A minute before Charlotte’s appointment, I get a text from my mother. Please call me. She doesn’t normally send texts like this, so I dial her cell. She answers on the first ring.
“Don’t be alarmed,” she says, which always means that something alarming has happened. “But Dad’s in the hospital.”
My hand tenses on the phone.
“He’s fine,” she says quickly. Fine people aren’t admitted to the hospital, I think. “What happened?” I ask.
Well, she says, they don’t know yet. She explains that my father was eating lunch when he said he didn’t feel well. Then he started shaking and had trouble breathing, and now they’re at the hospital. It looks like he has an infection but they don’t know if it’s related to his heart or something else. He’s fine, she keeps repeating. He’ll be fine. I think she says this as much for herself as for me. We both want—need—my father to be fine.
“Really,” she says, “he’s fine. Here, see for yourself.” I hear her mumble something to my father as she hands him the phone.
“I’m fine,” he says by way of hello, but I can hear his labored breathing. He tells me the same story about having lunch and not feeling well, leaving out the shaking and difficulty-breathing parts. He’ll probably be out by tomorrow, he says, once the antibiotics kick in, though when my mom gets back on the phone, we wonder whether it’s something more serious. (Later that night, when I go to the hospital, I’ll see that my father looks pregnant—his abdomen filled with fluid—and that he’s on several different IV antibiotics because a serious bacterial infection has spread throughout his body. He will be hospitalized for a week, the fluid around his lungs aspirated, his heart rate stabilized.)
But right now, getting off the phone with my parents, I realize that I’m twelve minutes late for Charlotte’s appointment. I try to shift focus as I head to the waiting room.
Charlotte jumps up from her seat when I open the door. “Oh, phew!” she says. “I thought maybe I had the wrong time, but this is always my time, and then I thought I had the wrong day, but no, it’s Monday”—she holds up her phone to show me the date—“so then I thought maybe, I don’t know, but here you are.”
This all comes out as one long sentence. “Anyway, hi,” she says, moving past me into my office.
This may seem surprising, but when therapists are late, many patients are shaken. Though we try to avoid this, every therapist I know has let a patient down this way. And when we do, it can bring up old experiences of distrust or abandonment, leaving patients feeling anything from discombobulated to enraged.
In my office, I explain that I was on an urgent phone call and apologize for the delay.
“It’s fine,” Charlotte says nonchalantly, but she seems out of sorts. Or maybe I am, after the call with my father. I’m fine, he had said. Just like Charlotte says it’s fine. Are they both really fine? Charlotte fidgets in her chair, twirling her hair, looking around the room. I try to help her locate herself by meeting her eyes, but they’re darting from the window to a picture on the wall to the pillow she always keeps on her lap. One leg is crossed over the other, and she’s rapidly kicking that leg in the air.
“I wonder what it was like for you, not knowing where I was,” I say, remembering how, a few months ago, I’d been in the same position, sitting in Wendell’s waiting room and wondering where he was. Killing time on my phone, I noticed that he was four minutes late, then eight. After ten minutes, the thought crossed my mind that maybe he’d been in an accident or fallen ill and was at this moment in the emergency room.
I debated whether to call and leave a message (to say what, I’m not sure. Hi, it’s Lori. I’m sitting in your waiting room. Are you in there, on the other side of the door, writing chart notes? Eating a snack? Have you forgotten me? Or are you dying?). And just as I was thinking about how I’d need to find a new therapist, in no small part to process my old therapist’s death, the door to Wendell’s office opened. Out walked a middle-aged couple, the man saying “Thank you” to Wendell and the woman smiling tightly. A first session, I speculated. Or the disclosure of an affair. Those sessions tend to run over.
I breezed past Wendell and took my place perpendicular to him.
“It’s fine,” I said when he apologized for the delay. “Really,” I continued, “my sessions go over sometimes too. It’s fine.”
Wendell looked at me, his right eyebrow raised. I raised my eyebrows back, trying to preserve my dignity. Me, get all worked up because my therapist was late? C’mon. I burst out laughing, and then some tears escaped. We both knew how relieved I was to see him and how important he had become to me. Those ten minutes of waiting and wondering were definitely not “fine.”
And now—with a forced smile on her face, her leg jerking like she’s having a seizure—Charlotte is reiterating how fine it was to wait for me.
I ask Charlotte what she thought had happened when I wasn’t there.
“I wasn’t worried,” she says, even though I said nothing about worry. Then something catches my eye through the large wall-to-wall window.
Flying in dizzyingly fast circles a few feet behind the right side of Charlotte’s head are a couple of very kinetic bumblebees. I’ve never seen bees out my window, several stories high, and these two look like they’re hopped up on amphetamines. Maybe it’s a bee mating dance, I think. But then a few more fly into view, and within seconds, I see a swarm of bees buzzing in circles, the only thing separating us from them being a huge sheet of glass. Some are starting to land on the window and crawl around.
“So, you’re going to kill me,” Charlotte begins, apparently unaware of the bees. “But, um, I’m going to take a break from therapy.”
I look away from the bees and back to Charlotte. I’m not expecting this today, and it takes a moment for what she just said to register, especially because there’s so much movement in my peripheral vision and I can’t help but follow it. Now there are hundreds of bees, so many that my office has become darker, the bees pressed up against the windowpanes and blocking out the light like a cloud. Where are they coming from?
The room is so dark that Charlotte now notices. She turns her head in the direction of the window and we sit there, saying nothing, staring at the bees. I wonder if she’ll be upset by the sight of them, but instead she seems mesmerized.
My colleague Mike used to see a family with a teenage girl at the same time I saw a couple. Every week about twenty minutes in, this couple and I would hear an eruption from Mike’s office, the teenager screaming at her parents, storming out, slamming the door; the couple yelling after her to come back; her yelling “No!” and then Mike coaxing her back, calming everyone down. The first few times this happened, I thought it would be upsetting for the couple in my office, but it turned out it made them feel better. At least that’s not us, they thought.
I’d hated the disturbance, though—it always broke my focus. And in the same way, I’m hating these bees. I think about my dad in the hospital, ten blocks away. Are these bees a sign, an omen?
“I once thought about becoming a beekeeper,” Charlotte says, breaking the silence, and this is less surprising to me than her sudden wish to leave. She finds terrifying situations thrilling—bungee jumping, skydiving, swimming with sharks. As she tells me about her beekeeper fantasy, I think that the metaphor is almost too neat: this job that would require her to wear head-to-toe protective clothing so she wouldn’t get stung and would allow her to master the very creatures that might hurt her, harvesting their sweetness in the end. I can see the appeal of having that kind of control over danger, especially if you grew up feeling like you had none.
I can also imagine the appeal of saying you’re leaving therapy if you were inexplicably left in the waiting room. Has Charlotte been planning to leave, or is this an impulsive reaction to the primal fear she felt a few minutes ago? I wonder if she’s drinking again. Sometimes people drop out of therapy because it makes them feel accountable when they don’t want to be. If they’ve started drinking or cheating again—if they’ve done or failed to do something that now causes them shame—they may prefer to hide from their therapists (and themselves). What they forget is that therapy is one of the safest of all places to bring your shame. But faced with lying by omission or confronting their shame, they may duck out altogether. Which, of course, solves nothing.
“I decided before I came in today,” Charlotte says. “I feel like I’m doing well. I’m still sober, work is going fine, I’m not fighting as much with my mom, and I’m not seeing the Dude—I even blocked him on my phone.” She pauses. “Are you mad?”
Am I mad? I’m certainly surprised—I thought she’d moved past her fear of being addicted to me—and I’m frustrated, which I admit to myself is a euphemism for mad. But underneath the anger is the fact that I worry for her, perhaps more than I should. I worry that until she has had practice being in a healthy relationship, until she can find more peace with her dad than bouncing between pretending he doesn’t exist and becoming devastated when he shows up and inevitably disappears again, she’ll struggle and miss out on much of what she wants. I want her to work through this in her twenties rather than her thirties; I don’t want her to squander her time. I don’t want her to one day panic, Half my life is over. And yet I also don’t want to discourage her independence. Just as parents raise their kids to leave them one day, therapists work to lose patients, not retain them.
Still, something feels rushed about this decision and perhaps comfortably dangerous for her, like jumping out of a plane with no parachute.
People imagine they come to therapy to uncover something from the past and talk it through, but so much of what therapists do is work in the present, where we bring awareness to what’s going on in people’s heads and hearts in the day-to-day. Are they easily injured? Do they often feel blamed? Do they avoid eye contact? Do they fixate on seemingly insignificant anxieties? We take these insights and encourage patients to practice making use of them in the real world. Wendell once put it this way: “What people do in therapy is like shooting baskets against a backboard. It’s necessary. But what they need to do then is go and play in an actual game.”
The one time Charlotte got close to having a real relationship, about a year into her therapy, she abruptly stopped seeing this guy but refused to tell me why. Nor would she tell me why she didn’t want to talk about it. I was less interested in what had happened than in what made this—of all the things she’d told me about herself—the Thing That Cannot Be Discussed. I wonder, today, if she’s leaving because of that thing.
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.
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.
But Wendell told me that by diminishing my problems, I was judging myself and everyone else whose problems I had placed lower down on the hierarchy of pain. You can’t get through your pain by diminishing it, he reminded me. You get through your pain by accepting it and figuring out what to do with it. You can’t change what you’re denying or minimizing. And, of course, often what seem like trivial worries are manifestations of deeper ones.
“You still doing Tinder therapy?” I ask Cory.
He rubs some product into my hair. “Hell, yeah,” he says.