Maybe You Should Talk to Someon - Lori Gottlieb Page 0,103
me in mind.
This time, though, nothing comes out. Charlotte just stands there. I wonder if she’s thinking about something particularly hard for her to address—her drinking, or her hope that her father will pick up the phone when she calls on his birthday next week. Instead she blurts out: “Where did you get that top?”
It seems like such a simple question. I’ve had an Uber driver, a barista at Starbucks, and a stranger on the street all ask me the same question about this new top—one of my favorites—and each time, I answered without a hint of hesitation. “Anthropologie, on sale!” I’d reply, proud of my good taste and good fortune. But with Charlotte, something stops me. It’s not that I’m worried she’ll start to dress exactly like me (as one of my patients did). It’s that my gut tells me why she’s asking; she wants to get it and wear it on her date with the Dude—the date that she’s supposedly not going on.
“Anthropologie,” I say anyway.
“It’s cute,” she says, smiling. “See you next week.”
And off she goes, but not before I meet her eyes for a split second and she looks away.
We both know what’s about to happen.
34
Just Be
About halfway through my traineeship, I got into a conversation with my hairstylist about therapy.
“Why would you want to be a therapist?” Cory asked, scrunching up his nose. He said that often he felt like a therapist, listening to people’s problems all day. “It’s TMI,” he continued. “I’m cutting their hair. Why do they tell me these things?”
“Do they really get that personal?”
“Oh yeah, some do. I don’t know how you do it. It’s so—” He held up the scissors, searching for the right word. “Draining.”
He went back to cutting. I watched him snip my front layers.
“What do you say to them?” I asked. It occurred to me that when people shared their secrets with him, they were probably looking in the mirror, the way we were having our conversation right now—with each other’s reflections. Maybe that made it easier, I thought.
“What do I say when I hear all their problems?” he asked.
“Right. Do you try to give them advice, add your two cents?”
“None of that,” he said.
“Then what?”
“‘Just be,’” he said.
“What?”
“I tell them, ‘Just be.’”
“That’s what you say?” I started laughing. I imagined saying that in my office. You’ve got problems? Just be.
“You should try it with your patients,” he said, smiling back. “It might help them.”
“Does it help your clients?” I asked.
Cory nodded. “It’s like this. I’ll give them a haircut, and they’ll come back the next time and say they want something different. ‘Why?’ I’ll ask. ‘Was something wrong with the last one?’ No, they say. The last one was fabulous! They just want something different. So I give them the exact same haircut but they think it’s different. And they love it.”
I waited for him to say more, but he seemed to be focusing on my split ends. I watched my hair fall to the floor.
“Okay,” I said. “But what does this have to do with their problems?”
Cory stopped cutting and looked at me in the mirror.
“Maybe everything they complain about isn’t actually a problem! Maybe it’s fine the way it is. Maybe it’s even great, like their haircut. Maybe they’d be happier if they didn’t try to change things. Just be.”
I considered this. There was certainly some truth here. Sometimes people needed to accept themselves and others the way they were. But sometimes in order to feel better, you need a mirror held up to you, and not the mirror that makes you look pretty, like the one I was looking in now.
“Have you ever been to therapy?” I asked Cory.
“Hell no.” He shook his head vigorously. “Not for me.”
Despite Cory’s objections to TMI, in the years he’d been cutting my hair, he’d told me quite a bit about himself—how burned he’d been by love, how his family had trouble accepting him when he told them he was gay, how his father had been secretly gay his whole life, having affairs with men, but still hadn’t come out. I knew, too, that Cory had had multiple cosmetic surgeries and still wasn’t satisfied with his looks, that he was preparing to go under the knife yet again. Even as we spoke, he was checking himself out in the mirror and finding himself wanting.
“What do you do when you feel lonely or sad?” I asked.