In Maybe You Should Talk to Someone, Lori Gottlieb talked about her patients’ stories as a therapist herself and how she worked with her own therapist on her struggles.
Lori compares therapy to porn as both reveal nudity and people shy away from talking about it. Lori talked about a few of her patients in the book, including a high profile TV show writer John who seems to be an arrogant asshole, a young cancer patient Julie who is trying to make peace with her death and miscarriages, a 69-year-old woman Rita who find men over 75 disgusting and un-fuckable and looking to commit suicide on her 70th birthday. All of them so different from me yet so similar in a way that we all fear death and rejection, and long for love and connections.
I can’t believe how every one of them had an ending story in the book that made me cry. I knew I would cry when Julie eventually died of cancer but I didn’t know I would cry for her when she was working at Trader Joe’s cheering up everyone’s day with a kind note on their receipts.
“I’m going to miss my freaking colon!” she says, laughing now. “I didn’t appreciate it enough before. I’m going to miss sitting on a toilet and shitting. Who thinks they’ll miss shitting?” Then come the tears — angry ones.
…
Then, in almost a whisper, Julie adds, “I’m going to miss life.”
John seems incapable of empathy and thinks everyone is an idiot. He doesn’t want other people to know about him going to therapies so he pays Lori in cash, thus calling her his mistress before changing it to his hooker as she is not quite his mistress type. But I cried for him when he shared his loss of his mom as a kid, guilt about his own son’s death and love for his daughters and dog.
John points to his tears. “See?” he says. “My fucking humanity.”
“It’s magnificent,” I say.
Rita’s ex-husband was alcoholic and abusive towards their kids. Instead of protecting them and leaving the man, Rita was scared of not able to provide for 3 kids being a single mom and college dropout. She turned a blind eye towards the abuse. Her kids grew up cutting her out of their lives completely and are in therapy themselves for their childhood trauma. But I cried for her when she became the grandma of the neighbor kids and finally reached out to her children apologizing and opened up herself to accept love for others and herself.
But now the kiss has presented another Crisis for Rita — possibility. And that may feel even more intolerable to her than her pain.
But what makes the book more touching is how Lori opens up about herself. She doesn’t position herself as a professional therapist who has everything figured out. She wrote about how she first worked as an assistant for TV shows, then went to medical school, then dropped out and tried to become a journalist, and eventually started her therapy practice in her thirties. She wrote about her breakdown after a breakup and failures on finishing a book contract. She talked about google stalking her ex-boyfriend and her therapist, and feeling vulnerable discussing her struggles with her therapist, fearing he might perceive her as incompetent professionally. She discusses her in-diagnosable disease and how it shifts her thinking towards death.
I was reading this book during an onsite interview trip and it gave me tremendous strength to speak my true feelings. Growing up, I dealt with my fear of rejection by pretending that I don’t care. I remember going to interviews or dates, trying to be as cool as I can and not showing how much I cared. Now I want to learn to be vulnerable and allow myself to be the more excited one in a conversation. Because there is really nothing to lose.
Edit: And that companyh rejected me. Fuck fuck fuck fuck why do humans have to have feelings.
