I remember how she’d wanted to hold on to this Thing—to say no to my request. “It’s hard for me to say no,” she explained, “so I’m practicing in here.” I told her that regardless of whether she talked about the breakup, I thought it was equally hard for her to say yes. The inability to say no is largely about approval-seeking—people imagine that if they say no, they won’t be loved by others. The inability to say yes, however—to intimacy, a job opportunity, an alcohol program—is more about lack of trust in oneself. Will I mess this up? Will this turn out badly? Isn’t it safer to stay where I am?
But there’s a twist. Sometimes what seems like setting a boundary—saying no—is actually a cop-out, an inverted way of avoiding saying yes. The challenge for Charlotte is to get past her fear and say yes—not just to therapy, but to herself.
I glance at the bees pressed up against the glass and think of my father again and how once, when I was complaining about the way a relative would try to make me feel guilty, my father quipped, “Just because she sends you guilt doesn’t mean you have to accept delivery.” I think about this with Charlotte: I don’t want her to feel guilty for leaving, to feel that she has let me down. All I can do is let her know that I am here for her either way, share my perspective and hear hers, and set her free to do as she wishes.
“You know,” I tell Charlotte as I watch some of the bees begin to disperse, “I agree that things are better in your life, and that you’ve worked hard to make that happen. I also have the sense that you’re still struggling with getting close to people and that the parts of your life that might be related to this—your dad, the conversation about the guy that you don’t want to have—feel too painful to talk about. By not talking about them, part of you might believe that you can still hold out hope that things might be different—and you wouldn’t be alone in that way of thinking. Some people hope that therapy will help them find a way to be heard by whoever they feel wronged them, at which point those lovers or relatives will see the light and become the people they’d wished for all along. But it rarely happens like that. At some point, being a fulfilled adult means taking responsibility for the course of your own life and accepting the fact that now you’re in charge of your choices. You have to move to the front seat and be the mommy dog driving the car.”
Charlotte has been looking at her lap while I speak, but she sneaks a glance at me during that last part. The room is brighter now, and I notice that most of the bees have left. Just a few stragglers remain, some still on the glass, others circling each other before flying away.
“If you stay in therapy,” I say softly, “you might have to let go of the hope for a better childhood—but that’s only so that you can create a better adulthood.”
Charlotte looks down for a long time, then says, “I know.”
We sit together in the silence.
Finally she says, “I slept with my neighbor.” She’s talking about a guy in her apartment building who had been flirting with her but also said that he wasn’t looking for anything serious. She’d decided she was only going to date men who were looking for a girlfriend. She wanted to stop dating emotional versions of her dad. She wanted to stop being like her mom. She wanted to start saying no to those things and yes to becoming neither parent but instead the person she has yet to discover.
“I figured if I left therapy, I could just keep sleeping with him,” she says.
“You can do whatever you want,” I say, “whether you’re in therapy or not.” I watch her hear what she already knows. Yes, she has given up drinking and the Dude and has begun to give up the fight with her mom too, but the stages of change are such that you don’t drop all of your defenses at the same time. Instead, you release them in layers, moving closer and closer to the tender core: your sadness, your shame.
She shakes her head. “I just don’t want to wake up five years from now and never have had any kind of relationship,” she says. “Five years from now, a lot of people my age won’t be single anymore, and I’ll be the girl who hooks up with a guy in the waiting room or her neighbor and then tells the story at a party like it’s just another adventure. Like I don’t even care.”
“The cool girl,” I say. “The one who has no needs or feelings and just goes with the flow. But you do have feelings.”
“Yeah,” she says. “Being the cool girl feels like shit.” She’s never admitted this before. She’s taking off her beekeeper suit. “Is ‘like shit’ a feeling?” she asks.
“It sure is,” I say.
And so it begins, at last. Charlotte doesn’t leave this time. Instead, she stays in therapy until she learns to drive her own car, navigating her way through the world more safely, looking both ways, making many wrong turns but finding her way back, always, to where she truly wants to go.
47
Kenya
I’m getting a haircut and telling Cory my news about canceling my book contract with the publisher. I explain that now I might spend years repaying the publisher its money, and I might not be able to get another book contract after backing out of this one so late in the game, but I feel like an albatross has been removed from around my neck.
Cory nods. I see him check out his tattooed biceps in the mirror.
“You know what I did this morning?” he says.
“Hmm?” I say.
He combs out my front layers and checks that they’re even. “I watched a documentary on Kenyans who can’t get clean water,” he says. “They’re dying, and many of them are traumatized by war and sickness, and they’re being thrown out of their homes and villages. They’re wandering around just trying to find some water to drink that won’t kill them. None of them go to therapy or owe their publishers money.” He pauses. “Anyway, that’s what I did this morning.”
There’s an awkward silence. Cory and I find each other’s eyes in the mirror, and then, slowly, we begin to laugh.
We’re both laughing at me, and I’m laughing too at the ways people rank their pain. I think about Julie. “At least I don’t have cancer,” she’d say, but that’s also a phrase that healthy people use to minimize their own suffering. I remember how, initially, John’s appointment was scheduled after Julie’s and how I regularly made an effort to remember one of the most important lessons from my training: There’s no hierarchy of pain. Suffering shouldn’t be ranked, because pain is not a contest. Spouses often forget this, upping the ante on their suffering—I had the kids all day. My job is more demanding than yours. I’m lonelier than you are. Whose pain wins—or loses?
But pain is pain. I’d done this myself, too, apologizing to Wendell, embarrassed that I was making such a big deal about a breakup but not a divorce; apologizing for suffering from anxiety about the very real financial and professional consequences of an unmet book contract but that, nonetheless, were in no way as serious as the problems facing, well, the people in Kenya. I even apologized for talking about my health concerns—like when a patient noticed my tremor and I didn’t know what to say—because, after all, how bad was my suffering if I didn’t even have a diagnosis, much less a diagnosis that ranked high on the “acceptable problems to suffer from” scale? I had an unidentified condition. I didn’t—knock on wood—have Parkinson’s. I didn’t—knock on wood—have cancer.