Maybe You Should Talk to Someon - Lori Gottlieb Page 0,128

irreparable way. I wait for everything to feel distant, different, changed between us. But instead, the opposite happens. It feels as though the storm came in, passed through the room, and left not ruins but a clearing in its wake.

I feel lighter, relieved of a burden. Sharing difficult truths might come with a cost—the need to face them—but there’s also a reward: freedom. The truth releases us from shame.

Wendell nods, and we sit there in a wordless conversation. Me: I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have done that. That was so invasive. Him: It’s okay. I understand. It’s natural to be curious. Me: I’m happy for you—for the loving family that you have. Him: Thank you. I hope you will have this one day too.

And then we have a version of that conversation aloud. We also talk about my curiosity. Why I kept it a secret. What it was like to hold that secret and also know so much about him. What I imagined would happen between us if I revealed it—and how it feels now that I have. And because I’m a therapist—or maybe because I’m a patient and I just need to know—I ask him what it’s like to learn that I stalked him. Is there anything I found that he wishes I didn’t know? Does he feel different about me, about us?

Only one of his answers shocks me: He has never seen the interview with his mother! He didn’t know it existed online. He knew that his mother had done an interview for that organization, but he thought it was for their internal archives. I ask if he worries that other patients might come across it and he sits back and takes a breath. For the first time, I see his forehead scrunch up.

“I don’t know,” he says after a beat. “I’ll have to think about it.”

Frankl’s quote pops into my mind again. He’s making space between stimulus and response in order to choose his freedom.

Our time is up, so Wendell gives his legs the usual two pats and stands. We head for the exit, but at the threshold, I stop.

“I’m sorry about your father,” I say. After all, the jig is up. He knows I know the whole story.

Wendell smiles. “Thank you.”

“Do you miss him?” I ask.

“Every day,” he says. “Not a day goes by that I don’t miss him.”

“Not a day will go by that I won’t miss my father either,” I say.

He nods, and we stand there, thinking about our fathers together. When he steps back to open the door for me, I see a hint of moisture in his eyes.

There’s so much more I want to ask him. Is he at peace with where things were left when his father collapsed? I think about the ways in which sons and fathers can get tangled up in expectations and yearnings for approval. Did his father ever tell him he was proud of him, not despite his rejecting the family business and carving out his own path but because of it?

I won’t learn more about Wendell’s father, but we’ll have many discussions in the coming weeks and months about mine. And through these discussions, it will become clear that by seeking a male therapist, I had hoped to get an objective opinion on the breakup, but instead, I got a version of my father.

Because my father, too, shows me how it feels to be exquisitely seen.

41

Integrity Versus Despair

Rita is sitting across from me in her smart slacks and sensible shoes giving a detailed commentary on why her life is hopeless. Her session, like most of her sessions, feels like a dirge, which is all the more confounding because between bouts of insisting that nothing will ever change, she has been making changes both minute and monumental.

Back when she and Myron were friends, pre-Randie, Myron had made Rita a website so that she could catalog her art online. This way, he said, she could keep her pieces organized and also share them with others. But Rita didn’t think she needed a website. “Who’s going to look at it?” she asked.

“I will,” Myron said. Three weeks later, Rita had a website with exactly one visitor. Well, two, if you counted Rita who, truth be told, loved it. It looked so professional. Those first weeks, she spent hours each day clicking around on her site, coming up with ideas for new projects, imagining them on display. But her excitement waned when Myron started dating Randie. Why bother posting anything new