Maybe you Should Talk to Someone by Lori Gottlieb
As the type of person who is skeptical of people who are happy all the time, I had a feeling I’d enjoy this book after I read the following quote from the first page.
“It is proposed that happiness be classified as a psychiatric disorder and be included in future editions of the major diagnostic manuals under the new name: major affective disorder, pleasant type. In a review of the relevant literature it is shown that happiness is statistically abnormal, consists of a discrete cluster of symptoms, is associated with a range of cognitive abnormalities, and probably reflects the abnormal functioning of the central nervous system. One possible objection to this proposal remains – that happiness is not negatively valued. However, this objection is dismissed as scientifically irrelevant.” -Richard Bentall, Journal of Medical Ethics, 1992
Whether Gottlieb starts off her book with this quote to be quip or dry I’m not sure but I absolutely love it. I’ve always thought people who are happy all.. the.. time.. are disingenuous. When I try explaining this sentiment to others not many get it. But Gotlieb iterates this theme multiple times throughout the book. And really, is there anything interesting to learn about a happy person anyway?
“He’s so happy all the time. It feels … unnatural. Like, what the hell is he so happy about?”
The whole premise of the book is that the author is a therapist sharing the stories of her own patients but has problems of her own too. When her boyfriend suddenly breaks up with her she realizes she also needs to go see a therapist. In the novel she explores her experiences and relationships with her own patients as well as the one she shares with her therapist.
One of Lori’s patient’s, Julie, is a young professor in her 30’s and is recently married. She’s just learned she is suffering from a terminal diagnosis of cancer and she is going to die. Reading about Julie’s story affected me the most. She got dealt a crappy card and unfortunately it could happen to any of us.
When I read this book I had just gotten home from this amazing weekend with my best friends. We went to a cabin in the woods of West Virginia to basically just drink and be alone together. We were able to go hiking, relax in the sun, and float in a river down the road from the cabin.
Normally I’m always so concerned with what my future plans are and what is supposed to happen next in my life that I struggle to remain present. But for that weekend I found myself sitting back and truly enjoying. I was fully immersed and content, listening and partaking in the banter. To date the greatest times of my life are still from living with both of them at school. It’s so rare for me to feel as happy and carefree as I do spending time with them. With nothing on my mind to complain about, nothing to fear.
My greatest and most realistic fear is that I will leave this place one day with an unfinished life. There are so many things I want to accomplish and do with my life. So much for me to see, read, experience. At the top of my list is witnessing my friends finding happiness and creating a family of my own. Two things that are never quite complete and take an abundance of time.
In college I dated this firefighter who had just started out working as a rookie. There was a nursing home nearby my university that his squad often received calls for. One day he described to me how an elderly person at the home had a heart attack and he experienced his first loss on the job. I remember talking with him about it and telling him that I will always be jealous of old people. Grandparents who were healthy enough to grow old and able to witness their children have children. They are the lucky ones who got to live a full and complete life. As far as I’m concerned they made it.
I understand that no matter your age there is uncertainty about life. That everyone grapples with the awareness that we all will one day depart this world. Some of us getting to do more on our lists than others.
“We think we make our bucket lists to ward off regret, but really they help us to ward off death. After all, the longer our bucket lists are, the more time we imagine we have left to accomplish everything on them. Cutting the list down, however, makes a tiny dent in our denial systems, forcing us to acknowledge a sobering truth: Life has a 100 percent mortality rate. Every single one of us will die, and most of us have no idea how or when that will happen. In fact, as each second passes, we’re all in the process of coming closer to our eventual deaths. As the saying goes, none of us will get out of here alive.”
“The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it” – Flannery O’Connor
This was an interesting read because I not only saw myself in some of the author’s patients’ but I saw myself in the author as well. This book forced me to really take a look at myself and what I’ve been going through lately. As humans we are all subject to the same slew of problems that our environment imposes on us. We all have to deal with mortality, love, loss. As Gotlieb is going through a tough breakup, the author chooses to see a therapist of her own. She knows she needs help to stop ignoring aspects of her life that she isn’t able to deal with on her own.
“I’ve lost more than my relationship in the present. I’ve lost my relationship in the future. We tend to think that the future happens later, but we’re creating it in our minds every day. When the present falls apart, so does the future we had associated with it. And having the future taken away is the mother of all plot twists. But if we spend the present trying to fix the past or control the future, we remain stuck in place, in perpetual regret.”
I hadn’t been paying attention to how my breakup had made me feel. Until I spent some time with my friends and experienced happiness, I wasn’t able to register that I’d been feeling immense sadness. I’d never dealt with anything like this before and it was hard for me to acknowledge that I wasn’t okay.
When I started this website it was around the time I realized I was unhappy with my life in many ways. Even though I was able to admit I wasn’t happy I still felt extremely trapped in the life I had been living. I didn’t think there was much I could do to change it. I started off the new year promising myself that I would write in a journal every day. The intent was to try to make me do one thing for myself each day and record it. It morphed into me writing down my daily thoughts and feelings. When I look back at what I wrote during that time I can see the progression of my thoughts. I was slowly getting to the root of what was bothering me and pinpointing the major sources of my unhappiness. I noticed it was stemming from three themes in my life, my relationship, my living situation, and my job.
“Rather than steering people straight to the heart of the problem, we nudge them to arrive there on their own, because the most powerful truths—the ones people take the most seriously—are those they come to, little by little, on their own.”
First, I started thinking about my relationship. How could I exit something I was so committed to? We’d already talked about our futures together. ‘What if this is only temporary. Our lives are so intertwined that’s not a possibility. We have so many plans.’ Then the pandemic happened. Every obligation I had keeping me in Boston and near him disappeared. Work went remote, my basketball games got cancelled, the kid’s sport league I volunteered for ended their sessions, and every social engagement Matt and I had together were no longer happening. I packed my suitcase and boarded a one-way train home to New York and I had never felt more free. My obligations to him and to Boston were gone. I could suddenly be wherever I wanted and that was decidedly not in Boston and not with Matt. In one afternoon, everything in my life that had been tying me down disappeared. I was free. (aside from an impending pandemic)
“I’m reminded of a famous cartoon. It’s of a prisoner, shaking the bars, desperately trying to get out—but to his right and left, it’s open, no bars. All the prisoner has to do is walk around. But still, he frantically shakes the bars. That’s most of us. We feel completely stuck, trapped in our emotional cells, but there’s a way out—as long as we’re willing to see it.”
Throughout the course of this year I have been able to make changes. As the year is wrapping up, I’m considering this my growing year. It’s been hard but so far I’ve made progress on every item that was contributing to my unhappiness. Matt is no longer in my life. Sometimes I wish it could’ve worked out differently, that we could’ve figured out how to fix things. The hardest part for me to accept has been that he didn’t want to. I’m back in Boston doing it right this time. My living situation is different. My roommates and I have fostered an apartment that feels more like a home every day. It’s turned into what I’ve always wanted here. As for my job I’m in the process of changing that too.
At the beginning of my journaling I jotted down “what would you do with your time if you could do anything you wanted?” “where would you work?” Not surprisingly the answer isn’t my current position.
Julie, the patient with a terminal cancer diagnosis had similar thoughts when she found out her condition. She decided she wanted to work at Trader Joe’s as a cashier. Something called her to it and she ended up loving it. I’m not quite ready to make a drastic change and go work at Trader Joe’s. I change my mind about what I’d like to be doing with my life a lot. Most of the time I’d really love to work at a nonprofit where I’m able to do tangible things and directly help others. I will get there someday.
“She knew she was idealizing the job. But she still wanted to experience that sense of purpose and community, of being a small part of lots of different people’s lives—even if just for the time it took to ring up their groceries.”
The main thing I took away from this book was that it’s okay to be human; to struggle or be unhappy, to need to talk to someone, even if that person is yourself. Most of all, that trapped feeling is a construct of our own creation. This book has a lot to offer everyone. I found many quotes that helped me think differently. I’m going to pass this book around to my current roommates. The pandemic has brought on all sorts of challenges for all of us and I think they’d enjoy this read.
“In other words, therapy is about understanding the self that you are. But part of getting to know yourself is to unknow yourself—to let go of the limiting stories you’ve told yourself about who you are so that you aren’t trapped by them, so you can live your life and not the story you’ve been telling yourself about your life.”
There were SO SO SO many quotes that resonated with me.. they are as follows:
“PEACE. IT DOES NOT MEAN TO BE IN A PLACE WHERE THERE IS NO NOISE, TROUBLE OR HARD WORK. IT MEANS TO BE IN THE MIDST OF THOSE THINGS AND STILL BE CALM IN YOUR HEART.”
“With a shortened future, she imagined doing work where she could see tangible results in the moment—you pack groceries, you cheer up customers, you stock items. At the end of the day, you’ve done something concrete and useful.”
“She hasn’t seen me yet, and I can’t help but watch her from afar. She rings the bell for a bagger, gets a child some stickers, laughs with a customer over something I can’t hear. She’s like the Queen of Cashiers, the party everyone wants to be at. People seem to know her and, not surprisingly, she’s incredibly efficient, moving the line along quickly.”
“Because therapists know that at first, each patient is simply a snapshot, a person captured in a particular moment. It’s like a photo of you taken from an unfortunate angle and with a sour expression on your face. There might also be a photo in which you’re glowing, caught opening a present or mid-laugh with a lover. Both are you in that fraction of time, and neither is you in your entirety.”
“I was finding it hard to manage my negative thoughts because, outside of Wendell’s office, they didn’t have much of an outlet. Breakups tend to fall into the category of silent losses, less tangible to other people. You have a miscarriage, but you didn’t lose a baby. You have a breakup, but you didn’t lose a spouse. So friends assume that you’ll move on relatively quickly, and things like these concert tickets become an almost welcome external acknowledgement of your loss—not only of the person but of the time and company and daily routines, of the private jokes and references, and of the shared memories that now are yours alone to carry.”
“Wendell, though, has been asking me to look at the ways we avoided each other by hiding behind romance and banter and plans for our future.”
“I want real life—real people—to be my world.”
“Like in those National Geographic Channel shows that capture the embryonic development and birth of rare crocodiles, I want to capture the process in which humans, struggling to evolve, push against their shells until they quietly (but sometimes loudly) and slowly (but sometimes suddenly) crack open.”
“Right now it’s all about one foot, then the other. That’s one thing I tell patients who are in the midst of crippling depression, the kind that makes them think, There’s the bathroom. It’s about five feet away. I see it, but I can’t get there. One foot, then the other. Don’t look at all five feet at once. Just take a step. And when you’ve taken that step, take one more. Eventually you’ll make it to the shower. And you’ll make it to tomorrow and next year too. One step. They may not be able to imagine their depression lifting anytime soon, but they don’t need to. Doing something prompts you to do something else, replacing a vicious cycle with a virtuous one. Most big transformations come about from the hundreds of tiny, almost imperceptible, steps we take along the way. A lot can happen in the space of a step.”
“I said I wasn’t depressed; I was just bored. I hadn’t considered that if the only thing that keeps you going all day is knowing you’ll get to turn on the TV after dinner, you probably are depressed.”
“And the pain of that will never, ever, ever, ever go away … because the loss of that dream is a very, very significant loss. But … if you spend your life mourning the fact that you didn’t get to Italy, you may never be free to enjoy the very special, the very lovely things … about Holland.”
“The answer to an unasked question is always no”
“We all have a deep yearning to understand ourselves and be understood.”
“Honesty is stronger medicine than sympathy, which many console but often conceals.” —Gretel Ehrlich
“We are afraid of being responsible for our own lives. Sometimes it takes a while to admit our fears, especially to ourselves.”
“In a real dark night of the soul, it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day” — Fitzgerald
“No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.” —Einstein
“Most of us come to therapy feeling trapped—imprisoned by our thoughts, behaviors, marriages, jobs, fears, or past. Sometimes we imprison ourselves with a narrative of self-punishment. If we have a choice between believing one of two things, both of which we have evidence for—I’m unlovable, I’m lovable—often we choose the one that makes us feel bad. Why do we keep our radios tuned to the same static-ridden stations (the everyone’s-life-is-better-than-mine station, the I-can’t-trust-people station, the nothing-works-out-for-me station) instead of moving the dial up or down? Change the station. Walk around the bars. Who’s stopping us but ourselves?”
“Might it be safer to stay in jail?”
“You take a risk, you fall down, and you get back up and do it all over again.”
“It’s a common belief that people’s sex lives reflect their relationships, that a good relationship equals a good sex life and vice versa. But that’s only true sometimes. Just as often, there are people who have extremely problematic relationships and fantastic sex, and there are people who are deeply in love but who don’t click with the same intensity in the bedroom.”