesn’t depend on others’ perceptions of us, our achievements, or our performances.
So I challenge you, not as someone who has mastered these practices, but as someone who is also seeking a path to self-love, to take 10 minutes today and begin on Gilbert’s journey. Write to yourself, and let love answer.
The question isn’t whether you’re worthy of love, it's whether you’re ready to stop begging for scraps when you’re sitting on a pot of gold.
