Maybe You Should Talk to Someon - Lori Gottlieb Page 0,146

one so late in the game, but I feel like an albatross has been removed from around my neck.

Cory nods. I see him check out his tattooed biceps in the mirror.

“You know what I did this morning?” he says.

“Hmm?” I say.

He combs out my front layers and checks that they’re even. “I watched a documentary on Kenyans who can’t get clean water,” he says. “They’re dying, and many of them are traumatized by war and sickness, and they’re being thrown out of their homes and villages. They’re wandering around just trying to find some water to drink that won’t kill them. None of them go to therapy or owe their publishers money.” He pauses. “Anyway, that’s what I did this morning.”

There’s an awkward silence. Cory and I find each other’s eyes in the mirror, and then, slowly, we begin to laugh.

We’re both laughing at me, and I’m laughing too at the ways people rank their pain. I think about Julie. “At least I don’t have cancer,” she’d say, but that’s also a phrase that healthy people use to minimize their own suffering. I remember how, initially, John’s appointment was scheduled after Julie’s and how I regularly made an effort to remember one of the most important lessons from my training: There’s no hierarchy of pain. Suffering shouldn’t be ranked, because pain is not a contest. Spouses often forget this, upping the ante on their suffering—I had the kids all day. My job is more demanding than yours. I’m lonelier than you are. Whose pain wins—or loses?

But pain is pain. I’d done this myself, too, apologizing to Wendell, embarrassed that I was making such a big deal about a breakup but not a divorce; apologizing for suffering from anxiety about the very real financial and professional consequences of an unmet book contract but that, nonetheless, were in no way as serious as the problems facing, well, the people in Kenya. I even apologized for talking about my health concerns—like when a patient noticed my tremor and I didn’t know what to say—because, after all, how bad was my suffering if I didn’t even have a diagnosis, much less a diagnosis that ranked high on the “acceptable problems to suffer from” scale? I had an unidentified condition. I didn’t—knock on wood—have Parkinson’s. I didn’t—knock on wood—have cancer.

But Wendell told me that by diminishing my problems, I was judging myself and everyone else whose problems I had placed lower down on the hierarchy of pain. You can’t get through your pain by diminishing it, he reminded me. You get through your pain by accepting it and figuring out what to do with it. You can’t change what you’re denying or minimizing. And, of course, often what seem like trivial worries are manifestations of deeper ones.

“You still doing Tinder therapy?” I ask Cory.

He rubs some product into my hair. “Hell, yeah,” he says.

48

Psychological Immune System

“Congratulations, you’re not my mistress anymore,” John says dryly as he walks in carrying a bag with our lunches.

I wonder if this is his way of saying goodbye. Has he decided to stop therapy right when we’ve just genuinely begun?

He walks to the couch and makes a show of silencing his cell phone before tossing it onto a chair. Then he opens the takeout bag and hands me my Chinese chicken salad. He reaches in again, pulls out some chopsticks, and holds them up: Want these? I nod: Thanks.

Once we’re settled, he looks at me expectantly, tapping his foot.

“Well,” he says, “don’t you want to know why you’re no longer my mistress?”

I look back at him: I’m not playing this game.

“Okay, fine.” He sighs. “I’ll tell you. You’re not my mistress anymore because I came clean to Margo. She knows that I’m seeing you.” He takes a bite of his salad, chews. “And you know what she did?” he continues.

I shake my head.

“She got mad! Why would you keep this a secret? How long has this been going on? What’s her name? Who else knows? You’d think you and I were fucking or something, right?” John laughs to make sure I know how outlandish he considers that possibility.

“To her, it might feel like that,” I say. “Margo feels left out of your life and now she’s hearing that you’ve been sharing it with somebody else. She craves that closeness with you.”

“Yeah,” John says, and he seems lost in thought for a bit. He takes more bites of his salad, looks at the floor, then rubs his forehead as if whatever’s