Maybe You Should Talk to Someon - Lori Gottlieb Page 0,66

Walk around the bars. Who’s stopping us but ourselves?

There is a way out—as long as we’re willing to see it. A cartoon, of all things, has taught me the secret of life.

I open my eyes and smile, and Wendell smiles back. It’s a conspiratorial smile, one that says, Don’t be fooled. It may seem as though you’ve had an earth-shattering breakthrough, but this is just the beginning. I know full well what challenges lie ahead, and Wendell knows that I know, because we both know something else: freedom involves responsibility, and there’s a part of most of us that finds responsibility frightening.

Might it feel safer to stay in jail? I picture the bars and the open sides again. A part of me lobbies to stay, another to go. I choose to go. But walking around the bars in my mind is different from walking around them in real life.

“Insight is the booby prize of therapy” is my favorite maxim of the trade, meaning that you can have all the insight in the world, but if you don’t change when you’re out in the world, the insight—and the therapy—is worthless. Insight allows you to ask yourself, Is this something that’s being done to me or am I doing it to myself? The answer gives you choices, but it’s up to you to make them.

“Are you ready to start talking about the fight you’re in?” Wendell asks.

“You mean the fight with Boyfriend?” I begin. “Or with myself—”

“No, your fight with death,” Wendell says.

For a second I’m confused, but then I flash to my dream about running into Boyfriend at the mall. Him: Did you ever write your book? Me: What book? Him: The book about your death.

Oh. My. God.

Typically therapists are several steps ahead of our patients—not because we’re smarter or wiser but because we have the vantage point of being outside their lives. I’ll say to a patient who has bought the ring but can’t seem to find the right time to propose to his girlfriend, “I don’t think you’re sure you want to marry her,” and he’ll say, “What? Of course I am! I’m doing it this weekend!” And then he goes home and doesn’t propose, because the weather was bad and he wanted to do it at the beach. We’ll have the same dialogue for weeks, until one day he’ll come back and say, “Maybe I don’t want to marry her.” Many people who say, “No, that’s not me,” find themselves a week or a month or a year later saying, “Yeah, actually, that’s me.”

I have a feeling that Wendell has been storing up this question, waiting for just the right moment to float it out there. Therapists are always weighing the balance between forming a trusting alliance and getting to the real work so the patient doesn’t have to continue suffering. From the outset, we move both slowly and quickly, slowing the content down, speeding up the relationship, planting seeds strategically along the way. As in nature, if you plant the seeds too early, they won’t sprout. If you plant too late, they might make progress, but you’ve missed the most fertile ground. If you plant at just the right time, though, they’ll soak up the nutrients and grow. Our work is an intricate dance between support and confrontation.

Wendell asks about my fight with death at exactly the right moment—but for more reasons than he could possibly know.

23

Trader Joe’s

It’s a busy Saturday morning at Trader Joe’s, and I’m scanning the lines to see which is shortest while my son darts off to look at the display of chocolate bars. Despite the chaos, the cashiers seem unfazed. A young guy whose arms are covered in tattoos rings a bell, and a bagger in leggings dances over and packs up a customer’s groceries, jiving to the canned music. In the next aisle a hipster with a Mohawk calls for a price check, and at the end of the row, a pretty blond cashier juggles some oranges to amuse a toddler having a meltdown in her stroller.

It takes me a minute before I realize that the juggling cashier is my patient Julie. I haven’t seen her new blond wig yet, though she had mentioned it in therapy.

“Too crazy?” she’d asked about the idea of being a blonde, holding me to my promise to tell her if she was going overboard. She’d asked the same thing about answering an ad for a singer in a local band, going on a game show,