Maybe You Should Talk to Someon - Lori Gottlieb Page 0,32
could care for herself and do meaningful part-time work and have meaningful downtime too. She and her husband found each other and their marriage again while also struggling with the challenges they couldn’t change. Instead of sitting in their hotel room the whole trip, they decided to venture out and see the country.
Now Dara was inviting Julie to do the same, to look at the tulips and Rembrandts. And after Julie’s anger about “Welcome to Holland” subsided, it occurred to her that there would always be somebody whose life seemed more—or less—enviable. Would Julie trade places with Dara now? Her first instinct: yes, in a heartbeat. Her second: maybe not. She’d come up with various scenarios: If she could have ten great years with a healthy child, would she take that over a longer life? Is it more difficult to be sick yourself or to have a child who is? She felt horrible even having these thoughts, but she couldn’t deny them either.
“Do you think I’m a bad person?” she’d ask, and I’d assure her that everyone who comes to therapy worries that what they think or feel might not be “normal” or “good,” and yet it’s our honesty with ourselves that helps us make sense of our lives with all of their nuances and complexity. Repress those thoughts, and you’ll likely behave “badly.” Acknowledge them, and you’ll grow.
In this way, Julie started to see that we’re all in Holland, because most people don’t have lives that go exactly as planned. Even if you’re lucky enough to be traveling to Italy, you might experience canceled flights and horrible weather. Or your spouse might have a fatal heart attack in the shower ten minutes after the two of you have glorious sex in a luxurious Rome hotel room during a trip to celebrate your anniversary, as happened to an acquaintance of mine.
So Julie was going to Holland. She didn’t know how long her stay would be, but we were booking her trip for ten years and would change the itinerary as needed.
Meanwhile, we’d work together to figure out what she wanted to do there.
Julie had just one stipulation.
“Will you promise to tell me if I’m doing something crazy? I mean, now that I’m going to die sooner than I ever imagined, I don’t have to be so . . . sensible, right? So if I’m going overboard, and things get a little over-the-top, you’ll tell me?”
I said I would. Julie had spent her entire life being conscientious and responsible, doing everything by the book, and I couldn’t imagine what her version of over-the-top would look like. I figured if anything, it would be the equivalent of the goody-goody student who went a little crazy by having one too many beers at a party.
But I’d forgotten that people are often at their most interesting when they’ve got a proverbial gun to their head.
“Bucket list,” Julie said in session as we tried to envision her Holland. “It’s such a funny term, isn’t it?” I had to agree. What do we want to do before we kick the bucket?
Often people think about bucket lists when somebody close to them dies. That’s what happened for Candy Chang, an artist who, in 2009, created a space on a public wall in New Orleans with the prompt Before I die _____. Within days the wall was completely filled. People wrote things like Before I die, I want to straddle the international dateline. Before I die, I want to sing for millions. Before I die, I want to be completely myself. Soon the idea spawned over a thousand such walls all over the world: Before I die, I would like to have a relationship with my sister. Be a great dad. Go skydiving. Make a difference in someone’s life.
I don’t know if people followed through, but based on what I’ve seen in my office, a good number may have had momentary awakenings, done a little soul-searching, added more to their lists—and then neglected to tick things off. People tend to dream without doing, death remaining theoretical.
We think we make bucket lists to ward off regret, but really they help us to ward off death. After all, the longer our bucket lists are, the more time we imagine we have left to accomplish everything on them. Cutting the list down, however, makes a tiny dent in our denial systems, forcing us to acknowledge a sobering truth: Life has a 100 percent mortality rate. Every single one of us will