This time, though, nothing comes out. Charlotte just stands there. I wonder if she’s thinking about something particularly hard for her to address—her drinking, or her hope that her father will pick up the phone when she calls on his birthday next week. Instead she blurts out: “Where did you get that top?”
It seems like such a simple question. I’ve had an Uber driver, a barista at Starbucks, and a stranger on the street all ask me the same question about this new top—one of my favorites—and each time, I answered without a hint of hesitation. “Anthropologie, on sale!” I’d reply, proud of my good taste and good fortune. But with Charlotte, something stops me. It’s not that I’m worried she’ll start to dress exactly like me (as one of my patients did). It’s that my gut tells me why she’s asking; she wants to get it and wear it on her date with the Dude—the date that she’s supposedly not going on.
“Anthropologie,” I say anyway.
“It’s cute,” she says, smiling. “See you next week.”
And off she goes, but not before I meet her eyes for a split second and she looks away.
We both know what’s about to happen.
34
Just Be
About halfway through my traineeship, I got into a conversation with my hairstylist about therapy.
“Why would you want to be a therapist?” Cory asked, scrunching up his nose. He said that often he felt like a therapist, listening to people’s problems all day. “It’s TMI,” he continued. “I’m cutting their hair. Why do they tell me these things?”
“Do they really get that personal?”
“Oh yeah, some do. I don’t know how you do it. It’s so—” He held up the scissors, searching for the right word. “Draining.”
He went back to cutting. I watched him snip my front layers.
“What do you say to them?” I asked. It occurred to me that when people shared their secrets with him, they were probably looking in the mirror, the way we were having our conversation right now—with each other’s reflections. Maybe that made it easier, I thought.
“What do I say when I hear all their problems?” he asked.
“Right. Do you try to give them advice, add your two cents?”
“None of that,” he said.
“Then what?”
“‘Just be,’” he said.
“What?”
“I tell them, ‘Just be.’”
“That’s what you say?” I started laughing. I imagined saying that in my office. You’ve got problems? Just be.
“You should try it with your patients,” he said, smiling back. “It might help them.”
“Does it help your clients?” I asked.
Cory nodded. “It’s like this. I’ll give them a haircut, and they’ll come back the next time and say they want something different. ‘Why?’ I’ll ask. ‘Was something wrong with the last one?’ No, they say. The last one was fabulous! They just want something different. So I give them the exact same haircut but they think it’s different. And they love it.”
I waited for him to say more, but he seemed to be focusing on my split ends. I watched my hair fall to the floor.
“Okay,” I said. “But what does this have to do with their problems?”
Cory stopped cutting and looked at me in the mirror.
“Maybe everything they complain about isn’t actually a problem! Maybe it’s fine the way it is. Maybe it’s even great, like their haircut. Maybe they’d be happier if they didn’t try to change things. Just be.”
I considered this. There was certainly some truth here. Sometimes people needed to accept themselves and others the way they were. But sometimes in order to feel better, you need a mirror held up to you, and not the mirror that makes you look pretty, like the one I was looking in now.
“Have you ever been to therapy?” I asked Cory.
“Hell no.” He shook his head vigorously. “Not for me.”
Despite Cory’s objections to TMI, in the years he’d been cutting my hair, he’d told me quite a bit about himself—how burned he’d been by love, how his family had trouble accepting him when he told them he was gay, how his father had been secretly gay his whole life, having affairs with men, but still hadn’t come out. I knew, too, that Cory had had multiple cosmetic surgeries and still wasn’t satisfied with his looks, that he was preparing to go under the knife yet again. Even as we spoke, he was checking himself out in the mirror and finding himself wanting.
“What do you do when you feel lonely or sad?” I asked.
“Tinder,” he said matter-of-factly.
“And hook up?”
He smiled. Of course.
“And then you don’t see these guys again?”
“Not usually.”
“And you feel better?”
“Yeah.”
“You mean, until you get lonely or sad again and go back on the app for another fix?”
“Exactly.” He exchanged his scissors for the blow dryer. “Anyway, is that any different from people who come to therapy each week for their fix?”
It was. It was different in so many ways. For one, therapists don’t provide a simple weekly fix. I once heard a journalist say that doing a proper interview was a little bit like cutting another person’s hair: it looked easy until you got the scissors in your hand. The same, I was learning, was true of therapy. But I didn’t want to proselytize. Therapy, after all, wasn’t for everyone.
“You’re right,” I said to Cory. “There are many ways to just be.”
He turned on the dryer. “You have your therapy,” he said, then he nodded toward his cell phone. “And I have mine.”
35
Would You Rather?
Julie is cataloging her body parts, deciding which ones to keep.
“Colon? Uterus?” she asks, her eyebrows raised as if telling a joke. “And you’re not going to believe this one. Vagina. So basically it comes down to, do I want to be able to shit, have babies, or fuck.”
I feel a knot form in my throat. Julie looks different from the way she had at Trader Joe’s a few months back, or even from what she’d looked like a few weeks ago, when the doctors said that in order to keep her alive, they’d need to take more of her away. She’d soldiered through the first bout of cancer and the recurrence and the death sentence that ended up with a stay of execution and the pregnancy that gave her hope. But after too many just kiddings, she’s done with the cosmic jokes, worn down by it all. Her skin looks thin and lined, her eyes bloodshot. Now sometimes we cry together, and she hugs me when she leaves.
Nobody at Trader Joe’s knows that she’s sick, and for as long as she can, she wants to keep it that way. She wants them to know her first as a person, not as a cancer patient, which sounds a lot like how we therapists think about our patients: We want to get to know them before we get to know their problems.
“It’s like those ‘would you rather’ games we played at slumber parties as kids,” she says today. “Would you rather die in an airplane crash or a fire? Would you rather be blind or deaf? Would you rather smell bad for the rest of your life or smell bad things for the rest of your life? One time when it was my turn to answer, I said, ‘Neither.’ And everyone said, ‘No, you have to choose one,’ and I said, ‘Well, I choose neither.’ And that kind of blew people’s minds, just the concept that when presented with two awful alternatives, maybe neither was an option.”