Maybe You Should Talk to Someon - Lori Gottlieb Page 0,116

have the same problem—say, they have trouble being vulnerable in relationships—but the approach I take with them will vary. The process is highly idiosyncratic because there’s no cookie-cutter way to help people through what are at the deepest level existential fears—or what Yalom called “ultimate concerns.”

The four ultimate concerns are death, isolation, freedom, and meaninglessness. Death, of course, is an instinctive fear that we often repress but that tends to increase as we get older. What we fear isn’t just dying in the literal sense but in the sense of being extinguished, the loss of our very identities, of our younger and more vibrant selves. How do we defend against this fear? Sometimes we refuse to grow up. Sometimes we self-sabotage. And sometimes we flat-out deny our impending deaths. But as Yalom wrote in Existential Psychotherapy, our awareness of death helps us live more fully—and with less, not more, anxiety.

Julie, with the “wacky” risks she’s been taking, is a perfect example of this. I never paid attention to my own death until I embarked on the Medical Mystery Tour—and even then, Boyfriend allowed me to distract myself from my fears of extinction, both professional and actual. But he also offered me an antidote to my fear of isolation, another ultimate concern. There’s a reason that solitary confinement makes prisoners literally go crazy; they experience hallucinations, panic attacks, obsessional behavior, paranoia, despair, difficulty with focus, and suicidal ideation. When released, these people often struggle with social atrophy, which renders them unable to interact with others. (Perhaps this is simply a more intense version of what happens with our increasing want, our loneliness, created by our speedy lifestyles.)

And then there’s the third ultimate concern: freedom, and all the existential difficulties that freedom poses for us. On the surface, it’s almost laughable how much freedom I have—if, as Wendell pointed out, I’m willing to walk around those bars. But there’s also the reality that as people get older, they face more limitations. It becomes harder to change careers or move to a different city or marry a different person. Their lives are more defined, and sometimes they crave the freedom of youth. But children, bound by parental rules, are really free only in one respect—emotionally. For a while, at least, they can cry or laugh or have tantrums unselfconsciously; they can have big dreams and unedited desires. Like many people my age, I don’t feel free because I’ve lost touch with that emotional freedom. And that’s what I’m doing here in therapy—trying to free myself emotionally again.

In a way, this midlife crisis may be more about opening up than shutting down, an expansion rather than a constriction, a rebirth rather than a death. I remember when Wendell said that I wanted to be saved. But Wendell isn’t here to save me or solve my problems as much as to guide me through my life as it is so that I can manage the certainty of uncertainty without sabotaging myself along the way.

Uncertainty, I’m starting to realize, doesn’t mean the loss of hope—it means there’s possibility. I don’t know what will happen next—how potentially exciting! I’m going to have to figure out how to make the most of the life I have, illness or not, partner or not, the march of time notwithstanding.

Which is to say, I’m going to have to look more closely at the fourth ultimate concern: meaninglessness.

38

Legoland

“You know why I’m late?” John says as soon as I open the door to the waiting room. It’s fifteen minutes past the hour, and I’d assumed he wasn’t coming. A month went by before he responded to my message after his no-show—he’d unexpectedly resurfaced and asked to come in. But maybe, I thought before he arrived, he got cold feet. Indeed, on the walk down the hallway, John goes on to say that after he pulled into the building’s parking lot, he sat in his car, debating whether to come upstairs. The attendant asked for his keys, but John said he needed a minute, so the attendant told him to pull over toward the exit, and by the time John decided to stay, the attendant informed him that the lot was full. John had to find a spot on the street and sprint the two blocks to my building.

“Can’t a person have a minute to sit in his own car and collect his thoughts?” John asks.

As we enter my office, I think about how beleaguered he tends to feel. Today he looks ragged, exhausted.