Maybe You Should Talk to Someon - Lori Gottlieb Page 0,177

the flashback sequence began, he didn’t know why, it was instinct or love or both, but something propelled him to get up and move right next to her so that their legs touched, and he wrapped his legs around hers as they both sobbed through the scene. As he tells me this, I’ll think about how far away I sat from Wendell on that very first day and how long it was until I finally felt comfortable enough to move closer. John will say in this session that I was right—that it was, in fact, okay to cry with Margo, and that instead of drowning them both in a flood of tears, it brought them safely onto land.

When he says this, I’ll imagine myself, John and Margo, and millions of viewers around the world lying on our couches, cracked open by his words—and I’ll think how, for all of us, John made it okay to cry.

57

Wendell

“I’ve been calling you Wendell,” I tell my therapist, whose real name, I must confess, isn’t actually Wendell.

I’ve just made an announcement in our session: I started writing again, a book of sorts, and he—my therapist, now called “Wendell”—plays a prominent role.

I hadn’t planned to do this, I explain. A week ago, pulled to my desk by what felt like a gravitational force, I fired up my laptop, opened a blank document, and wrote for hours, as if a dam had broken. I felt like myself again, but different—more free, more relaxed, more alive—and I was experiencing what the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls “flow.” It wasn’t until I began yawning that I stepped away, noticed the time, and climbed into bed. I was tired, but in an energized way, ready for rest after having been awakened.

I got up the next morning refreshed, and that night, the mysterious force drew me again to my laptop. I thought about John’s plan to become a psychiatrist. For many people, going into the depths of their thoughts and feelings is like going into a dark alley—they don’t want to go there alone. People come to therapy to have somebody to go there with, and people watch John’s show for a similar reason: it makes them feel less alone, allows them to see a version of themselves muddling through life on the screen. Maybe in this way, he is a psychiatrist to many—and maybe his bravery in writing about his own loss had inspired me to write about mine.

All week, I wrote about my breakup, my therapist, my mortality, our fear of taking responsibility for our lives and the need to do so in order to heal. I wrote about outdated stories and false narratives and how the past and the future can creep into the present, sometimes eclipsing it entirely. I wrote about holding on and letting go and how hard it is to walk around those prison bars even when freedom isn’t just right in front of us but literally inside of us, in our minds. I wrote about how no matter our external circumstances, we have choices about how to live our lives and that, regardless of what has happened, what we’ve lost, or how old we are, as Rita put it, it ain’t over till it’s over. I wrote about how sometimes we have the key to a better life but need somebody to show us where we left the damn thing. I wrote about how for me, that person has been Wendell, and how for others, that person is sometimes me.

“Wendell . . .” Wendell says, trying on the name to see if it fits.

“Because I come here on Wednesdays,” I say. “You know, Wednesdays with Wendell could be the title. The alliteration sort of sings, doesn’t it? But mine’s too personal to publish. It’s just for me. It feels great to write again.”

“It has meaning,” he says, referring to our earlier conversations. It’s true—I couldn’t write the happiness book because I wasn’t actually searching for happiness. I was searching for meaning—from which fulfillment and, yes, occasionally happiness ensue. And I couldn’t get myself to cancel the book contract for so long because if I did, I’d have to let go of my crutch—the I-should-have-written-the-parenting-book litany that shielded me from examining anything else. Even after I canceled the contract, for weeks I held on to my regret and the fantasy of how much easier my life would have been had I written the original book. Like Rita, I was reluctant to give light and space