“I’ve been calling you Wendell,” I tell my therapist, whose real name, I must confess, isn’t actually Wendell.
I’ve just made an announcement in our session: I started writing again, a book of sorts, and he—my therapist, now called “Wendell”—plays a prominent role.
I hadn’t planned to do this, I explain. A week ago, pulled to my desk by what felt like a gravitational force, I fired up my laptop, opened a blank document, and wrote for hours, as if a dam had broken. I felt like myself again, but different—more free, more relaxed, more alive—and I was experiencing what the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls “flow.” It wasn’t until I began yawning that I stepped away, noticed the time, and climbed into bed. I was tired, but in an energized way, ready for rest after having been awakened.
I got up the next morning refreshed, and that night, the mysterious force drew me again to my laptop. I thought about John’s plan to become a psychiatrist. For many people, going into the depths of their thoughts and feelings is like going into a dark alley—they don’t want to go there alone. People come to therapy to have somebody to go there with, and people watch John’s show for a similar reason: it makes them feel less alone, allows them to see a version of themselves muddling through life on the screen. Maybe in this way, he is a psychiatrist to many—and maybe his bravery in writing about his own loss had inspired me to write about mine.
All week, I wrote about my breakup, my therapist, my mortality, our fear of taking responsibility for our lives and the need to do so in order to heal. I wrote about outdated stories and false narratives and how the past and the future can creep into the present, sometimes eclipsing it entirely. I wrote about holding on and letting go and how hard it is to walk around those prison bars even when freedom isn’t just right in front of us but literally inside of us, in our minds. I wrote about how no matter our external circumstances, we have choices about how to live our lives and that, regardless of what has happened, what we’ve lost, or how old we are, as Rita put it, it ain’t over till it’s over. I wrote about how sometimes we have the key to a better life but need somebody to show us where we left the damn thing. I wrote about how for me, that person has been Wendell, and how for others, that person is sometimes me.
“Wendell . . .” Wendell says, trying on the name to see if it fits.
“Because I come here on Wednesdays,” I say. “You know, Wednesdays with Wendell could be the title. The alliteration sort of sings, doesn’t it? But mine’s too personal to publish. It’s just for me. It feels great to write again.”
“It has meaning,” he says, referring to our earlier conversations. It’s true—I couldn’t write the happiness book because I wasn’t actually searching for happiness. I was searching for meaning—from which fulfillment and, yes, occasionally happiness ensue. And I couldn’t get myself to cancel the book contract for so long because if I did, I’d have to let go of my crutch—the I-should-have-written-the-parenting-book litany that shielded me from examining anything else. Even after I canceled the contract, for weeks I held on to my regret and the fantasy of how much easier my life would have been had I written the original book. Like Rita, I was reluctant to give light and space to the triumph, still spending more time thinking about how I’d failed rather than how I’d freed myself.
But I got a second chance too. Wendell once pointed out that we talk to ourselves more than we’ll talk to any other person over the course of our lives but that our words aren’t always kind or true or helpful—or even respectful. Most of what we say to ourselves we’d never say to people we love or care about, like our friends or children. In therapy, we learn to pay close attention to those voices in our heads so that we can learn a better way to communicate with ourselves.
So today, when Wendell says, “It has meaning,” I know that by “it,” he’s also referring to us, our time together. People often think they go to therapy for an explanation—say, why Boyfriend left, or why they’ve become depressed—but what they’re really there for is an experience, something unique that’s created between two people over time for about an hour each week. It was the meaning of this experience that allowed me to find meaning in other ways.
Months will pass before I’ll toy with the idea of turning these late-night laptop sessions into a real book, before I’ll decide to use my own experience to help others find meaning in their lives too. And once I get up the courage to expose myself in this way, that’s what it will become: the book you are reading right now.
“Wendell,” he says again, letting the name sink in. “I like it.”
But there’s one more story to tell.
“I’m ready to dance,” I said to Wendell a few weeks before, surprising not just me, but him. I’d been thinking about the comment Wendell had made months earlier after I told him that I felt betrayed by my body on the dance floor at the wedding, by my foot that had lost its strength. He had offered to dance, to show me that I could both reach out for help and take a risk, and in doing so, I realized later, he had taken a risk. Therapists take risks all the time on behalf of their patients, making split-second decisions on the presumption that these risks will do far more good than harm. Therapy isn’t a paint-by-numbers business, and sometimes the only way to move patients beyond their stuckness is by taking a risk in the room, by going out of the therapist’s own comfort zone to teach by example.
“I mean, if the offer’s still on the table,” I added. Wendell paused. I smiled. It felt like a role reversal.
“It is,” Wendell said, after the briefest of hesitations. “What would you like to dance to?”
“How about ‘Let It Be’?” I suggested. I’d been playing the Beatles tune on the piano recently and it popped into my head before I realized it wasn’t exactly a dance song. I considered changing it to something by Prince or Beyoncé, but Wendell got up and grabbed his iPhone from his desk drawer, and within a minute the room filled with those iconic opening chords. I stood, but immediately got cold feet, stalling with words, telling Wendell that we needed something more clubby and danceable, something like . . .
That’s when the song’s chorus erupted—Let it be, let it be, let it be, let it be—and Wendell started rocking out like a teenager at a heavy-metal concert, exaggerating for comic effect. I watched in amazement. There was buttoned-up Wendell, doing air guitar and all.
The song went on to its quieter, poignant second verse about the brokenhearted people, but Wendell was still rocking the hell out of this, as if to say, Prince or Beyoncé be damned. Life doesn’t have to be perfect. I watched his tall, skinny frame jiving across the room, the courtyard a backdrop through the windows behind him, as I tried to get out of my head and just, well, let it be. I thought of my hairstylist Cory. Could I “just be”?
The chorus started up again and suddenly I was jiving across the room, too, laughing self-consciously at first, twirling in circles as Wendell went even crazier. But his dance training was apparent—or maybe it was less about his training and more about his sense of self. He wasn’t doing anything fancy; he just seemed wholly at home in his skin. And he was right: despite the problems with my foot, I needed to get out on the dance floor anyway.
Now we were both dancing and singing out loud together—about the light that shines in the cloudy night—belting out the verses at the top of our lungs as if we were at a karaoke bar, dancing exuberantly in the same room in which I’d fallen apart in despair.
There will be an answer, let it be
The music ended sooner than I’d expected, just as our sessions sometimes did. But rather than feeling like I needed more time, I found something satisfying about our time being up.
Not long before this, I’d told Wendell that I’d begun thinking about what it would be like to stop coming to therapy. So much had changed over the course of the year, and I was feeling not just better equipped to handle life’s challenges and uncertainties but also more peaceful inside. Wendell had smiled—it was the smile I’d seen recently that seemed to mean I’m delighted for you—then asked if we should talk about termination.
I wavered. Not yet.
Now, though, as Wendell placed his iPhone back in his drawer and returned to his spot on the couch, the time seemed right. There’s a biblical saying that translates roughly as “First you will do, then you will understand.” Sometimes you have to take a leap of faith and experience something before its meaning becomes apparent. It’s one thing to talk about leaving behind a restrictive mindset. It’s another to stop being so restrictive. The transfer of words into action, the freedom of it, made me want to carry that action outside the therapy room and into my life.
And with that, I was ready to set a date to leave.
The strangest thing about therapy is that it’s structured around an ending. It begins with the knowledge that our time together is finite, and the successful outcome is that patients reach their goals and leave. The goals are different for each person, and therapists talk to their patients about what those goals are. Experiencing less anxiety? Relationships going more smoothly? Being kinder to yourself? The endpoint depends on the patient.
In the best case, the ending feels organic. There might be more to do, but we’ve done a lot, enough. The patient feels good—more resilient, more flexible, more able to navigate daily life. We’ve helped them hear the questions they didn’t even know they were asking: Who am I? What do I want? What’s in my way?
It seems silly, though, to deny that therapy is also about forming deep attachments to people and then saying goodbye.
Sometimes therapists find out what happens afterward, if patients come back at a later point in their lives. Other times we’re left to wonder. How are they doing? Is Austin thriving after leaving his wife and coming out as a gay man in his late thirties? Is Janet’s husband with Alzheimer’s still alive? Did Stephanie stay in her marriage? There are so many stories left unfinished, so many people I think about but will never see again.
“Will you remember me?” Julie had asked, but the question wasn’t unique to her situation.
And today I’m saying goodbye to Wendell. We’ve been talking about this goodbye for weeks, but now that it’s here, I don’t know how to thank him. As an intern, I was taught that when patients thank us, it helps to remind them that they did the hard work.
It’s all you, we tend to say. I was just here to guide you. And in a sense, that’s true. The fact that they picked up the phone and decided to come to therapy and then work through things every week is something no one else could do for them.
But we’re also taught something else that we can’t really understand until we’ve done thousands of hours of sessions: We grow in connection with others. Everyone needs to hear that other person’s voice saying, I believe in you. I can see possibilities that you might not see quite yet. I imagine that something different can happen, in some form or another. In therapy we say, Let’s edit your story.
Early on, when I was talking about Boyfriend, in my view an open-and-shut case of I’m-the-innocent-injured-party-here, Wendell said, “You want me to agree with you.” I said that I didn’t want him to agree with me (though I did!), I just wanted him to be sensitive to the shock I was experiencing, and then I proceeded to tell him exactly how I wanted him to do that. At that point he said that I was trying to “control the therapy” and that my attempts to bend situations to my liking might have played a part in my being blindsided by Boyfriend. Wendell didn’t want to do therapy the way I wanted him to. Boyfriend didn’t want to live in contented domesticity the way I wanted him to. Boyfriend tried to accommodate me until he couldn’t anymore. Wendell wouldn’t waste my time that way, he explained; he didn’t want to say two years in, like Boyfriend did, Sorry, I can’t do this.
I remember how I both loved and hated Wendell for saying that. It’s like when somebody finally has the guts to tell you that you have a problem and you feel both defensive and relieved that this person is telling it like it is. That’s the delicate work that therapists do. Wendell and I worked on my grief but also my self-imprisonment. And we did it together—it wasn’t all me. Therapy can only work if it’s a joint endeavor.
Nobody is going to save you, Wendell had said. Wendell didn’t save me, but he did help me to save myself.
So when I express my gratitude to Wendell, he doesn’t push away the compliment with a trite line of humility.
He says, “It’s been my pleasure.”
Recently John observed that a good television series leaves viewers feeling like the time between weekly episodes is simply a pause in the story. Similarly, he said, he began to realize that each of our sessions wasn’t a discrete conversation but a continuing one and that the time between sessions was just a pause, not a period. I share this with Wendell as the minutes wind down in our final session. “Let’s consider this a pause in the conversation,” I say. “Like every week, but longer.”
I tell him I may come back one day, because it’s true; people leave and come back at different times in their lives. And when they do, the therapist is still there, sitting in the same chair, holding all of their shared history.
“We can still consider it a pause,” Wendell replies, then adds the part that’s hardest to say. “Even if we don’t meet again.”
I smile, knowing exactly what he means. Relationships in life don’t really end, even if you never see the person again. Every person you’ve been close to lives on somewhere inside you. Your past lovers, your parents, your friends, people both alive and dead (symbolically or literally)—all of them evoke memories, conscious or not. Often they inform how you relate to yourself and others. Sometimes you have conversations with them in your head; sometimes they speak to you in your sleep.
In the weeks leading up to this session, I’ve been having dreams about my leaving. In one, I imagine seeing Wendell at a conference. He’s standing with somebody I don’t know and I’m not sure if he’s seen me. I feel a yawning distance between us and all that once lived between us. And then it happens: He looks over. I nod. He nods. There’s a hint of a smile that only I can see.
In another dream, I’m visiting a friend at her therapy office—who this friend is isn’t clear—and as I exit the elevator on her floor, I see Wendell leaving the suite. I wonder if he’s there to meet with colleagues for a consultation group. Or maybe he has just left his own therapy session. I’m fascinated; Wendell’s therapist! Is one of these therapists Wendell’s? Is my friend Wendell’s therapist? Either way, he’s not self-conscious about it. “Hi,” he says warmly on his way out. “Hi,” I say on my way in.
I wonder what these dreams mean. I’m always embarrassed as a therapist when I can’t understand my own dreams. I bring them to Wendell. He doesn’t know what they mean either. We come up with theories, two therapists analyzing one therapist’s dreams. We talk about how I felt during the dreams. We talk about how I feel now—both anxious and excited to move on. We talk about how hard it can be to get attached and say goodbye.
“Okay,” I say now in Wendell’s office. “A pause.”
We have about a minute left, and I try to take in the moment, memorize it. Wendell with his crossed and impossibly long legs, his stylish button-down and khakis, and today’s trendy blue lace-ups over socks with patterned squares. His face—curious, compassionate, present. His beard with the flecks of gray. The table with the tissues between us. The armoire, the bookshelf, and the desk that always has his laptop on it and nothing else.
Wendell pats his legs twice and stands but doesn’t say his usual “See you next week” at the door.
“Bye,” I say.
“Bye,” he says and he reaches his hand out to shake mine.
When I release his hand, I turn and walk through the waiting room with the funky chairs and black-and-white photos and humming noise machine, then head down the corridor toward the building’s exit. As I approach the main door, a woman enters from the street. She’s holding her phone to her ear with one hand, pulling the door open with the other.
“I have to go. Can I call you in an hour?” she says into her phone. I hang back, watching her move down the hall. Sure enough, she opens the door to Wendell’s office. I wonder what they’ll talk about. I wonder if they’ll ever dance.
I think about our conversation, wondering how the pause will hold.
Once outside, I quicken my step as I head to my car. I have patients to see at the office, people like me, all of us trying our best to get out of our own ways. The light on the corner is about to change so I run to catch it, but then I notice the warmth on my skin and I stop at the curb, tilting my face to the sun, soaking it in, lifting my eyes to the world.
Actually, I’ve got plenty of time.