27 Mar … You Must Give Up the Hope for a Better Past (IRVIN D. YALOM) | Part A’
I want this to be different from our last consultation. This time I want a complete overhaul. My sixtieth birthday is approaching, and I want to change my life.”
Those were Sally’s first words. A handsome, forthright woman, she looked straight into my eyes and held my gaze. She was referring to our previous therapy six years earlier, when she had requested four, and only four, sessions to help deal with her protracted grief following her father’s death. Though she had used that time efficiently and explored her stormy relationship with her parents in some depth, I sensed there was much more that needed attention, but Sally had been resolute in her wish for only four sessions.
“I’m not sure how much you remember about me,” she continued, “but I’ve worked forever as a physics technician and that’s what I want to change. The truth is that my heart’s never been in that work. My real calling is writing. I want to be a writer.”
“I don’t recall your mentioning that before.”
“I know. I wasn’t ready to talk about it then. Not even to talk to myself about it. Now I am ready. And I’ve contacted you again because I know you’re a writer and I think you can help me find my way to becoming a real writer.”
“I’ll do my best. Fill me in.”
“I’ve made the decision to put my writing first. I’ve got enough money to do that now, with my retirement benefits and my husband’s job. He’s an airline pilot, and even though United has stolen the pilots’ pensions—the CEO really needed his hundred-million-dollar salary and bonus—my husband still makes good money, at least for the next five years. And the most important thing is that I must have talent.”
“Must have talent? Tell me about that.”
“I mean I must have some talent. I won a literary guild fiction prize for new writers when I was eighteen. Four thousand dollars. And that was forty-two years ago.”
“A huge award! Quite an honor!”
“Quite a curse, it turned out.”
“How so?”
“I got this notion I could never live up to that honor. I began to feel like a fraud and was afraid to show my work.”
“What did you write?”
“What do I write, we should say, because I’ve never stopped writing. A bit of everything—an unending stream of poetry and stories and vignettes.”
“And what have you done with all your work? Have you published any of it?”
“Aside from the novella that won me the prize, I’ve published nothing. Never tried to publish. Not once. But I’ve still got every piece I ever wrote. Couldn’t send anything out and couldn’t throw anything out. I put everything in a big box and sealed it with strong tape. Everything I’ve written since my teens.”
A big sealed box containing everything she’s ever written! My heart began to race. Slow down, I said to myself, for I was slipping into my identity as a writer and felt myself getting too involved. My curiosity was aflame. And my empathy, too. I shuddered as I imagined my entire life’s work stored away unseen in a large box. Don’t over-identify, I told myself.Nothing good will come of it. I turned back to Sally.
“What’s that like for you?”
“What? Having everything in that box?”
I nodded.
“It’s not so bad. Out of sight, out of mind. It worked just fine . . . until now. I can tell you a lot about the blessings of denial. I’ve always thought your profession lacked a proper appreciation for denial.”
“Right! We don’t invite denial to our campfire. I confess that I expect my patients to doff their denial and hang it in the cloakroom before entering.”
We smiled together. We were a good pair. When had I last uttered “campfire,” “doff,” and “cloakroom” during a therapy hour? I sensed us settling comfortably into a writerly conversation. Careful, careful, I thought. She has come for help, not conviviality.
“That box—where do you keep it?”
“Actually there are two boxes. Box number 1, the main guy, is jammed full, taped shut, and stored out of sight, way in the back of my closet. I’ve jettisoned a lot of things over the years—clothes, photos, books—but not that box. I’ve carried that box around with me, as a tortoise lugs its shell, from dwelling to dwelling for most of my life. In it is all my work from adolescence until about fifteen years ago. The second box, where I store all my recent work, is open for business under my desk.”
“So you’ve saved your whole life’s output of writing and keep it close but out of sight?”
“No, not my entire oeuvre. A good bit from even earlier years met a sad fate.”
“How so?”
“It’s an odd story. I’m pretty sure I didn’t tell you this in our previous therapy. One day when I was about fourteen, my parents and brothers were out, and I began snooping through the dresser drawers in my father’s bedroom. That was not unusual for me. I can’t recall what I was looking for, but I’ve always been a hard-core snooper. On this particular day I found two of my poems in a drawer containing my father’s sweaters. The paper seemed damp, as though my father’s tears had fallen on them. I had never given him my poems, and I was absolutely enraged that he had them. How could he have gotten them? There was only one way: he must have snooped through my room when I was at school and stolen them.”
“And so . . . ”
“Well, I couldn’t very well confront him with it, could I? That way I’d have to admit I was snooping in his closet. So I had only one recourse.”
“Which was . . . ”
“I burned all the poems I had ever written.”
Ouch! It felt like a stab in the heart. I tried to hide it, but she missed nothing.
“You winced when I said that.”
“Burning all the poems you had ever written! I’m trying to conjure up a picture of that fourteen-year-old girl striking a match and setting her poems on fire. What a painful, horrendous thought. Such violence toward yourself! Tell me, Sally, do you have any sympathy for that young, fourteen-year-old girl?”
Sally looked touched. She tilted her head back and glanced upward for a few seconds, “Hmm. I’ve never addressed that particular question before. I’ll have to think on it.”
“Let’s tag it and make sure we return to it later. It’s important. For now though, let’s talk more about your reasons for coming.” I would have greatly preferred to return to that mysterious taped-up box—it drew me in like a nail to a magnet—but Sally’s story of burning her work when her father invaded her privacy gave me pause. The situation called for great discretion. She’d get back to that box, I was sure of it, but only on her schedule, only when she was good and ready.
Over the next few months we prepared the ground for her new life. First she had to deal with retirement, a major, often frightening transition that few navigate with equanimity. Though she was fully aware of the many obstacles in her way, she was also a determined, efficient woman who composed a checklist and checked off one item after another.
First she had to come to terms with the irreversibility of her decision. Her particular field of physics moved so quickly that her knowledge base would soon be outdated, and she knew that she would not have the option of changing her mind in the future and reclaiming her job. To make sure that her lab would function without her, she instigated a thoughtful administrative reorganization, insuring a smooth transition.
Next she addressed loneliness. Her husband planned to continue to fly for five more years and was away fifty percent of the time, but she knew she could count on a bevy of friends. And then there was the question of finances. At my suggestion, she and her husband consulted a financial advisor and learned they had sufficient funds for retirement, provided they gave their children less money. They then arranged a meeting with their two sons, who reassured her that they could manage on their own.
The final item on her list—where to write?—was particularly bothersome to Sally, and she fretted about it for weeks. To write well, she required absolute silence, solitude, and restful contact with nature. Eventually she located and rented a nearby loft encircled by the arms of a massive California oak.
And then one day, to my great shock, she entered my office carrying a two-foot-by-two-foot box, a box so heavy that the floor quivered when she set it down between us. We sat in silence looking at it until she extracted a large pair of shears from her purse, kneeled on the floor next to the box, looked at me, and said, “Today’s the day, I guess.”
I tried to slow things down. Sally’s eyes were red, her lips trembled, and her grip on the shears seemed unsteady. “First, let me ask what you’re feeling. You look so strained, Sally.”
Sitting back on her heels, she replied, “Even before our first session, I knew that this day would come. This is why I came to see you. I’ve dreaded it, hardly sleeping several nights, especially last night. But I woke up this morning somehow knowing that now was the time.”
“What did you imagine happening when you opened it?” I had posed that question in the past, but it had never proved fruitful. On this day, however, she was forthcoming.
“There are a lot of dark chapters in my life, darker episodes than I’ve conveyed to you, and there are a lot of dark stories in that box, stories that I may have mentioned, but only obliquely, in our therapy. I’m afraid of their power, and I don’t want to get sucked back into those days. I’m very frightened of that. Oh yes, as you know, my family looked good from the outside, but inside . . . inside there was so much pain.”
“Is there a particular story or poem that you dread meeting again?”
Rising from the floor and setting down her scissors, Sally settled back into her chair. “Yes, one story that I wrote when I was in college haunted me all last night. ‘Riding on the Bus’ I think it was called, and it was about me at thirteen, a period when I was so unhappy I seriously considered suicide. In the story—a true story—I boarded a bus and rode to the end of the line and then kept riding it back and forth for hours contemplating how to end my life.”
“Tell me more about not sleeping last night.”
“It was bad. My heart pounded so hard I felt the bed shaking. I was terrified of that particular story and how I sat all day on the bus, thinking of killing myself. I remember being unable to find a reason to continue living. I kept imagining myself opening the box, rummaging around, and then finding that story.”
“You were thirteen then, and you’ve just turned sixty. So that means the bus ride was forty-seven years ago. You’re no longer that thirteen-year-old girl. You’re all grown up now; you’re married to a man you love, mothered two fine sons; you love being alive, and you’re here today planning to pursue your real calling. You’ve come so very far, Sally. And yet you hold onto the idea you’ll be sucked back into the past. How—when—did that odd myth take hold?”
“Long ago. That’s why I taped the box shut.” She picked up the shears again. “Maybe that’s why I brought it here to your office.”
I raised my eyebrows and gave her my best puzzled look. “How so?”
“Maybe if you’re with me, you’ll hold me and keep me inthis world.”
“I’m a good holder.”
“You promise?”
I nodded.
With that, Sally again kneeled on the floor, methodically cut the tape—doing as little damage as possible to this treasured box she had lived with most of her life—and gradually pried open the lid. Then she sat back in her chair, and we both stared in silence, in awe, at the startled stacks of paper, the dusty literary record of her life. She picked one sheet at random and silently read a poem.
“A little louder, please.”
She looked at me in alarm. “I’m not used to sharing this stuff.”
“What better time than right now to break a bad habit?”
Her hands trembled as she looked at the page. She cleared her throat a couple of times. “Well, here are the first lines of a poem I don’t recall at all. It’s dated 1980.”
Part b’ follows
Creatures of a Day
IRVIN D. YALOM
