Maybe You Should Talk to Someon - Lori Gottlieb Page 0,55

afraid of being responsible for our own lives.

Sometimes it takes a while to admit our fears, especially to ourselves.

I’ve noticed that dreams can be a precursor to self-confession—a kind of pre-confession. Something buried is brought closer to the surface, but not in its entirety. A patient dreams that she’s lying in bed hugging her roommate; initially she thinks it’s about their strong friendship but later she realizes she’s attracted to women. A man has a recurring dream that he’s been caught speeding on the freeway; a year into this dream, he begins to consider that his decades of cheating on his taxes—of positioning himself above the rules—might catch up with him.

After I’ve been seeing Wendell for a few months, my patient’s dream about her high-school classmate seeps into mine. I’m at the mall, looking through a rack of dresses, when Boyfriend appears at the same rack. Apparently, he’s shopping for a birthday gift for his new girlfriend.

“Oh, which birthday?” I ask in the dream.

“Fiftieth,” he says. At first I’m relieved in the pettiest way—not only is she not the clichéd twenty-five-year-old, but she’s actually older than I am. It makes sense. Boyfriend wanted no kids in the house, and she’s old enough to have kids in college. Boyfriend and I are having a pleasant conversation—friendly, innocuous—until I happen to catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror adjacent to the rack. That’s when I see that I’m actually an old lady—late seventies, maybe eighties. It turns out that Boyfriend’s fifty-year-old girlfriend is, in fact, decades younger than I am.

“Did you ever write your book?” Boyfriend asks.

“What book?” I say, watching my wrinkled, prune-like lips move in the mirror.

“The book about your death,” he replies matter-of-factly.

And then my alarm goes off. All day, as I hear other patients’ dreams, I can’t stop thinking about mine. It haunts me, this dream.

It haunts me because it’s my pre-confession.

20

The First Confession

Allow me to get defensive for a minute. You see, when I told Wendell that everything was just fine until the breakup, I was telling the absolute truth. Or, rather, the truth as I knew it. Which is to say, the truth as I wanted to see it.

And now let me remove the defense: I was lying.

One thing I haven’t told Wendell is that I’m supposed to be writing a book—and that it hasn’t been going very well. By “not going very well,” I mean that I haven’t actually been writing it. This wouldn’t be a problem if I weren’t under contract and therefore legally obligated to either produce a book or return the advance that I no longer have in my bank account. Well, it would still be a problem even if I could return the money, because in addition to being a therapist, I am a writer—it’s not just what I do but who I am—and if I can’t write, then a crucial part of me goes missing. And if I don’t turn in this book, my agent says that I won’t get the opportunity to write another.

It isn’t that I haven’t been able to write at all. In fact, during the time I was supposed to be writing my book, I was crafting fabulously witty and flirtatious emails to Boyfriend, all while telling friends and family and even Boyfriend that I was busy writing my book. I was like the closet gambler who gets dressed for work and kisses his family goodbye each morning and then drives to the casino instead of the office.

I’ve been meaning to talk to Wendell about this situation, but I’ve been so focused on getting through the breakup that I haven’t had a chance.

Obviously that, too, is a big fat lie.

I haven’t told Wendell about the book-I’m-not-writing because every time I think about it, I’m filled with panic, dread, regret, and shame. Whenever the situation pops into my head (which is constantly; as Fitzgerald put it, “In a real dark night of the soul, it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day”), my stomach tightens and I feel paralyzed. Then I question every bad decision I’ve made at various forks in the road because I’m convinced that I’m in this current situation due to what ranks as one of the most colossally bad decisions of my life.

Perhaps you’re thinking, Really? You were lucky enough to get a book contract, and now you’re not writing the book? Boo-hoo! Try working twelve hours a day in a factory, for God’s sake! I understand how this