Maybe You Should Talk to Someon - Lori Gottlieb Page 0,126

sixty years later, Wendell was saying I could choose too—that the jail cell was open on both sides.

I particularly liked this line from Frankl’s book: “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”

I’d never emailed Wendell for anything other than scheduling issues, but I was so stunned by the parallel that I wanted to share it with him. I pulled up his email and typed, This is what we were talking about. The trick, I suppose, is to find that elusive “space.”

A few hours later, he replied.

I’ve always appreciated Frankl. Beautiful quote. See you Wednesday.

It was typical Wendell—warm and genuine but clearly stating that therapy takes place face-to-face. I remembered our first phone call, when he’d said almost nothing, and how surprisingly interactive he was once we met.

Still, I carried around his reply in my head all week. I could have sent that quote to various friends who would have appreciated it too, but it wouldn’t have been the same. Wendell and I existed in a separate universe where he saw me in ways that even those close to me didn’t. Of course, it’s also true that my family and friends saw aspects of me that Wendell would never see, but nobody would quite understand the subtext of my email as precisely as Wendell would.

The following Wednesday, Wendell brings up the email. He tells me that he shared the quote with his wife, who, he says, is going to use it for a talk she’s giving. He’s never mentioned his wife, though I know everything about her from my long-ago Google binge.

“What does your wife do?” I ask as if I haven’t seen her LinkedIn profile. He tells me about her work at a nonprofit.

“Oh, interesting,” I reply, but the word interesting sounds unnaturally high-pitched.

Wendell watches me. I quickly change the subject.

For a split second, I think about what I might do if I were the therapist here. Sometimes I want to say, I wouldn’t do it that way, but I know that’s like back-seat driving. I need to be the patient, which means I need to relinquish control. It may seem like the patient controls the session, deciding what to say or not, setting the agenda or topic. But therapists pull the strings in our own ways—in what we say or don’t say, what we respond to or hold on to for later, what we give attention to and what we don’t.

Later in the session, I’m talking about my father. I tell Wendell that he’d been in the hospital again due to his heart condition, and though he’s okay now, I’m afraid of losing him. I’m aware in a new way of just how frail he is, and I’m starting to absorb the reality that he won’t be here forever.

“I can’t picture a world without him in it,” I say. “I can’t imagine not being able to call and hear his voice or ask his advice or laugh together about something we both find funny.” I think about how there’s nothing in the world like laughing with my dad. I think about how knowledgeable he is on almost any topic and how fully he loves me and how kind he is—not just to me, but to everyone. The first thing people say about my father isn’t how smart or funny he is, though he is both. The first thing they say is “He’s so sweet.”

I tell Wendell about the time I was in college on the East Coast, missing home and unsure if I wanted to stay there. My father heard the pain in my voice and got on a plane and flew three thousand miles to sit with me on a park bench across from my dorm, in the cold winter weather, and just listen. He listened to me for two more days, and I felt better, and he went home. I haven’t thought about this in years.

I also recount what happened this past weekend after my son’s basketball game. As the boys ran off to celebrate their victory, my father took me aside and told me that he’d just been at a friend’s funeral the day before. After the funeral, he explained, he’d gone up to the friend’s daughter, now in her thirties, and said, “Your father was so proud of you. Every conversation we had, he’d say, ‘I’m so proud of Christina,’ and he’d tell me about