Maybe You Should Talk to Someon - Lori Gottlieb Page 0,64

oh yeah. Half my life has passed me by.’”

I roll my eyes, but he keeps going. It’s a bluesy tune and I’m trying to place it. Etta James? B. B. King?

“‘I wish I could go back, change the past. Have more years, to get it right . . .’”

And then I realize it’s not a famous song. It’s Wendell Bronson, impromptu lyricist. His lyrics are awful, but he surprises me with his strong, resonant voice.

The song goes on, and he’s getting really into it. Tapping his feet. Snapping his fingers. If we were out in the world, I’d think he was a nerdy guy in a cardigan, but in here, it’s his confidence and spontaneity that strike me, his willingness to be fully himself, entirely unconcerned that he’ll come across as foolish or unprofessional. I can’t imagine doing this in front of my patients.

“‘’Cause half my life is o-o-o-o-over.’” He arrives at the finale, complete with jazz hands.

Wendell stops singing and looks at me seriously. I want to tell him that he’s being annoying, that he’s trivializing what is realistically and practically an anxiety-provoking problem. But before I can say that, I feel a heavy sadness descend, seemingly out of nowhere. His tune is going through my head.

“It’s like that Mary Oliver poem,” I say to Wendell. “‘What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?’ I thought I knew what I planned to do, but now everything has changed. I was going to be with Boyfriend. I was going to write what mattered to me. I never expected—”

“—​to be in this situation.” Wendell gives me a look. Here we go again. We’re like an old married couple by now, finishing each other’s sentences.

But then Wendell is silent, and it doesn’t seem like the intentional kind of silence I’m used to. It occurs to me that maybe Wendell is stumped, the way I sometimes get stumped in sessions when my patients are stuck and I get stuck too. He’s tried yawning and singing and redirecting me and asking important questions. But still, I’m back to where I usually go—the saga of my losses.

“I was just thinking about what you want in here,” he says. “How do you think I can help you?”

I’m thrown by his question. I don’t know if he’s enlisting my help as a fellow therapist or asking me as his patient. Either way, I’m not sure; what do I want from therapy?

“I don’t know,” I say, but as soon as I say it, I’m scared. Maybe Wendell can’t help me. Maybe nothing can. Maybe I just have to learn to live with my choices.

“I think I can help,” he says, “but maybe not in the way you imagine. I can’t bring your boyfriend back, and I can’t give you a redo. And now you’re in this book situation and you want me to save you from that too. And I can’t do that either.”

I let out a snort at how preposterous this is. “I don’t want you to save me,” I say. “I’m a head of household, not a damsel in distress.”

He locks his eyes on mine. I look away.

“Nobody is going to save you,” he says quietly.

“But I don’t want to be saved!” I insist, though this time part of me wonders, Wait, do I? On some level, don’t we all? I think about how people come to therapy expecting to feel better, but what does better really mean?

There’s a magnet that somebody stuck on the refrigerator in our office’s kitchen: PEACE. IT DOES NOT MEAN TO BE IN A PLACE WHERE THERE IS NO NOISE, TROUBLE, OR HARD WORK. IT MEANS TO BE IN THE MIDST OF THOSE THINGS AND STILL BE CALM IN YOUR HEART. We can help patients find peace, but maybe a different kind than they imagined they’d find when they started treatment. As the late psychotherapist John Weakland famously said, “Before successful therapy, it’s the same damn thing over and over. After successful therapy, it’s one damn thing after another.”

I know that therapy won’t make all my problems disappear, prevent new ones from developing, or ensure that I’ll always act from a place of enlightenment. Therapists don’t perform personality transplants; they just help to take the sharp edges off. A patient may become less reactive or critical, more open and able to let people in. In other words, therapy is about understanding the self that you are. But part of getting to know yourself is to