“Why are we essentially outsourcing the thing that defines us as people?” Turkle asked in the video. Her question made me wonder: Was it that people couldn’t tolerate being alone or that they couldn’t tolerate being with other people? Across the country—at coffee with friends, in meetings at work, during lunch at school, in front of the cashier at Target, and at the family dinner table—people were texting and Tweeting and shopping, sometimes pretending to make eye contact and sometimes not even bothering.
Even in my therapy office, people who were paying to be there would glance at their phones when they buzzed just to see who it was. (These were often the same people who later admitted that they also glanced at pinging phones during sex or while sitting on the toilet. Upon learning this, I placed a bottle of Purell in my office.) To avoid distraction, I’d suggest turning off their phones during sessions, which worked well, but I noticed that before patients even reached the door at the end of the session, they’d grab their phones and start scrolling through their messages. Wouldn’t their time have been better spent allowing themselves just one more minute to reflect on what we had just talked about or to mentally reset and transition back to the world outside?
The second people felt alone, I noticed, usually in the space between things—leaving a therapy session, at a red light, standing in a checkout line, riding the elevator—they picked up devices and ran away from that feeling. In a state of perpetual distraction, they seemed to be losing the ability to be with others and losing their ability to be with themselves.
The therapy room seemed to be one of the only places left where two people sit in a room together for an uninterrupted fifty minutes. Despite its veil of professionalism, this weekly I-thou ritual is often one of the most human encounters that people experience. I was determined to establish a flourishing practice, but I wasn’t willing to compromise this ritual in order to make that happen. It may have seemed quaint, if not downright inconvenient, but for those patients I did have, I knew there was a tremendous payoff. If we create the space and put in the time, we stumble upon stories that are worth waiting for, the ones that define our lives.
And my own story? Well, I wasn’t really allowing the time and the space for that—gradually, I became too busy listening to the stories of others. But beneath the hectic bustle of therapy sessions and school drop-offs, of doctor appointments and romance, a long-repressed truth was percolating beneath the surface and just beginning to make itself felt when I arrived in Wendell’s office. Half my life is over, I would say, seemingly out of nowhere, in our very first session—and Wendell would jump right on this. He was picking up where my internship supervisor had left off years earlier.
You won’t get today back.
And the days were flying by.
37
Ultimate Concerns
I’m soaked when I get to Wendell’s office this morning. During my short walk across the street from the parking lot to his building, the winter’s first downpour began unannounced. Having no umbrella or coat, I threw my cotton blazer over my head and ran.
Now my blazer is dripping, my hair is frizzing, my makeup is running, and my wet clothes are sticking to my body like leeches in the most unfortunate places. Too damp to sit, I’m standing by the waiting-room chairs, wondering how I’m going to make myself presentable for work, when the door to Wendell’s inner office opens and out comes the pretty woman I’ve seen before. Again, she’s wiping her tears. She lowers her head and rushes past the paper screen, and I hear the click-clack of her boots echoing down the building’s corridor.
Margo?
No—it’s coincidence enough that she’s also seeing Wendell, but to have our weekly appointments back to back? I’m being paranoid. Then again, as the writer Philip K. Dick put it, “Strange how paranoia can link up with reality now and then.”
I stand there shivering like a wet puppy until Wendell’s door opens again, this time to let me in.
I drag myself to the sofa and settle into position B, arranging the familiar mismatched pillows behind my back in the way I’ve become accustomed. Wendell quietly closes the office door, walks across the room, lowers his tall body into his spot, and crosses his legs when he lands. We begin our opening ritual: our wordless hello.
But today I’m getting his sofa wet.
“Would you like a towel?” he asks.
“You have towels?”
Wendell smiles, walks over to his armoire, and tosses me a couple of hand towels. I dry my hair with one and sit down on the other.
“Thanks,” I say.
“You’re welcome,” he says.
“Why do you have towels here?”
“People get wet,” Wendell replies with a shrug, as if towels are an office staple. How strange, I think—and yet I feel so taken care of, like when he tossed me the tissues. I make a mental note to store towels in my office.
We look at each other in silent greeting again.
I don’t know where to start. Lately I’ve been anxious about pretty much everything. Even little things like making small commitments have left me paralyzed. I’ve become cautious, afraid of taking risks and making mistakes because I’ve made so many already and I fear I won’t have time to clean up the mistakes anymore.
The night before, as I tried to relax in bed with a novel, I came across a character who described his constant worry as “a relentless need to escape a moment that never ends.” Exactly, I thought. For the past few weeks, every second has been linked to the next by worry. I know the anxiety is front and center because of what Wendell said at the end of our last session. I’d had to cancel my next appointment to go to an event at my son’s school, then Wendell was away the following week, so I’ve been sitting with Wendell’s words for three weeks now. Me: What fight? Him: Your fight with death.
The skies opening up on me on my way in today felt appropriate. I take a deep breath and tell Wendell about my wandering uterus.
Until today, I’ve never told this story from beginning to end. If before I’d been embarrassed by it, now, as I say it aloud, I realize how truly terrified I’ve been. Layered on top of the grief Wendell had mentioned early on—that half my life is over—has been the fear that I, like Julie, might be dying much sooner than expected. There’s nothing scarier to a single mom than contemplating leaving her young child on this earth without her. What if the doctors are missing something that could be treated if found promptly? What if they find the cause but it can’t be treated?
Or what if this is all in my head? What if the person who can cure my physical symptoms is none other than the person I am sitting with right now, Wendell?
“That’s quite a story,” Wendell says when I’m done, shaking his head and blowing out some air.
“You think it’s a story?” Et tu, Brute?
“I do,” Wendell says. “It’s a story about something frightening that’s been happening to you over the past couple of years. But it’s also a story about something else.”
I anticipate what Wendell will say: It’s a story about avoidance. Everything I’ve told him since coming to therapy has been about avoidance, and we both know that avoidance is almost always about fear. Avoidance of seeing the clues that Boyfriend and I had irreconcilable differences. Avoidance of writing the happiness book. Avoidance of talking about not writing the happiness book. Avoidance of thinking about my parents getting older. Avoidance of the fact that my son is growing up. Avoidance of my mysterious illness. I remember something I learned during my internship: “Avoidance is a simple way of coping by not having to cope.”