Maybe You Should Talk to Someon - Lori Gottlieb Page 0,178
to the triumph, still spending more time thinking about how I’d failed rather than how I’d freed myself.
But I got a second chance too. Wendell once pointed out that we talk to ourselves more than we’ll talk to any other person over the course of our lives but that our words aren’t always kind or true or helpful—or even respectful. Most of what we say to ourselves we’d never say to people we love or care about, like our friends or children. In therapy, we learn to pay close attention to those voices in our heads so that we can learn a better way to communicate with ourselves.
So today, when Wendell says, “It has meaning,” I know that by “it,” he’s also referring to us, our time together. People often think they go to therapy for an explanation—say, why Boyfriend left, or why they’ve become depressed—but what they’re really there for is an experience, something unique that’s created between two people over time for about an hour each week. It was the meaning of this experience that allowed me to find meaning in other ways.
Months will pass before I’ll toy with the idea of turning these late-night laptop sessions into a real book, before I’ll decide to use my own experience to help others find meaning in their lives too. And once I get up the courage to expose myself in this way, that’s what it will become: the book you are reading right now.
“Wendell,” he says again, letting the name sink in. “I like it.”
But there’s one more story to tell.
“I’m ready to dance,” I said to Wendell a few weeks before, surprising not just me, but him. I’d been thinking about the comment Wendell had made months earlier after I told him that I felt betrayed by my body on the dance floor at the wedding, by my foot that had lost its strength. He had offered to dance, to show me that I could both reach out for help and take a risk, and in doing so, I realized later, he had taken a risk. Therapists take risks all the time on behalf of their patients, making split-second decisions on the presumption that these risks will do far more good than harm. Therapy isn’t a paint-by-numbers business, and sometimes the only way to move patients beyond their stuckness is by taking a risk in the room, by going out of the therapist’s own comfort zone to teach by example.
“I mean, if the offer’s still on the table,” I added. Wendell paused. I smiled. It felt like a role reversal.
“It is,” Wendell said, after the briefest of hesitations. “What would you like to dance to?”
“How about ‘Let It Be’?” I suggested. I’d been playing the Beatles tune on the piano recently and it popped into my head before I realized it wasn’t exactly a dance song. I considered changing it to something by Prince or Beyoncé, but Wendell got up and grabbed his iPhone from his desk drawer, and within a minute the room filled with those iconic opening chords. I stood, but immediately got cold feet, stalling with words, telling Wendell that we needed something more clubby and danceable, something like . . .
That’s when the song’s chorus erupted—Let it be, let it be, let it be, let it be—and Wendell started rocking out like a teenager at a heavy-metal concert, exaggerating for comic effect. I watched in amazement. There was buttoned-up Wendell, doing air guitar and all.
The song went on to its quieter, poignant second verse about the brokenhearted people, but Wendell was still rocking the hell out of this, as if to say, Prince or Beyoncé be damned. Life doesn’t have to be perfect. I watched his tall, skinny frame jiving across the room, the courtyard a backdrop through the windows behind him, as I tried to get out of my head and just, well, let it be. I thought of my hairstylist Cory. Could I “just be”?
The chorus started up again and suddenly I was jiving across the room, too, laughing self-consciously at first, twirling in circles as Wendell went even crazier. But his dance training was apparent—or maybe it was less about his training and more about his sense of self. He wasn’t doing anything fancy; he just seemed wholly at home in his skin. And he was right: despite the problems with my foot, I needed to get out on the dance floor anyway.