Maybe You Should Talk to Someon - Lori Gottlieb Page 0,104

these guys again?”

“Not usually.”

“And you feel better?”

“Yeah.”

“You mean, until you get lonely or sad again and go back on the app for another fix?”

“Exactly.” He exchanged his scissors for the blow dryer. “Anyway, is that any different from people who come to therapy each week for their fix?”

It was. It was different in so many ways. For one, therapists don’t provide a simple weekly fix. I once heard a journalist say that doing a proper interview was a little bit like cutting another person’s hair: it looked easy until you got the scissors in your hand. The same, I was learning, was true of therapy. But I didn’t want to proselytize. Therapy, after all, wasn’t for everyone.

“You’re right,” I said to Cory. “There are many ways to just be.”

He turned on the dryer. “You have your therapy,” he said, then he nodded toward his cell phone. “And I have mine.”

35

Would You Rather?

Julie is cataloging her body parts, deciding which ones to keep.

“Colon? Uterus?” she asks, her eyebrows raised as if telling a joke. “And you’re not going to believe this one. Vagina. So basically it comes down to, do I want to be able to shit, have babies, or fuck.”

I feel a knot form in my throat. Julie looks different from the way she had at Trader Joe’s a few months back, or even from what she’d looked like a few weeks ago, when the doctors said that in order to keep her alive, they’d need to take more of her away. She’d soldiered through the first bout of cancer and the recurrence and the death sentence that ended up with a stay of execution and the pregnancy that gave her hope. But after too many just kiddings, she’s done with the cosmic jokes, worn down by it all. Her skin looks thin and lined, her eyes bloodshot. Now sometimes we cry together, and she hugs me when she leaves.

Nobody at Trader Joe’s knows that she’s sick, and for as long as she can, she wants to keep it that way. She wants them to know her first as a person, not as a cancer patient, which sounds a lot like how we therapists think about our patients: We want to get to know them before we get to know their problems.

“It’s like those ‘would you rather’ games we played at slumber parties as kids,” she says today. “Would you rather die in an airplane crash or a fire? Would you rather be blind or deaf? Would you rather smell bad for the rest of your life or smell bad things for the rest of your life? One time when it was my turn to answer, I said, ‘Neither.’ And everyone said, ‘No, you have to choose one,’ and I said, ‘Well, I choose neither.’ And that kind of blew people’s minds, just the concept that when presented with two awful alternatives, maybe neither was an option.”

In her high-school yearbook, under her name, they’d written I choose neither.

She’d used this logic in her grown-up life too. When she’d been asked if she’d rather have a prestigious grad-school opportunity with minimal funding or a fully funded position that was far less interesting, everyone had an opinion about which one she should take. But against all advice, she chose neither. It served her well; soon after, she got an even better grad-school offer in a better location in the same city as her sister, and she’d met her husband there.

Once she got sick, though, neither became less of an option: Would you rather have no breasts but live or keep your breasts and die? She chose life. There were many decisions like this, where the answers were difficult yet obvious, and each time, Julie took them in stride. But now, with this particular would-you-rather, this body-part roulette, she didn’t know how to choose. She was, after all, still getting over the shock of her recent miscarriage.

Her pregnancy had lasted eight weeks, during which time her younger sister, Nikki, had become pregnant with her second child. Not wanting to announce their news until the end of their first trimesters, the sisters kept each other’s secrets, giddily marking the days on a shared online calendar that labeled their progression for twelve weeks. Julie’s hash marks were in blue because she guessed she was carrying a boy; she’d nicknamed him BB, for Beautiful Boy. Nikki’s were in yellow (nickname: Baby Y), the color she planned to paint the baby’s nursery; as with her first pregnancy,