Maybe You Should Talk to Someon - Lori Gottlieb Page 0,10

before while thinking, John Lithgow is going to be eating this bagel in my crappy living room with the hideous wall-to-wall carpet and popcorn ceilings tomorrow! Could it get any better than this?

And then it did—or so I thought. I got promoted. It was a promotion I’d worked hard for and wanted very badly. Until I actually got it.

The irony of my job was that a lot of the creative work happens when you don’t have much experience. When you’re just starting out, you’re the behind-the-scenes person, the one who does all the script work at the office while the higher-level people are out wooing talent, lunching with agents, or stopping by movie sets to check in on the company’s productions. When you become a development executive, you go from being what’s known as an internal executive to an external one, and if you were the social kid in high school, this is the job for you. But if you were the bookish kid who was happiest working intently with a couple of friends in the library, be careful what you wish for.

Now I was out awkwardly attempting to socialize at lunches and meetings all day. On top of that, the pace of the process began to feel glacial. It could take ages—literally years—for a film to be made, and I got the sinking feeling that I was in the wrong job. I’d moved into a duplex with a friend, and she pointed out that I’d been watching a lot of TV every night. Like, in a pathological way.

“You seem depressed,” she said with concern. I said I wasn’t depressed; I was just bored. I hadn’t considered that if the only thing that keeps you going all day is knowing you’ll get to turn on the TV after dinner, you probably are depressed.

One day around this time, I was sitting at lunch in a perfectly nice restaurant with a perfectly lovely agent who was talking about a perfectly good deal she had made when I noticed that four words kept running through my mind: I. Just. Don’t. Care. No matter what the agent said, these four words played in a loop, and they didn’t stop when the check came, nor did they stop on the drive back to the office. They rattled around in my head the next day, too, and for the next several weeks, until finally I had to admit, months later, that they weren’t going away. I. Just. Don’t. Care.

And since the only thing I did seem to care about was watching TV—since the only time I felt anything (or, perhaps more accurately, the only time I felt the absence of something unpleasant that I couldn’t quite put my finger on) was when I was immersed in these imaginary worlds with new episodes arriving weekly like clockwork—I applied for a job in television. Within a few months, I began working in series development at NBC.

It felt like a dream come true. I thought, I’ll get to help tell stories again. Even better, instead of developing self-contained films with neatly crafted endings, I’ll get to work on series. Over the course of multiple episodes and seasons, I’ll have a hand in helping audiences get to know their favorite characters, layer by layer—characters as flawed and contradictory as the rest of us, with stories that are just as messy.

It seemed like the perfect solution to my boredom. It would take years for me to realize that I’d solved the wrong problem.

5

Namast’ay in Bed

Chart note, Julie:

Thirty-three-year-old university professor presents for help in dealing with cancer diagnosis upon returning from her honeymoon.

“Is that a pajama top?” Julie asks as she walks into my office. It’s the afternoon after the Boyfriend Incident, right before my appointment with John (and his idiots), and I’ve almost made it through the day.

I give her a quizzical look.

“Your shirt,” she says, settling onto the couch.

I flash back to the morning, to the gray sweater I intended to wear and then, with a sinking feeling, to the image of the sweater laid out on my bed next to the gray pajama top I’d taken off before stepping into the shower in my post-breakup daze.

Oh God.

On one of his Costco runs, Boyfriend had gotten me a pack of PJs, their fronts emblazoned with sayings like AREN’T I JUST A FUCKING RAY OF SUNSHINE and TALK NERDY TO ME and ZZZZZZZZZZ SNORE (not the message a therapist wants to send her patients). I’m trying to remember which one I