141
" Gloria-in-human-resources wants an answer by tonight,” I heard Brad say. “Should I pick the smart one or the hot one?” I froze, appalled. “Always pick the smart one,” the other agent replied, and I wondered which one Brad considered me to be. An hour later, I got the job. And despite finding the question outrageously inappropriate, I felt perversely hurt. Still, I wasn’t sure why Brad had pegged me as smart. All I’d done that day was dial a string of phone numbers (repeatedly disconnecting calls by pressing the wrong buttons on the confusing phone system), make coffee (which was sent back twice), Xerox a script (I pushed 10 instead of 1 for number of copies, then hid the nine extra screenplays under a couch in the break room), and trip over a lamp cord in Brad’s office and fall on my ass. The hot one, I concluded, must have been particularly stupid. "
― Lori Gottlieb , Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, Her Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed
144
" When I asked what she wanted that day to be like, first she said, “Well, I’d rather not be dead that day,” but failing that, she didn’t want it to be all “sugarcoated” and “cheery.” She liked the idea of a “celebration of life,” which the party planner told her was all the rage nowadays, but she didn’t like the message that came with it.
“It’s a funeral, for God’s sake,” she said. “All these people in my cancer group say, ‘I want people to celebrate! I don’t want people to be sad at my funeral.’ And I’m like, ‘Why the fuck not? You died!’ "
― Lori Gottlieb , Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, Her Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed
153
" Once, at the end of a session with Wendell, I told him that sometimes, on days when I left more upset than when I came in—tossed out into the world, having so much more to say, holding so many painful feelings—I hated therapy. “Most things worth doing are difficult,” he replied. He said this not in a glib way but in a tone and with an expression that made me think he spoke from personal experience. He added that while everyone wants to leave each session feeling better, I, of all people, should know that that’s not always how therapy works. If I wanted to feel good in the short term, he said, I could eat a piece of cake or have an orgasm. But he wasn’t in the short-term-gratification business. "
― Lori Gottlieb , Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, Her Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed
154
" One thing that has surprised Julie about going through the process of watching herself die is how vivid her world has become. Everything that she used to take for granted produces a sense of revelation, as if she were a child again. Tastes- the sweetness of a strawberry, it’s juice dripping onto her chin; a buttery pastry melting in her mouth. Smells - flowers on a front lawn, a colleague‘s perfume, seaweed washed up on the shore, Matt’s sweaty body in bed at night. Sounds – the strings on a cello, the screech of a car, her nephew’s laughter. Experiences - dancing at a birthday party, people-watching at Starbucks, buying a cute dress, opening the mail. All of this, no matter how mundane, delights her to no end. She’s become hyper-present. When people delude themselves into believing they have all the time in the world, she noticed, they get lazy. She hadn’t expected to experience this pleasure in her grief, to find it invigorating, in a way. But even as she’s dying, she’s realized, life goes on - even as the cancer invades her body, she still checks Twitter. At first she thought, why would I waste even ten minutes of the time I have left checking Twitter? And then she thought, why wouldn’t I? I like Twitter! She also tries not to dwell on what she’s losing. “I can breathe fine now, “Julie says, “but it’ll get harder, and I’ll grieve for that. Until then, I breathe. "
― Lori Gottlieb , Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, Her Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed
157
" We think we make 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.
[...] Who wants to think about this? How much easier it is to become death procrastinators! Many of us take for granted the people we love and the things we find meaningful, only to realize, when our deadline is announced, that we’d been skating by on the project: our lives.”-Maybe You Should Talk to Someone, p.79, Lori Gottlieb
“It’s no surprise that we often dream about our fears. We have a lot of fears.
What are we afraid of?
We are afraid of being hurt. We are afraid of being humiliated. We are afraid of failure and we are afraid of success. We are afraid of being alone and we are afraid of connection. We are afraid to listen to what our hearts are telling us. We are afraid of being unhappy and we are afraid of being too happy. We are afraid of not having our parents’ approval and we are afraid of accepting ourselves for who we really are. We are afraid of bad health and good fortune. We are afraid of our envy and having too much. We are afraid to have hope for things that we might not get. We are afraid of change and we are afraid of not changing. We are afraid of something happening to our kids, our jobs. We are afraid of not having control and afraid of our own power. We are afraid of how briefly we are alive and how long we will be dead. (We are afraid that after we die, we won’t have mattered.) We are afraid of being responsible for our own lives.
Sometimes it takes a while to admit our fears, especially to ourselves. "
― Lori Gottlieb , Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, Her Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed
160
" Which all boils down to: Happiness equals reality minus expectations. Apparently, you can make people happy by delivering bad news and then taking it back (which, personally, would just make me mad). Still, I knew I could put together some interesting studies, but I felt I’d just be scratching the surface of something else I wanted to say but couldn’t quite put my finger on. And in my new career, and in my life more generally, scratching the surface no longer felt satisfying. You can’t go through psychotherapy training and not be changed in some way, not become, without even noticing, oriented toward the core. "
― Lori Gottlieb , Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, Her Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed
