Maybe You Should Talk to Someon - Lori Gottlieb Page 0,175
John starts, and I stop him.
“If you begin to feel that way,” I say, “I’m going to encourage you to hang in there until you have more information. If the therapist is any good, the process might make you uncomfortable, and we can talk about that discomfort in here. Let’s understand it together before you make a determination.” I think about when I doubted Wendell, when I projected my discomfort onto him. I remember wondering what he was smoking when he first talked about my grief. I remember finding him corny at times and being skeptical of his competence at others.
Maybe we all need to doubt, rail against, and question before we can really let go.
John tells me that when he was having trouble falling asleep the other night, he started thinking about his childhood. Ever since he was a boy, he says, he wanted to be a doctor, but his family didn’t have enough money to send him to medical school.
“I had no idea,” I say. “What kind of doctor?”
John looks at me like the answer is evident. “Psychiatrist,” he says.
John, a psychiatrist! I try to picture John seeing patients: Your mother-in-law said that? What an idiot!
“Why a psychiatrist?”
John rolls his eyes. “Because I was a kid whose mother died, obviously, and I want to save her or myself or something.” He pauses. “That and I was too lazy to be a surgeon.”
I’m fascinated by his self-awareness, even if he still covers his vulnerability with a joke.
Anyway, he continues, he had applied to medical school with the hope of substantial financial aid. He knew he would graduate with tremendous debt, but he figured that on a doctor’s salary, he’d be able to pay it off. He did well in college, majoring in biology, but because he had to work twenty hours a week for his tuition, his grades weren’t as good as they might have been. Certainly not as good as those of his fellow premed students, the gunners who pulled all-nighters and competed for top scores.
Still, he got interviews at several schools. Inevitably, though, the interviewer would make some “backhanded crack” about how great his application essays were and then try to manage his expectations, given his good-but-not-exceptional GPA. “You should be a writer!” more than one interviewer said, kidding but not. John was furious. Couldn’t they see from his application that he had been working a job while doing a premed curriculum? Didn’t that show his dedication? His work ethic? His ability to power through? Couldn’t they see that a handful of Bs and that fucking C minus weren’t indicators of his aptitude but of the fact that he never had time to study, much less stay after class if the labs went long?
In the end, John got into one medical school, but he wasn’t given enough financial aid to live on. And since he knew he couldn’t work his way through medical school the way he’d worked his way through college, he declined the offer and planted himself in front of the television set, despairing about his future. His father, a teacher like his late mother, suggested that John become a science teacher, but John kept thinking about the famous saying “Those who can’t do, teach.” John could do—he knew he could do the science classes in medical school—he just needed the money. And then, as he sat in front of the TV and cursed his dismal predicament, an idea came to him.
He thought, Hey, I can write this crap.
In short order, John bought a book on scriptwriting, cranked out an episode, sent it to an agent whose name he got from a directory, and was hired as a staff writer on a show. The show, he says, was “absolute garbage,” but his plan was to write for three years, make some real money, then reapply to medical school. A year later, though, he was hired on a much better show, and the following year, he was hired on a hit show. By the time he’d saved up the money to get himself through medical school, John had an Emmy award on the mantel in his studio apartment. He decided not to reapply. What if he got into zero schools this time? Besides, he wanted to make money—the crazy money he could make in Hollywood—so his future kids wouldn’t have to face those kinds of choices. Now, he says, he has so much money, his daughters could go to medical school many times over.