Maybe You Should Talk to Someon - Lori Gottlieb Page 0,71

slim, with large green eyes and high cheekbones, her thick naturally red hair flecked with just a few strands of gray, Rita was genetically blessed with the complexion of a forty-year-old. (Terrified of living as long as her mother had and running out of retirement funds, she refused to pay for what she called “modern beauty expenses,” her euphemism for Botox.) She also attended an exercise class at the Y every morning, “just to have a reason to get out of bed.” Her physician, who had sent her to me, said that she was “one of the healthiest people her age I’ve seen.”

But in every other way, Rita seemed dead, lifeless. Even her movements were listless, like the way she sauntered to the sofa in slow motion, a sign of depression known as psychomotor retardation. (This slowing down of coordinated efforts between the brain and the body might also explain why I kept missing the tissue box in Wendell’s office.)

Often at the beginning of therapy, I’ll ask patients to recount the past twenty-four hours in as much detail as possible. In this way I get a good sense of the current situation—their level of connectedness and sense of belonging, how their lives are peopled, what their responsibilities and stressors are, how peaceful or volatile their relationships might be, and how they choose to spend their time. It turns out that most of us aren’t aware of how we actually spend our time or what we really do all day until we break it down hour by hour and say it out loud.

Here’s how Rita’s days went: Get up early (“Menopause ruined my sleep”), drive to the Y. Come home, eat breakfast while watching Good Morning America. Paint or nap. Eat lunch while reading the paper. Paint or nap. Heat up frozen dinner (“It’s too much trouble cooking for one”), sit on her building’s stoop (“I like to look at the babies and puppies that people walk at dusk”), watch “junk” on TV, fall asleep.

Rita seemed to have almost no contact with other human beings. Many days, she talked to nobody. But what struck me most about her life wasn’t just how solitary it was, but how nearly everything she said or did conjured for me an image of death. As Andrew Solomon wrote in The Noonday Demon: “The opposite of depression isn’t happiness, but vitality.”

Vitality. Yes, Rita had had lifelong depression and a complicated history, but I wasn’t sure that her past should be our initial focus. Even if she hadn’t given herself a one-year deadline, there was another deadline that neither of us could change: mortality. As with Julie, I wondered what the goal should be in treating her. Did she just need somebody to talk to, to ease the pain and loneliness, or was she willing to understand her role in creating it? It was also the question I was struggling with in Wendell’s office: What should be accepted and what should be changed in my own life? But I was more than two decades younger than Rita. Was it too late for her to redeem herself—is it ever too late for that? And what degree of emotional discomfort would she be willing to endure to find out? I thought about how regret can go one of two ways: it can either shackle you to the past or serve as an engine for change.

Rita said that she wanted her life to improve by her seventieth birthday. Instead of dredging up the past seven decades, I thought, maybe we should start with trying to inject her life with a little vitality—now.

“Companionship?” Rita says today after I tell her that I won’t try to talk her out of finding companionship with men under seventy-five. “Oh, honey, please don’t be so naive—I want more than companionship. I’m not dead yet. Even I know how to order something on the internet from the privacy of my apartment.”

It takes me a minute to connect the dots: She buys vibrators? Good for her!

“Do you know,” Rita adds, “how long it’s been since I’ve been touched?”

Rita goes on to describe how disheartening she finds the dating scene—and in this regard, at least, she’s not alone. It’s the most common refrain I hear from single women of all ages: Dating sucks.

Marriage, though, hasn’t been much better for her. She’d met the man who would be husband number one when she was twenty years old, eager to escape her dreary home. She commuted to college each day