Maybe You Should Talk to Someon - Lori Gottlieb Page 0,27

made a decision never to go through anything like that again,” he had said early in our relationship. I’d asked him to explain more, but he didn’t want to talk about it, and I, colluding with his avoidance, didn’t push it.

Wendell, though, has been asking me to look at the ways we avoided each other by hiding behind romance and banter and plans for our future. And now I’m in pain and creating my own suffering—and my therapist is literally trying to kick some sense into me.

He switches his crossed legs from right over left to left over right, something therapists do when their legs start to fall asleep. His striped socks match his striped cardigan today, as if they came as a set. He points with his chin to the papers in my hand. “I don’t think you’re going to get the answers you’re looking for from these notes.”

You’re grieving something bigger pops into my head, like a song lyric I can’t shake. “But if I don’t talk about the breakup, I won’t have anything to say,” I insist.

Wendell tilts his head. “You’ll have the important things to say.”

I hear him and I don’t. Whenever Wendell implies that this is bigger than Boyfriend, I push back, so I suspect that he must be onto something. The things we protest against the most are often the very things we need to look at.

“Maybe,” I say. But I feel antsy. “Right now I feel like I need to finish telling you what Boyfriend said. Can I just tell you one last thing?”

He takes in a breath and then stops, hesitating, like he was about to say something but decided against it. “Sure,” Wendell says. He’s pushed me enough and knows it. He’s taken away my drug—talking about Boyfriend—for a minute too long, and I need another fix.

I start rifling through the pages, but now I can’t remember where I was. I’m scanning the notes to see which damning quote I should share next, but there are so many asterisks and so many notes, and I can feel Wendell’s eyes on me. I wonder what I would be thinking if somebody like me were sitting in my therapy room right now. Actually, I know. I’d be thinking of the laminated sign that my office mate posted inside the files at work: There is a continuing decision to be made as to whether to evade pain, or to tolerate it and therefore modify it.

I put down the notes.

“Okay,” I say to Wendell. “What did you want to say?”

Wendell explains that my pain feels like it’s in the present, but it’s actually in both the past and the future. Therapists talk a lot about how the past informs the present—how our histories affect the ways we think, feel, and behave and how at some point in our lives, we have to let go of the fantasy of creating a better past. If we don’t accept the notion that there’s no redo, much as we try to get our parents or siblings or partners to fix what happened years ago, our pasts will keep us stuck. Changing our relationship to the past is a staple of therapy. But we talk far less about how our relationship to the future informs the present too. Our notion of the future can be just as powerful a roadblock to change as our notion of the past.

In fact, Wendell continues, I’ve lost more than my relationship in the present. I’ve lost my relationship in the future. We tend to think that the future happens later, but we’re creating it in our minds every day. When the present falls apart, so does the future we had associated with it. And having the future taken away is the mother of all plot twists. But if we spend the present trying to fix the past or control the future, we remain stuck in place, in perpetual regret. By Google-stalking Boyfriend, I’ve been watching his future unfold while I stay frozen in the past. But if I live in the present, I’ll have to accept the loss of my future.

Can I sit through the pain, or do I want to suffer?

“So,” I say to Wendell, “I guess I should stop interrogating Boyfriend—and Google-stalking him.”

He smiles indulgently, the way one would at a smoker who announces that she’ll quit cold turkey but doesn’t realize how overly ambitious that is.

“Or at least try,” I say, backtracking. “Spend less time on his future, more on my