Today I’m early for my appointment, so I sit in Wendell’s waiting room and take a look around. Turns out his waiting room is as unusual as his therapy room. Instead of professional-looking furniture and the usual art—a framed poster of an abstract painting; maybe an African mask—the aesthetic in here is Grandma’s hand-me-downs. There’s even a musty smell to go with it. In a corner are two worn, high-backed dining chairs in an outdated paisley gold-brocade fabric, an equally worn and outdated rug on top of the beige wall-to-wall carpet, and a credenza covered by a stained lace tablecloth topped with doilies—doilies!—and a vase of fake flowers. On the floor between the chairs is a white-noise machine, and in front of them, in lieu of a coffee table, is what probably used to be a living-room side table now nicked and chipped and covered by a mess of magazines. A paper folding screen shields this seating area from the path leading in and out of Wendell’s office so that patients have some privacy, but you can still see clearly through the hinged openings.
I know I’m not here for the décor, but I find myself wondering: Can somebody with such bad taste help me? Is this a reflection of his judgment? (An acquaintance told me that she’d been profoundly distracted by the crooked pictures hanging in her therapist’s office; why wouldn’t she just straighten the damn things?)
For about five minutes, I glance at the magazine covers—Time, Parents, Vanity Fair—and then the door to the therapy room opens and out walks a woman. She whizzes behind the screen, but I can tell in the split second I see her that she’s pretty, well dressed, and tearful. Then Wendell appears in the waiting area.
“I’ll just be a minute,” he says, and he heads into the hallway, presumably to use the restroom.
As I wait, I wonder what the pretty woman was crying about.
When Wendell returns, he gestures for me to enter his office. There’s no hesitation at the doorway now. I go straight to position A, by the window, he to position C, by the side table, and I launch right in.
“Blah-blah-blah-blah,” I begin. “And if you can believe this, Boyfriend said, ‘Blah-blah-blah-blah-blah,’ so I said, ‘Well, blah-blah-blah?’”
Or at least, that’s what I’m sure it sounds like to Wendell. This goes on for a while. I’ve brought in pages of notes for this session, numbered, annotated, and in chronological order, just like I organized the interviews I did as a journalist before I became a therapist.
I confess to Wendell that I’d caved and phoned Boyfriend and that he’d let it go to voicemail. Humiliated, I had to wait a full day for him to call me back, knowing the entire time that the last thing anyone wants to do is talk to the person he’s just broken up with but who still wants to be together.
“You’re probably going to ask what I wanted to get out of calling him,” I say, anticipating his next question.
Wendell raises his right eyebrow—just the one, I notice, and I wonder how he does that—but before he can respond, I plow ahead. First, I explain, I wanted Boyfriend to tell me that he missed me and this was all a big mistake. But barring that “unlikely possibility” (added so that Wendell knows I have self-awareness, even though I’d believed that Boyfriend would tell me he’d reconsidered), I wanted to get clear on how we had arrived at this point. If I could just get my questions answered, I’d stop going over the breakup in my head ad nauseam, in an infinite loop of confusion. Which is why, I tell Wendell, I subjected Boyfriend to a several-hour interrogation—I mean conversation—in which I tried to solve the mystery of What the Fuck Led to Our Sudden Breakup.
“And then he says, ‘Being around a kid is limiting and distracting,’” I go on, reading verbatim quotes. “‘It never would have been enough alone time with you. And I realized that no matter how great the kid, I’m never going to want to live with any child other than my own.’ So then I said, ‘Why did you hide all this from me?’ and he said, ‘Because I needed to figure it out before I said anything.’ And then I said, ‘But don’t you think we should have discussed this?’ and he said, ‘What’s to discuss? It’s binary. Either I could live with a kid or I couldn’t, and only I could figure that out.’ And just as my brain is about to burst, he says, ‘I really love you, but love doesn’t conquer all.’
“It’s binary!” I say to Wendell, shaking my papers in the air. I’d put an asterisk next to this word in my notes. “Binary! If it’s so binary, why get into the binary situation in the first place?”
I’m insufferable and I know it, but I can’t stop.
For the next several weeks, I come to Wendell’s office and report the details of my circular conversations with Boyfriend (admittedly, there are several more) while Wendell tries to interject something useful (that he’s not sure how this is helping me; that this feels masochistic; that I keep telling the same story hoping for a different outcome). He says that I want Boyfriend to explain himself to me—and that he is explaining himself to me—but that I keep going back because his explanation isn’t what I want to hear. Wendell says that if I’ve been taking such copious notes during our phone calls, I probably haven’t been able to listen to Boyfriend, and if my goal is to be open to understanding his perspective, that’s hard to do when I’m trying to prove a point rather than have an interaction in earnest. And, he adds, I’m doing the same thing to him in our sessions.
I agree, then go right back to railing against Boyfriend.
In one session, I explain with excruciating specificity the arrangements for getting Boyfriend’s belongings returned to him. In another, I repeatedly ask, Am I crazy or is he? (Wendell says neither of us is crazy, which infuriates me.) Another consists of an analysis of what kind of person says, “I want to marry you, just not you with a kid.” For this session, I’ve created an infographic on gender differences. A man can say “I don’t want to have to look at the Legos” and “I’ll never love a kid who’s not mine” and get away with it. A woman who said that would be crucified.
I also pepper our sessions with reports of what I’ve discovered in my daily Google-stalking: the women Boyfriend must be dating (based on elaborate stories I create from social media Likes); how fabulous his life is without me (based on his Tweets about his business trip); how he isn’t even sad about the breakup (because he photographs salads in restaurants—how can he even eat?). I’m convinced that Boyfriend has quickly transitioned into his post-me life completely unscathed. It’s a refrain I recognize from divorcing couples I see in which one person is struggling mightily and the other seems fine, happy even, to be moving on.
I tell Wendell that, like these patients, I want some sign of the scar tissue left behind. I want to know, in the end, that I mattered.
“Did I matter?” I ask over and over.
I continue like this, letting my freak flag fly, until finally Wendell kicks me.
One morning, as I drone on about Boyfriend, Wendell scoots to the edge of his couch, stands up, walks over to me, and, with his very long leg, lightly kicks my foot. Smiling, he returns to his seat.
“Ouch!” I say reflexively, even though it didn’t hurt. I’m startled. “What was that?”
“Well, you seem like you’re enjoying the experience of suffering, so I thought I’d help you out with that.”
“What?”
“There’s a difference between pain and suffering,” Wendell says. “You’re going to have to feel pain—everyone feels pain at times—but you don’t have to suffer so much. You’re not choosing the pain, but you’re choosing the suffering.” He goes on to explain that all of this perseverating I’m doing, all of this endless rumination and speculation about Boyfriend’s life, is adding to the pain and causing me to suffer. So, he suggests, if I’m clinging to the suffering so tightly, I must be getting something out of it. It must be serving some purpose for me.
Is it?
I think about why I might be obsessively Google-stalking Boyfriend despite how bad I know it makes me feel. Is it a way to stay connected to Boyfriend and his daily routine, even if it’s only one-sided? Maybe. Is it a way to
numb out so I don’t have to think about the reality of what happened? Possibly. Is it a way of avoiding what I should be paying attention to in my life but don’t want to?
Earlier, Wendell had pointed out that I’d kept my distance from Boyfriend—ignoring clues that would have made his revelation less shocking—because if I’d inquired about them, Boyfriend might have said something I didn’t want to hear. I told myself it meant nothing that he seemed irritated by kids in public places, that he’d happily run errands for us rather than attend my son’s basketball games, that he said it was more important to his ex-wife than to him to have children when they were having fertility problems, and that his brother and sister-in-law stayed in a hotel when they came to visit because Boyfriend didn’t want the commotion of their three kids in his house. And yet, neither he nor I had ever discussed our feelings about children directly. I figured: He’s a dad, he likes kids.
Wendell and I talked about my pretending away certain parts of Boyfriend’s history and comments and body language to quiet the alarm that might have gone off if I’d paid them heed. And now Wendell wonders if I’ve been keeping my distance from him as well, obsessing over my notes and sitting far away from him in order to protect myself here too.
I glance at the L-shaped sofa configuration. “Don’t most people sit here?” I ask from my seat under the window. I’m certain that nobody shares a sofa with him, so that rules out position D. And as for position B, catty-corner to him, who would sit that close to the therapist? Again, nobody.
“Some do,” Wendell says.
“Really? Where?”
“Anywhere along here.” Wendell gestures from where I’m sitting all the way to position B.
Suddenly the distance between us seems vast, but I still can’t believe that people sit that close to Wendell.
“So somebody walks into your office for the very first time, scans the room, and then plops down right there, even though you’re going to be sitting just inches away?”
“They do,” Wendell says simply. I think about the tissue box that Wendell had tossed to me and how he kept it on the table next to position B because, it occurs to me now, most people must sit there.
“Oh,” I say. “Should I move?”
Wendell shrugs. “It’s up to you.”
I get up and sit down perpendicular to Wendell. I have to adjust my legs to the side so that they don’t touch his. I notice a bit of gray at the roots of his dark hair. The wedding ring on his finger. I remember asking Caroline to refer me—or my “friend”—to a married male therapist, but now that I’m here, I realize it doesn’t really matter. He hasn’t sided with me or declared Boyfriend a sociopath.
I adjust the pillows and try to get comfortable. This feels strange. I look down at my notes, but I have no interest in reading them right now. I feel exposed, and I have the urge to run.
“I can’t sit here,” I say.
Wendell asks why, and I tell him I don’t know.
“Not knowing is a good place to start,” he says, and this feels like a revelation. I spend so much time trying to figure things out, chasing the answer, but it’s okay to not know.
We’re both quiet for a while, then I get up and move farther away, about midway between positions A and B. I can breathe again.
I think of a Flannery O’Connor quote: “The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.” What am I protecting myself from? What do I not want Wendell to see?
All along, I’d been telling Wendell that I didn’t wish ill upon Boyfriend—like having his next girlfriend blindside him—I just wanted our relationship back. I said with a straight face that I didn’t want revenge, that I didn’t hate Boyfriend, that I wasn’t angry, just confused.
Wendell listened but said he wasn’t buying it. Obviously, I did want revenge, I did hate Boyfriend, I was furious.
“Your feelings don’t have to mesh with what you think they should be,” he explained. “They’ll be there regardless, so you might as well welcome them because they hold important clues.”
How many times had I said something similar to my own patients? But here I feel as if I’m hearing this for the first time. Don’t judge your feelings; notice them. Use them as your map. Don’t be afraid of the truth.
My friends, my family—like me, they’ve had trouble considering the possibility that Boyfriend is a decent guy who was confused and conflicted. Instead, he was either selfish or a liar. They’ve also never considered that, even though Boyfriend told himself that he couldn’t live with a kid, maybe he also couldn’t live with me. Maybe, in ways he didn’t realize, I reminded him too much of his parents or ex-wife or the woman he once mentioned who had hurt him deeply in graduate school. “I made a decision never to go through anything like that again,” he had said early in our relationship. I’d asked him to explain more, but he didn’t want to talk about it, and I, colluding with his avoidance, didn’t push it.
Wendell, though, has been asking me to look at the ways we avoided each other by hiding behind romance and banter and plans for our future. And now I’m in pain and creating my own suffering—and my therapist is literally trying to kick some sense into me.
He switches his crossed legs from right over left to left over right, something therapists do when their legs start to fall asleep. His striped socks match his striped cardigan today, as if they came as a set. He points with his chin to the papers in my hand. “I don’t think you’re going to get the answers you’re looking for from these notes.”
You’re grieving something bigger pops into my head, like a song lyric I can’t shake. “But if I don’t talk about the breakup, I won’t have anything to say,” I insist.
Wendell tilts his head. “You’ll have the important things to say.”
I hear him and I don’t. Whenever Wendell implies that this is bigger than Boyfriend, I push back, so I suspect that he must be onto something. The things we protest against the most are often the very things we need to look at.
“Maybe,” I say. But I feel antsy. “Right now I feel like I need to finish telling you what Boyfriend said. Can I just tell you one last thing?”
He takes in a breath and then stops, hesitating, like he was about to say something but decided against it. “Sure,” Wendell says. He’s pushed me enough and knows it. He’s taken away my drug—talking about Boyfriend—for a minute too long, and I need another fix.
I start rifling through the pages, but now I can’t remember where I was. I’m scanning the notes to see which damning quote I should share next, but there are so many asterisks and so many notes, and I can feel Wendell’s eyes on me. I wonder what I would be thinking if somebody like me were sitting in my therapy room right now. Actually, I know. I’d be thinking of the laminated sign that my office mate posted inside the files at work: There is a continuing decision to be made as to whether to evade pain, or to tolerate it and therefore modify it.
I put down the notes.
“Okay,” I say to Wendell. “What did you want to say?”
Wendell explains that my pain feels like it’s in the present, but it’s actually in both the past and the future. Therapists talk a lot about how the past informs the present—how our histories affect the ways we think, feel, and behave and how at some point in our lives, we have to let go of the fantasy of creating a better past. If we don’t accept the notion that there’s no redo, much as we try to get our parents or siblings or partners to fix what happened years ago, our pasts will keep us stuck. Changing our relationship to the past is a staple of therapy. But we talk far less about how our relationship to the future informs the present too. Our notion of the future can be just as powerful a roadblock to change as our notion of the past.
In fact, Wendell continues, I’ve lost more than my relationship in the present. I’ve lost my relationship in the future. We tend to think that the future happens later, but we’re creating it in our minds every day. When the present falls apart, so does the future we had associated with it. And hav
ing the future taken away is the mother of all plot twists. But if we spend the present trying to fix the past or control the future, we remain stuck in place, in perpetual regret. By Google-stalking Boyfriend, I’ve been watching his future unfold while I stay frozen in the past. But if I live in the present, I’ll have to accept the loss of my future.
Can I sit through the pain, or do I want to suffer?
“So,” I say to Wendell, “I guess I should stop interrogating Boyfriend—and Google-stalking him.”
He smiles indulgently, the way one would at a smoker who announces that she’ll quit cold turkey but doesn’t realize how overly ambitious that is.
“Or at least try,” I say, backtracking. “Spend less time on his future, more on my present.”
Wendell nods, then pats his legs twice and stands. The session is over but I want to stay.
I feel like we just got started.
11
Goodbye, Hollywood
My first week working at NBC, I was assigned to two shows that were about to premiere: ER, a medical drama, and Friends, a sitcom. These shows would catapult the network to number one and establish its Thursday-night dominance for years to come.
The series were set to air in the fall, following a much faster cycle than in the film world. Within months, casts and crews were hired, sets were built, and production began. I was in the room when Jennifer Aniston and Courteney Cox auditioned for starring roles in Friends. I weighed in on whether Julianna Margulies’s character in ER should die at the end of episode one, and I was on the set with George Clooney before anyone knew how famous this series would make him.
Energized by this new job, I watched less TV at home. I had stories I was passionate about and colleagues who were equally passionate about those stories, and I felt connected to my work again.
One day ER’s writers called up a local emergency department with a medical question, and a physician named Joe happened to take the call. It seemed like kismet—in addition to his medical degree, he had a master’s in film production.
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