Maybe You Should Talk to Someon - Lori Gottlieb Page 0,130

despair

The eighth stage is where people Rita’s age generally find themselves. Erikson maintained that, in later years, we experience a sense of integrity if we believe we have lived meaningful lives. This sense of integrity gives us a feeling of completeness so that we can better accept our approaching deaths. But if we have unresolved regrets about the past—if we think that we made poor choices or failed to accomplish important goals—we feel depressed and hopeless, which leads us to despair.

It seemed to me that Rita’s current despair about Myron was tied to an old despair, and that was why it was hard for her to enjoy any of the ways her life had expanded. She was used to viewing the world from a place of deficit, and as a result, joy felt foreign to her. If you’re used to feeling abandoned, if you already know what it’s like for people to disappoint or reject you—well, it may not feel good, but at least there are no surprises; you know the customs in your own homeland. Once you step into foreign territory, though—if you spend time with reliable people who find you appealing and interesting—you might feel anxious and disoriented. All of a sudden, nothing’s familiar. You have no landmarks, nothing to go by, and all of the predictability of the world you’re used to is gone. The place you came from may not be great—it might, in fact, be pretty awful—but you knew exactly what you’d get there (disappointment, chaos, isolation, criticism).

I’ve talked about this with Rita, about how for so much of her life she wanted not to be invisible, to be seen, and now this was happening—in her relationship with her neighbors, in the people who bought her art, and in Myron’s declaration of his romantic interest. These people enjoyed her company, admired her, desired her, saw her—and yet she seemed unable to acknowledge that anything positive was happening.

“Are you waiting for the other shoe to drop?” I ask. There’s a term for this irrational fear of joy: cherophobia (chero is the Greek word for “rejoice”). People with cherophobia are like Teflon pans in terms of pleasure—it doesn’t stick (though pain cakes on them as if to an ungreased surface). It’s common for people with traumatic histories to expect disaster just around the corner. Instead of leaning into the goodness that comes their way, they become hypervigilant, always waiting for something to go wrong. That might be why Rita still fumbled for tissues in her purse even though she knew a fresh box was beside her on the table. Better not to get used to a full box of tissues, or a surrogate family next door, or people purchasing your art, or the man you’re dreaming about giving you a big fat kiss in the parking lot. Don’t delude yourself, sister! The second you get too comfortable—whoosh!—it will all go away. For Rita, joy isn’t pleasure; it’s anticipatory pain.

Rita looks up at me, nodding. “Exactly,” she says. “The other shoe always drops.” It did when she got to college, when she married an alcoholic, when she had two more chances at love and those went out the window too. It did when her father died and she finally—finally!—started to have a relationship with her mother, only to have her mother diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, after which Rita had to care for this woman who no longer recognized her for twelve long years.

Of course, Rita didn’t have to bring her mother into her apartment during those years—she chose to because somehow her misery served her. At the time it never occurred to her to ask if she had an obligation to take care of her mother when her mother hadn’t taken care of her while she was growing up. She didn’t grapple with that toughest of tough questions: What do I owe my parents, and what do they owe me? She could have gotten outside help for her mother. Rita considers this as we talk, but then she says that if she had to do it over, she’d do it all the same.

“I got what I deserved,” she explains. She deserves this misery for all of her crimes—ruining her kids’ lives, lacking compassion for her second husband’s grief, never getting her own life together. What feels horrible to her are her recent glimmers of happiness. She feels like a fraud, like somebody who won the lottery but stole the ticket. If the people who have come into her life