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

by Lori Gottlieb

I, too, am suspicious of chronically happy people.

if you spend your life mourning the fact that you didn’t get to Italy, you may never be free to enjoy the

very special, the very lovely things . . . about Holland.

my biggest fear was to end up in her situation.

shrift

She still equates feeling loved not with peace or joy but with anxiety.

She has the gift of time, if she uses it wisely.

initial relief is replaced by resentment.

But did 26 percent of the general population in this country really need to be on psychiatric medications?

he does not know what to do with the time he gains except kill it.”

Their lives are more defined, and sometimes they crave the freedom of youth.

joy isn’t pleasure; it’s anticipatory pain.

rote

not a wish for

her to go away but a longing for her to stay forever?

we realize that everyone lives with things that may not get worked out.

I hope he finds his Wendell.

missive

the heart is just as fragile at seventy as it is at seventeen.

Rita revels in it but also reckons with the pain of all that she cannot fix.

In elegant calligraphy above the bodies, she wrote, OLD PEOPLE STILL FUCK.

How do I feel safe in a world of uncertainty? How do I connect?

therapists are expected to compartmentalize their humanity when it

comes to their patients’ deaths.

The therapist is left to grieve alone.

only to be devastated to learn that he was lying unconscious, in a coma, and would die within a week.

“Almost getting something. Almost having a baby. Almost getting a clean scan. Almost not having cancer anymore.”

“They better have steak wherever I’m going.”

There are hundreds of people here from all parts of her life:

they got to be parents together—though in utero and for only a matter of months.

therapists get depth but not breadth,

All these years later, I still do. I remember her most in the silences.

he wants to fight to keep Margo before it’s too late.

They’re learning who they are at this point in their lives and what that means going forward.

The transfer of words into action, the freedom of it, made me want to carry that action

outside the therapy room and into my life.

therapy is also about forming deep attachments to people and then saying goodbye.

He says, “It’s been my pleasure.”

“Like every week, but longer.”

I wonder what they’ll talk about. I wonder if they’ll ever dance.

Actually, I’ve got plenty of time.