“Is there a feeling?”
“Frustration.”
“Because, why?”
“Because my intention was to listen to music, and now I can’t.”
“Anything else?”
“Stupid?” I asked. “Useless?”
“Helpless?”
“Yes!”
“And what does that feel like?”
“Sad?”
“Sit with that.”
“Helpless and sad,” I agreed, “but then where does the anger come in?”
“Sad is your internal reaction, which turns to anger because anger sets you in kinetic motion to avoid the sadness of sitting there and not listening to music, and knowing your plans have been thwarted. Your anger is your way to avoid sadness.”
“Hold on. Let me write that down.” I didn’t have a pen.
“You were a helpless little girl who had parents that left you alone too much. When something doesn’t go your way, you get angry because you feel that helplessness.”
“So, what is my exercise to stop this behavior?”
“Identification. Awareness. Modification. Or, if you like acronyms—IAM.” Dan was the one who liked acronyms, so I had no choice but to start liking them too. My life had become filled with acronyms and wheels.
“You identify the internal emotion you are feeling when something upsets you or doesn’t go your way. You stop, take a breath, and become aware of it. Then you simply modify your behavior—and/or your reaction. You may find that after you give it some space, you may not want to react at all.”
“Yes, I’ve heard about people doing that.”
“Are you ever able to sit back when you’ve heard a story more than once, or know the person you’re speaking to is wrong about something, but you withhold?” Dan asked.
Dan was talking about impulse control. He may as well have been speaking Portuguese.
“Does impulse control go with empathy? Because I don’t have that one either.”
I came to understand that motion had been cemented in my life at a time when I needed it to survive, and over time it became the only way I knew. It was my oxygen. I didn’t know how not to move fast, or how not to state my opinion, or how to just observe something rather than insert myself.
“But all that action doesn’t coincide with my sleep schedule,” I pointed out. “How is it that I can’t stop moving, but I also want to hibernate and withdraw? I can sleep for twenty hours straight, well…if I take a Xanax.”
“Because you’re exhausted.”
“Oh, right. Sorry, that was a dumb question.” This was a stimulating conversation. Things were clicking into place. “Well, this explains why I can’t shut the fuck up.”
“Well…”
“The other day, I was on my way into the airport when I heard about Trump undoing a ban on some terrible fertilizer that enlarges children’s brains—the company who makes it donated one million dollars to his inaugural committee.”
“Okay…”
“When I walked into the lounge, I headed straight to the little section that plays Fox News, hoping to find someone I could excoriate for continuing to support Trump. I can’t go on like this.”
“Well, that particular issue isn’t an unreasonable thing to have anger about.”
“Okay, fine, but I don’t want to be filled with such vitriol for Trump supporters. I want to be able to listen, and not always insert myself when there are things I disagree with. Not just with Trump supporters. With everything.”
Now that I had identified the genesis of my anger, I could better articulate what I wanted so badly to get out of this therapy experience: I wanted to learn how to be quiet.
My plan after ending my Netflix show was to travel the country and speak to people who had points of view and experiences different from my own. To understand why people continued to support Donald Trump. To do something—besides sitting around on my soapbox and complaining. I was getting so much more out of therapy with Dan than anything else I had ever done in my life. I was being heard, and I didn’t even have to yell.
“I’d like to order a scoop of quiet determination,” I told Dan. “I’ve only ever had the loud kind. I want to listen more and talk less. Rectitude without the self-righteousness.”
Dan told me to be reasonable with myself. To know that you don’t break habits overnight, and that being aware of your bad habits is half the battle. It’s downhill after you identify what your bad habits are.
He told me not to be a perfectionist about it. I had to slow down and go through the process of change. Identification. Awareness. Modification.
“Just so you know, I’m not a perfectionist. Whatever the opposite of a perfectionist is—that’s what I am. Is there a word for that?”
“Not that I know of,” he told me. “So, you’re not a perfectionist. You’re winging most things.”
“Some things come easily to me, but some things are much harder for me than for the average person. Silly things. Like I need very specific instructions to do anything technological.”
“Do you quit those things easily?”
“Usually once I get good at something, I lose interest. Sometimes, I lose interest in things before they even happen. I feel like I’m on a Tilt-A-Whirl.”
“Once the challenge is gone, you probably feel like you’re idling. It’s the need for motion. The need for doing.”
“Yes, I try hard in the beginning. I won’t give up. It took me over a hundred tries to get up on a wakeboard for the first time—in my thirties. Even the two guys driving the boat were exasperated with me after two hours, and tried to convince me to take a break. My body was sore from being pulled in so many different directions during every wipeout. By the time I got up on the wakeboard, I looked back at the big boat, where hours earlier all my friends had been cheering me on, and everyone had gone inside.”
We stared at each other for a short while, and then I started to laugh. “Seems to be a recurring theme in my life. Performing for people who aren’t even watching.”
“Or performing for a lot of people who are watching.”
“Performing in general,” I said.
The expression on Dan’s face I see the most is the one where he looks sad but hopeful for me—like he’s rooting for me.
“But you got up,” he said.
“Yes, I got up, and now I can water-ski and wakeboard topless. You can probably watch it on YouTube.”
* * *
• • •
That particular morning, I felt strong. I felt strong because all of the previous sessions where I’d cried and cried had fortified me. For the first time, I felt like someone who was able to pair my strength with my newfound vulnerability. I felt strong because I was able to recognize the behavior that I had adapted as my cover and I knew I could handle unraveling more.
Dan asked me about my relationships with men.
I told him about my two serious relationships, and he commented that it was odd for someone my age who is out and about, successful, and physically presentable (and also penetrable) not to have had more long-term relationships. It was an atypical thing for Dan to say to me, because he wouldn’t normally say anything that was in the same hallway as judgment.
“Why is it odd?” I asked him.
“I think people your age have, on average, been in more than two adult relationships.”
“Isn’t that my need for constant newness? Constant stimulation?”
“Dopamine,” he told me.
Relationships without hiccups were too boring, so inevitably they had to end. Don’t get comfortable. Uncomfortable and not knowing had become my comfort zone. I was always looking for an ultimatum—a way to test someone’s commitment, to prove they would disappoint me, and if they didn’t do anything wrong, I would find a way to pro
ve they were disappointing before they even had a chance to be.
“Yes, so my inclination has been to have casual relationships around the world with different men—so when I’m in Spain, there’s someone, when I ski, there’s someone, and then there’s someone I can travel with, although I haven’t found that person yet. I also know now that my fear of deep intimacy is because of what happened to my brother and my father—both disappearing in different ways. That the feelings I’ve clung to for so long are most likely self-preservation, believing I am all alone in this world, and all I have to depend on is me.”
“Do you feel like you have issues with intimacy?” Dan asked.
“I have a love/hate relationship with intimacy. Intimacy to me always feels like it occupies a narrow space between honesty and being horny. I don’t conflate sex with intimacy. Intimacy implies trust, and if trust is broken, then the intimacy was never real to begin with. So, in my experience, there’s false intimacy and then there’s the other one, which is the best feeling in the universe, and it’s not just about being in love with someone you’re attracted to—it’s the feeling of someone who sees you and loves you right back. The way you don’t have to wear a hat for your best friends and family.” Or the person you are paying to help detangle you.
“Do you want to be in a relationship?” Dan asked.
“Sometimes I think I do—but I don’t know for sure. Eventually, everyone ends up annoying me. Everyone ends up talking too much, being too sentimental, overstating their opinions, basically everything that annoys me about myself.”
“Have you ever had your heart broken?”
“Yeah, that’s annoying too.”
“Would you like to talk about that?”
“Not really, because now that we have gone through what my real issues are, all the male relationships in my life seem irrelevant. People I’ve given multiple chances to probably didn’t deserve them, and the people that deserved a second chance didn’t get one. I seem to have gotten my signals crossed somewhere along the line. Now I know that it’s because I’ve been in perpetual motion. I’ve been moving so fast, I can’t even see straight.”
“You have been a human doing, and we need to get you to be a human being.”
“Did you really just say that sentence?” I winced.
“Why, what’s wrong with that sentence?” he asked innocently.
“It just sounds like something straight out of a therapist’s handbook,” I told him.
This felt like a golden opportunity to alert Dan to some non-negotiables I had regarding men.
“Bear with me,” I told Dan. “This is going to be a long list. I don’t like strong scents, so that kind of prohibits waking up next to someone of the opposite sex, or any sex, really. I’m extremely sensitive to smell. I have a problem with smelling anyone’s breath. I’m not the kind of person who can get past that. I get turned off very easily. It could be anything. It could be finding out they have a cat, or seeing their apartment, or they could love room temperature water.”
“What else?”
“Feet are tricky. That’s why I like to lead with them. When I meet a guy I like, I take out a foot and show him what he’ll be dealing with if things go any further. Put your worst foot forward. That’s how I like to start a conversation. And then, when they’re gracious enough to tolerate me and my feet, God forbid they have a weird foot or a double-decker toe—I can’t deal with it.”
Dan was squinting at me. “Is there something wrong with your feet?”
“No, but they’re feet…feet can be tricky in general.”
“Okay, let’s keep moving,” he said with a sigh.
“Also, I have too many questionable habits that no man would be cool with, and by the way, if there was a guy that was cool with them, I’m not sure I’d be interested in him. There are snacks I get in the middle of the night that are not something I could do if anyone was around. If I didn’t have cleaning ladies that came every day, I’d probably be in jail. I find crumbs everywhere. In my clothing. My bed. My cleaning ladies leave chocolate next to my bed like I’m at a hotel, and those usually end up somewhere in my sheets. I don’t have a flawless enough body to get away with some of the more disgusting things I do…or eat…in bed. This is all from my mother. She ate in bed all the time, and there’s nothing I find more comforting than eating in bed. I stand by it, actually. It’s just not ideal for another person to have to witness.”
“Anything else?”
Dan looked intrigued…or bored. It was hard to tell.
“There are certain accents I simply cannot bear. One of them is my own. I can get icked out so easily. I’m aware this behavior is unreasonable and immature, and I’d like it to stop. I don’t want to get turned off so easily, but I just don’t know how to get past a bad pair of shoes, or…male jewelry.”
“Can you give me an example of a specific incident?”
“I could give you a hundred. Pick a city.” Dan asked me if I was serious. I was only half serious, but yes, I was serious.
“Let’s start with the last guy I hooked up with. Nice guy, nothing wrong with him. I was in Park City—skiing for a few days—and hooked up with a friend of a friend. Anyway, we wake up in the morning, and he tells me he wants to drive me to the airport instead of me taking a car service, because he was heading back to his house in Salt Lake City. I was rushing to pack my things and wasn’t thinking clearly—because I said yes, and normally I would not do that.”
“Why not?”
“Because I don’t want to be in a car with a guy I barely know for that long. It’s a forty-five-minute ride to the airport.”
“Okay.”
“So, we get in the car, and I immediately regret my decision. It was like being on a first date—after we had sex.”
“What was so bad about it?”
“Well, we got on the road, and then he lowers the music and says, ‘Top ten favorite bands. Name ’em.’ ”
“And?”
“And that was it. That sentence hurt my vagina. ‘Top ten favorite bands’?”
“And then what happened?” Dan asked.
“I told him to turn the music back up so I could find out.”
“And that was it?”
“Oh, no. It’s never a small story. This ordeal went on for hours. Keep in mind, this was simply a nice guy giving me a ride to the airport that was supposed to be only for forty-five minutes. We got to the airport early, and he insisted on driving me around the area to show me his house, and then he wanted to have breakfast. I felt like I was being held hostage. There was nothing I wanted to do less than have breakfast, and when we got to the restaurant, he ordered an ahi tuna sandwich and a Caesar Bloody Mary. I almost threw up at the table.”
“I see.”
“This happens all the time. All over the world. It’s never just an incident. It always snowballs into something bigger.”
“Tell me about the kind of men you do like,” Dan said.
“I like older men a lot, and I’ll tell you why it’s become a problem: because I just turned forty-three, and older men are getting really old, if you catch my drift. So now I have to scale back my margin and lower the difference in age that’s most preferable to me, which used to be twenty years. This is what is referred to as ‘thinning the herd.’ That is why I have the feelings I do for Robert Mueller.”
“I’m sorry?” Dan asked.
“I have strong feelings for Robert Mueller. I find him incredibly sexy, and I know why. It’s because he has his shit together, and my father never did. I get the psychology behind it, but then I’ll hook up with younger guys who are absolute and utter messes—whose lives I turn upside down even more, and who I then lose interest in. These relationships are based solely on their looks and their bodies. It’s completely reckless behavior when I think about it.
�
��My interest in younger men is new, but they have to be grown men. They can’t be growing. I want to be thrown around on a bed (in a loving way) while also being told to shut the fuck up when I’m being obnoxious. I know that’s not a popular thing to say in the current climate, but that’s what I like. Young guys won’t do that. I want to be dominated—by an older man—but in the past couple of years, I’ve had no choice but to start dipping into younger guys just because that’s what the Lord keeps putting before me.
“The real problem with younger men is that I am always the first one to lose interest, and in the past, it has cost me tens of thousands of dollars,” I went on. “I’ve had a few younger guys in my life, and each time I convince myself I’m not going to get sick of them—like a new album you listen to repeatedly. You know if you abuse an album and listen to it too many times, you’re going to get sick of it, but part of me always thinks this album will be different.”
“Why does it cost you money?” Dan asked.
“Because I usually upend their lives in some irreparable way—like I come in and out, and I don’t take them seriously, and just want to have fun—and then, when they get serious, I just want to do anything that will make them feel better, so I usually just give them money.”
“What?” Dan looked horrified.
“I don’t make them sign NDAs or anything. It’s not like Trump. It’s just more of a parting gift, to lessen the blow. Like a couple guys got fired who worked at resorts where I was a guest—that kind of thing. They weren’t supposed to mingle with the guests, so when they get fired, and I’m done with my little fling, I give them money. I know that it’s ridiculous behavior, and now I’m just using that money to support strong political candidates, so we don’t really have to dissect that either.”
“I think we do.”
“Yeah, I know you probably think we do, but IAM.” I may have winked at Dan when I said this, but I hope I didn’t. “Identification. Awareness. Modification. I’m going to modify, so let’s keep talking about relationships, because I want to know what’s wrong with me. Or what’s not wrong with me. Let’s ring that bell, shall we?”
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