Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, Her Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed

by Lori Gottlieb

given some air in your household and not tucked away in a box in the proverbial attic.” John shakes his head. “I don’t want to be like Margo,” he says. “She cries at the slightest things. Sometimes it seems like she’ll never stop crying, and I can’t live that way. It seems like nothing has changed for her and at some point, you have to make a decision to move on. I’ve chosen to move on. Margo hasn’t.” I picture Margo sitting on the couch near Wendell, hugging my favorite pillow and telling him how alone she feels in her pain, how she’s bearing it all herself while her husband is in his closed-off world. And then I think about how alone John must feel, watching his wife’s pain and not being able to bear the sight of it. “I know it looks that way,” I say finally. “But I wonder if part of why Margo is like this is that she’s been doing double duty. Maybe all of this time, she’s been crying for both of you.” John’s forehead furrows, then he looks down at his lap. A few tears land on his black designer jeans, slowly at first, then quickly, like a waterfall, faster than he can wipe them, and finally he stops trying. These are the tears he’s been holding in for the past six years. Or maybe more than thirty.

Fu Lin