Maybe You Should Talk to Someone

by Lori Gottlieb

  Now my blazer is dripping, my hair is frizzing, my makeup is running, and my wet clothes are sticking to my body like leeches in the most unfortunate places. Too damp to sit, I’m standing by the waiting-room chairs, wondering how I’m going to make myself presentable for work, when the door to Wendell’s inner office opens and out comes the pretty woman I’ve seen before. Again, she’s wiping her tears. She lowers her head and rushes past the paper screen, and I hear the click-clack of her boots echoing down the building’s corridor.

  Margo?

  No—it’s coincidence enough that she’s also seeing Wendell, but to have our weekly appointments back to back? I’m being paranoid. Then again, as the writer Philip K. Dick put it, “Strange how paranoia can link up with reality now and then.”

  I stand there shivering like a wet puppy until Wendell’s door opens again, this time to let me in.

  I drag myself to the sofa and settle into position B, arranging the familiar mismatched pillows behind my back in the way I’ve become accustomed. Wendell quietly closes the office door, walks across the room, lowers his tall body into his spot, and crosses his legs when he lands. We begin our opening ritual: our wordless hello.

  But today I’m getting his sofa wet.

  “Would you like a towel?” he asks.

  “You have towels?”

  Wendell smiles, walks over to his armoire, and tosses me a couple of hand towels. I dry my hair with one and sit down on the other.

  “Thanks,” I say.

  “You’re welcome,” he says.

  “Why do you have towels here?”

  “People get wet,” Wendell replies with a shrug, as if towels are an office staple. How strange, I think—and yet I feel so taken care of, like when he tossed me the tissues. I make a mental note to store towels in my office.

  We look at each other in silent greeting again.

  I don’t know where to start. Lately I’ve been anxious about pretty much everything. Even little things like making small commitments have left me paralyzed. I’ve become cautious, afraid of taking risks and making mistakes because I’ve made so many already and I fear I won’t have time to clean up the mistakes anymore.

  The night before, as I tried to relax in bed with a novel, I came across a character who described his constant worry as “a relentless need to escape a moment that never ends.” Exactly, I thought. For the past few weeks, every second has been linked to the next by worry. I know the anxiety is front and center because of what Wendell said at the end of our last session. I’d had to cancel my next appointment to go to an event at my son’s school, then Wendell was away the following week, so I’ve been sitting with Wendell’s words for three weeks now. Me: What fight? Him: Your fight with death.

  The skies opening up on me on my way in today felt appropriate. I take a deep breath and tell Wendell about my wandering uterus.

  Until today, I’ve never told this story from beginning to end. If before I’d been embarrassed by it, now, as I say it aloud, I realize how truly terrified I’ve been. Layered on top of the grief Wendell had mentioned early on—that half my life is over—has been the fear that I, like Julie, might be dying much sooner than expected. There’s nothing scarier to a single mom than contemplating leaving her young child on this earth without her. What if the doctors are missing something that could be treated if found promptly? What if they find the cause but it can’t be treated?

  Or what if this is all in my head? What if the person who can cure my physical symptoms is none other than the person I am sitting with right now, Wendell?

  “That’s quite a story,” Wendell says when I’m done, shaking his head and blowing out some air.

  “You think it’s a story?” Et tu, Brute?

  “I do,” Wendell says. “It’s a story about something frightening that’s been happening to you over the past couple of years. But it’s also a story about something else.”

  I anticipate what Wendell will say: It’s a story about avoidance. Everything I’ve told him since coming to therapy has been about avoidance, and we both know that avoidance is almost always about fear. Avoidance of seeing the clues that Boyfriend and I had irreconcilable differences. Avoidance of writing the happiness book. Avoidance of talking about not writing the happiness book. Avoidance of thinking about my parents getting older. Avoidance of the fact that my son is growing up. Avoidance of my mysterious illness. I remember something I learned during my internship: “Avoidance is a simple way of coping by not having to cope.”

  “It’s a story about avoidance, isn’t it?” I say.

  “Well, in some ways, yes,” Wendell replies. “Though I was going to say uncertainty. It’s also a story about uncertainty.”

  Of course, I think. Uncertainty.

  I’ve always thought about uncertainty in terms of my patients. Will John and Margo stay together? Will Charlotte stop drinking? But now so much seems uncertain in my own life. Will I be healthy again? Will I find the right partner? Will my writing career go up in flames? What will the next half of my life—if I even have that long—look like? I’d once told Wendell that it was hard to walk around those prison bars when I didn’t know where I was headed. I might be free, but which way should I go?

  I remember a patient who had pulled into her garage at the end of an ordinary workday and was greeted by an intruder with a gun. The intruder’s accomplice, she would soon learn, was in the house with her children and their babysitter. After a horrific ordeal, they were saved when a neighbor called the police. My patient told me that the worst thing about this incident was that it had shattered her smug sense of safety, however illusory it might have been.

  And yet, whether she realized it or not, she still held on to that illusion.

  “Do you worry about pulling into your new garage?” I asked when the family, too traumatized to live at the scene of the crime, had moved into a new home.

  “Of course not,” she said, as if it were an absurd question. “Like this would happen twice? What are the chances of that?”

  I tell Wendell this story and he nods. “How do you make sense of her response?” he asks.

  Wendell and I rarely talk about my work as a therapist, and now I feel self-conscious. Sometimes I wonder how Wendell would be with my patients, what he would say to Rita or John. Therapy is a completely different experience with a different therapist; no two are exactly the same. And because Wendell has been doing this much longer than I have, I feel like the student to his teacher, Luke Skywalker to his Yoda.

  “I think we want the world to be rational, and it was her way of having control over how uncertain life is,” I say. “Once you know a truth, you can’t unknow it, but at the same time, to protect herself from that knowledge, she convinces herself she could never be assaulted again.” I pause. “Did I pass the test?”

  Wendell starts to open his mouth but I know what he’s about to say: This isn’t a test.

  “Well,” I say, “was that what you were thinking? How would you make sense of her certainty in the face of uncertainty?”

  “The way you did with her,” he says. “The same way I’d make sense of it with you.”

  Wendell goes through the concerns I’ve brought to him: my breakup, my book, my health, my father’s health, my son’s rapid ascent through childhood. The seemingly offhand observations I’d pepper our conversations with, like “I heard on the radio that about half of today’s Americans weren’t alive in the 1970s!” Everything I talk about is shaded with uncertainty. How much longer will I live, and what will happen in that time before I die? How much control will I have over any of it? But, Wendell says, like my patient, I’ve come up with my own way to cope. If I screw up my life, I can engineer my own death rather than have it happen to me. It may not be what I want, but at least I’ll choose it. Like cutting off my nose to spite my face, this is a way to say, Take that, uncertainty.

  I try to wrap my mind around this paradox: self-sabotage as a form of control. If I screw up my life, I can engin
eer my own death rather than have it happen to me. If I stay in a doomed relationship, if I mess up my career, if I hide in fear instead of facing what’s wrong with my body, I can create a living death—but one where I call the shots.

  Irvin Yalom, the scholar and psychiatrist, often talked about therapy as an existential experience of self-understanding, which is why therapists tailor the treatment to the individual rather than to the problem. Two patients might have the same problem—say, they have trouble being vulnerable in relationships—but the approach I take with them will vary. The process is highly idiosyncratic because there’s no cookie-cutter way to help people through what are at the deepest level existential fears—or what Yalom called “ultimate concerns.”

  The four ultimate concerns are death, isolation, freedom, and meaninglessness. Death, of course, is an instinctive fear that we often repress but that tends to increase as we get older. What we fear isn’t just dying in the literal sense but in the sense of being extinguished, the loss of our very identities, of our younger and more vibrant selves. How do we defend against this fear? Sometimes we refuse to grow up. Sometimes we self-sabotage. And sometimes we flat-out deny our impending deaths. But as Yalom wrote in Existential Psychotherapy, our awareness of death helps us live more fully—and with less, not more, anxiety.

  Julie, with the “wacky” risks she’s been taking, is a perfect example of this. I never paid attention to my own death until I embarked on the Medical Mystery Tour—and even then, Boyfriend allowed me to distract myself from my fears of extinction, both professional and actual. But he also offered me an antidote to my fear of isolation, another ultimate concern. There’s a reason that solitary confinement makes prisoners literally go crazy; they experience hallucinations, panic attacks, obsessional behavior, paranoia, despair, difficulty with focus, and suicidal ideation. When released, these people often struggle with social atrophy, which renders them unable to interact with others. (Perhaps this is simply a more intense version of what happens with our increasing want, our loneliness, created by our speedy lifestyles.)

  And then there’s the third ultimate concern: freedom, and all the existential difficulties that freedom poses for us. On the surface, it’s almost laughable how much freedom I have—if, as Wendell pointed out, I’m willing to walk around those bars. But there’s also the reality that as people get older, they face more limitations. It becomes harder to change careers or move to a different city or marry a different person. Their lives are more defined, and sometimes they crave the freedom of youth. But children, bound by parental rules, are really free only in one respect—emotionally. For a while, at least, they can cry or laugh or have tantrums unselfconsciously; they can have big dreams and unedited desires. Like many people my age, I don’t feel free because I’ve lost touch with that emotional freedom. And that’s what I’m doing here in therapy—trying to free myself emotionally again.

  In a way, this midlife crisis may be more about opening up than shutting down, an expansion rather than a constriction, a rebirth rather than a death. I remember when Wendell said that I wanted to be saved. But Wendell isn’t here to save me or solve my problems as much as to guide me through my life as it is so that I can manage the certainty of uncertainty without sabotaging myself along the way.

  Uncertainty, I’m starting to realize, doesn’t mean the loss of hope—it means there’s possibility. I don’t know what will happen next—how potentially exciting! I’m going to have to figure out how to make the most of the life I have, illness or not, partner or not, the march of time notwithstanding.

  Which is to say, I’m going to have to look more closely at the fourth ultimate concern: meaninglessness.

  38

  Legoland

  “You know why I’m late?” John says as soon as I open the door to the waiting room. It’s fifteen minutes past the hour, and I’d assumed he wasn’t coming. A month went by before he responded to my message after his no-show—he’d unexpectedly resurfaced and asked to come in. But maybe, I thought before he arrived, he got cold feet. Indeed, on the walk down the hallway, John goes on to say that after he pulled into the building’s parking lot, he sat in his car, debating whether to come upstairs. The attendant asked for his keys, but John said he needed a minute, so the attendant told him to pull over toward the exit, and by the time John decided to stay, the attendant informed him that the lot was full. John had to find a spot on the street and sprint the two blocks to my building.

  “Can’t a person have a minute to sit in his own car and collect his thoughts?” John asks.

  As we enter my office, I think about how beleaguered he tends to feel. Today he looks ragged, exhausted. So much for his sleep medication.

  John lowers himself onto the couch, kicks off his shoes, then stretches out, lies down, and adjusts his head on the pillows. Usually he sits cross-legged on the sofa, so this is a first. I notice, too, that there’s no food today.

  “Okay, you win,” he begins with a sigh.

  “Win what?” I ask.

  “The pleasure of my company,” he deadpans.

  I raise my eyebrows.

  “The explanation to the mystery,” he continues. “I’m going to tell you the story. So, lucky you—you win.”

  “I didn’t know we were competing,” I say. “But I’m glad you’re here.”

  “Oh, for Chrissake,” he says. “Let’s not analyze everything, okay? Let’s just do this, because if we don’t start now, I’m two seconds away from leaving.”

  He rolls over to face the back of the couch, and then, very quietly, says to the fabric, “So, uh, we were going on a family trip to Legoland.”

  According to John, he and Margo were driving down the California coast with the kids to Legoland, a theme park in Carlsbad, for a long weekend away when they had a disagreement. It had been their policy never to argue in front of the children, and up to that point, they’d both kept their promise.

  At the time, John was in charge of his first television show, which meant that he was on call day and night in order to get each week’s episode out. Margo also felt overwhelmed, taking care of two young kids and trying to keep up with her graphic-design clients, but while John got to interact with adults all day, Margo was either “in Mommy-land,” as she put it, or working at her home computer.

  Margo looked forward to seeing John at the end of the day, but at dinner he would answer calls while she gave him what he termed the death stare. When things got so busy that John couldn’t make it home for dinner, Margo would ask him to turn off his cell at bedtime so that they could catch up and relax together without interruption. But John insisted that he couldn’t be unreachable.

  “I didn’t work this hard all these years only to get this opportunity and see my show fail,” he told her. And, indeed, it was off to a rocky start. The ratings were disappointing, but critics raved about the show, so the network agreed to give it more time to find an audience. The reprieve was a short one, though; if the ratings didn’t improve quickly, the show would be canceled. John doubled his efforts and made some changes (including “firing some idiots”), and the show took off.

  The network had a hit on its hands. And John had a very angry wife on his.

  With the show’s success, John got even busier. Did he remember that he had a wife? Margo asked him. What about his kids, who, when Margo called out, “Daddy’s here!” ran to the computer instead of the front door because they were so used to talking to Daddy on a screen? The younger one had even begun calling the computer Daddy. Yes, Margo conceded, John spent time with them on weekends, playing with them in the park for hours, taking them on outings, and horsing around with them at home. But even then, the ringing phone never left his side.

  John didn’t understand why Margo was making such a big deal out of this. When he became a father, he was surprised at how intense and immediate the bond was. His connection with his babies felt so powerful—fierce, even. It reminded him of the love he’d had as a boy for his mother before she die
d. It was a kind of love he didn’t even experience with Margo, though he loved her deeply, despite their disagreements. The first time he’d seen her, she was standing across the room at a party, laughing at something some doofus had said. Even from afar, John could see that it was the laugh of somebody being polite but thinking, What an idiot.

  John was smitten. He walked over to Margo, made her laugh for real, and married her a year later.

  Still, the way he loved his wife was different from the way he loved his kids. If his love for his wife was romantic and warm, his love for his kids was like a volcano. When he read Where the Wild Things Are to them, and they asked why the Wild Things wanted to eat the kid, he knew exactly why. “Because of how much they love him!” he said, pretending to swallow them as they giggled so hard they could barely breathe. He understood that devouring love.

  So what if he took calls when he was with his kids? He spent time with them, they adored him, and it was his professional success, after all, that provided them with the kind of financial security that he wished he’d had growing up as the son of two teachers. Yes, John was under a lot of pressure at work, but he loved creating characters and making up entire worlds as a writer—the very craft that his father had always aspired to. Whether by luck or talent or a combination, John had achieved both his and his father’s dreams. And he couldn’t be two places at once. The cell phone, he told Margo, was a gift.

  “A gift?” Margo had said.

  Yes, replied John. A gift. It allowed him to be at work and at home at the same time.

  Margo thought that was precisely the problem. I don’t want you to be at work and at home at the same time. We aren’t your coworkers. We’re your family. Margo didn’t want to be midsentence or mid-kiss or mid-whatever with John, only to be interrupted by Dave or Jack or Tommy from the show. I didn’t invite them into our home at nine p.m., she said.