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

by Lori Gottlieb

“Who looks inside, awakes.”

We can’t have change without loss, which is why so often people say they want change but nonetheless stay exactly the same.

“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?’

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.

Follow your envy—it shows you what you want.

“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances.”

Julie gives more examples of what helps when she tells people she’s dying. “A hug is great,” she says. “So is ‘I love you.’ My absolute favorite is just a plain ‘I love you.’”

Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us, or we find it not. —Ralph Waldo Emerson

I’m not angry with Zach. I’m angry with my mom. It was classic displacement.” Wendell smiles as if to say, Displacement’s a bitch, isn’t it?

“The nature of life is change and the nature of people is to resist change.”