What is it like to navigate each day with ADHD? In this personal essay for The Kenyon Review, Emily Stoddard—a writer who was diagnosed in her 30s—describes life with a restless mind and an interior motor that never quits. Stoddard artfully writes about being neurodivergent, and what it has meant to mask all of her life.

In the wake of diagnosis, I’m forced to admit the creature I named Restlessness both is and is not who I thought she was. The alphabet soup begins to expand and stratify with the language of neurodivergence — a map that only now, in retrospect, can I see and draw meaning from. Some regions of the language make me flinch at their candor and their implied judgment: thoughtless mistakes, oppositional defiance, rejection sensitive dysphoria. And other regions, especially the phenomenon of masking, shimmer with their potential for nuance. Here is a place where I can build a home for complexity. Masking rearranges every interaction I’ve ever had into an open question.

Useful is another mask. It’s the one I have worn the longest. It’s the mask many try on after gifted, after emotional, after too much. If I can’t make you understand me, maybe I can make you need me. If I don’t want to play dead forever, perhaps I can live to be of service — it’s easier to pretend to be noble than to go on being misunderstood. If I can’t belong with you, maybe I can do something for you instead.

Over and over, he read the same story, of potential patients who’d gone looking for someone to talk to about climate change and other environmental crises, only to be told that they were overreacting — that their concern, and not the climate, was what was out of whack and in need of treatment. (This was a story common enough to have become a joke, another therapist told me: “You come in and talk about how anxious you are that fossil-fuel companies continue to pump CO2 into the air, and your therapist says, ‘So, tell me about your mother.’”)

The traditional focus of his field, Bryant said, could be oversimplified as “fixing the individual”: treating patients as separate entities working on their personal growth. Climate change, by contrast, was a species-wide problem, a profound and constant reminder of how deeply intertwined we all are in complex systems — atmospheric, biospheric, economic — that are much bigger than us. It sometimes felt like a direct challenge to old therapeutic paradigms — and perhaps a chance to replace them with something better.

But we are far from freely administering psychedelic medication—getting the appropriate dose to the right patient will require a tremendous amount of fine-tuning. But for people to someday be able to use these drugs for therapy, without the hallucinatory side effects? What a trip.

While some entries can be bleak—particularly for harder drugs like meth or heroin—the vast majority are written in a companionable, curious voice that will be familiar to anyone with an older sibling or cousin who likes to test the limits of consciousness from their own backyard. The testimonials include highly specific descriptions not just of the chosen amount and imbibing method, but also the subtle shadings of each experience; sometimes with humor, but always with rigor, vibrancy, and clarity, often down to the passing minutes. These are good faith arbiters, truly interested in exploring the variance of human perception and making sure others can do so safely. There are none of Hunter S. Thompson’s “fools or frauds” here, though any one writer tends to give the distinct impression of being a bit of a weirdo.

RIVERS ARE PLACES OF FORGETTING, of memory. But they are also places of healing.

The use of rivers and water in therapeutic practices is millennia old, employed by nearly every Indigenous culture known around the world. The term “river therapy” refers to the practice of swimming in a river or walking near one and drawing positive benefits and relief from the space and its elements. River sounds are used in relaxation training systems to soothe and calm people. Studies have shown that just listening to a river can alleviate stress.

The term “spa” derives from the Latin phrase sanitas per aquas—” health through water.”

UVALDE IS NO LONGER known for rivers but for tragedy. We are part of a terrible tradition of Texas towns with this fate, among places like Santa Fe, El Paso, Sutherland Springs, and Allen. Since the massacre of May 24, 2022—the murder of 19 children and two teachers at Robb Elementary—we have seen our unraveling, our sorrow and our rage, broadcast to the world. We have watched our town’s name, the names of our neighbors and families and friends, carried on a current farther away from us. We grieve, even today. Some part of Uvalde always will.

But the rivers are still here, the moments of respite in the waters around us.

I hope the healing is coming, too.

This gentle essay by Mark Mann for Beside takes us into the understated world of David and Peter, who share a friendship spanning four decades, yet no words. Peter’s form of down syndrome means he is non-verbal, so ever since David first became his support worker they have been finding other ways to communicate — beginning with artmaking, to gardening, and ultimately, to farming. When David bought a 25-acre farm in 1998 he realized it was a place where he could “break the limitations imposed on people with developmental disabilities.” Abhorring the condescension he sometimes saw Peter face, on the farm David lets Peter take the lead in the quiet routines of  “preparing and sharing meals, tending to a few animals, and passing the time.”

This essay radiates with the peace that David has created for Peter in their silent sanctuary. It may not be a productive farm, but “rather than crops or yields, David and Peter’s harvest is each little detail noticed and celebrated: a trusting moment that passes between Peter and one of the horses, or the bright red sumac buds that David hangs above the kitchen table.”

Inspired by what David and Peter were doing at the Farm, others began joining them. David and Peter were connected to a larger network of families with members who were on the autism spectrum and used no spoken language, and some of these men became regulars. Neighbours started dropping in regularly, and friends and acquaintances from around Ontario began making the trip, to lend a hand and savour the atmosphere. (I was one of those, for several years.) The numbers have ebbed and flowed, but a small community has always coalesced around the Farm: loose, evolving, and delightfully unlikely. Today, it’s mainly just Peter and his close friend Kevin. Kevin doesn’t use spoken language either, but he, Peter, and David have found a rich and subtle terrain of conversation that goes beyond words: gestures, body language, touch, and eye contact.

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Devin Kelly | Longreads | February, 2021 | 24 minutes (6,376 words)

It wasn’t the pain on the lateral side of my right knee in March. I kept running through that. It wasn’t the throbbing of my right shin in July. I kept running through that. It was one morning, waking up, when I couldn’t bend my right leg at all. If I could’ve run, I would’ve. I just couldn’t. 

I should tell you before I say anything more that I am writing this from a place of injury, not recovery. There will be no conquering here, no overcoming. Nothing will be fixed by this essay’s end. Not long ago, I was diagnosed with an osteochondral lesion in my right knee. This, after multiple office visits and an MRI. This, after a year spent running over two thousand miles. After another year spent running over two thousand miles. After another year spent running over two thousand miles. And so on. And so on. And so on, and on.

An osteochondral lesion is a break in the cartilage that spreads itself over a bone. In this case, the fracture is in the cartilage covering the base of my femur. That cartilage does so much. It is, essentially, like a bone being fractured. The diagnosis is uncertain. I can walk fine. I present well. I do push-ups in the morning instead of going out for my usual run. I pace the apartment like a jaguar. I spend a whole day wishing I was someone else. They say I can’t run for months. They say something about surgery, maybe. They say don’t think about it yet. I stay up in bed and wonder if I will ever be the same. 

The list of injuries I have suffered over the course of nearly a lifetime spent running is long. I have had sciatica in my right leg as a result of a strained piriformis muscle, an injury that forced me, while in college, to pull my jeans onto my body while still in my bed. I could not balance on one leg. I have had a stress fracture in my right femur. I have had many iterations of shin splints, have slept with my foot in a boot because of plantar fasciitis, which is just a fancy way of saying that the bottom of your foot really fucking hurts. I have had runner’s knee, IT band syndrome, lost toenails. I have had injuries that have had nothing to do with my legs but everything to do with running. Headaches pulsing between the eyes, gastrointestinal mishaps, an hour spent in a port-a-potty after the Boston Marathon. My brother has a screw forever in his foot as a result of a running-related fracture. My father has two new hips. I watched the old ones wear away as a kid, his body looping around me in circles on the local high school track. Even though he was going the same speed, I didn’t know he was slowing down.

A known fact about most distance running injuries is that they most often fall into the bucket known as repetitive stress injuries. These injuries don’t appear suddenly. Perhaps the pain does. But the pain is the result of a long time spent doing something with one part of your body — whether it has to do with your stride length, your shoes, or your footstrike — in such a way that another part of your body has to compensate for the action. Repeat this enough, and you have a tight glute, a weakened bone, a foot that aches in the morning. What is interesting about running is that you engage with pain so frequently that the early warning signs of a serious injury often seem like regular pain, the usual, the old ordinary aches of a morning spent logging miles around a park. Most of my serious running injuries have been the result of ignoring the ways in which my body was signaling stress until some fateful morning when I woke up and realized it was too late to ignore the pain, that I’d have to honor it, and sit out for a week, a month, or more.

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In 2015, I suffered a stress fracture high up in my right femur while I was training for the New York City Marathon. I was almost certainly in the best shape of my life, and had been logging weeks of 80 miles and more as I attempted to break two hours and 40 minutes in the marathon, a coveted personal goal. The pain arrived simply and casually, like an old friend coming by to say hello. And so I let it say hello, over and over again, for weeks, until one morning I woke up and found I couldn’t run more than two steps without that hello turning into a scream. A few doctor’s visits and an MRI later, and I was diagnosed with a stress fracture and told to stay away from running for months. I remember being struck by a very particular kind of sorrow that befalls runners in this scenario, runners who have spent months dealing with a daily, ordinary pain in order to access some extraordinary moment. I remember saying I wish I had stopped running sooner, then it would have been nothing. I remember hating my past self, wishing I did better. The injury was not a singular decision, not a moment. It was a string of decisions. It was a litany of many moments.

***

Once, my father told me it was okay to ask for help. I was 15. I didn’t know what that meant. I have a hard time knowing now.

***

Help is a funny word. My first interactions with it were almost always ones of violence. A character in a movie cried for help. Someone was hurt, always. They needed help. They needed help now. The way they needed help was obvious. They were trapped under metal. They were physically crushed. A bone was broken. Blood was on their clothes. If help didn’t arrive soon, then the help would arrive too late. And then there were tears. And there was no helping those.

I went to my first therapist when I was a little older than 16. My mother had left my father years before. I had spent a childhood hiding bottles from her, finding them in the back seats of cars, thinking addiction was little more than a game that could be won. I never won it. I wanted to ask for help then, but I didn’t know how. Years later, I remember walking through my high school’s halls, feeling like the pit of my stomach was cleaning the floors. I spent each class writing poems on the back pages of my notebooks. I made promises I could never keep. I said I will love the people I love forever. I said I will never break my family in two. I wasn’t asking for help. I was saying I didn’t need it.

After school, I ran with my cross country team. I ran as hard as I could. I wanted to reach a point where the suffering I created from my body matched the suffering I felt inside my body. I wanted them to be the same suffering. When they reached the same point, it felt like pure equilibrium. It felt like home. On weekends when we didn’t have races, I cradled my Walkman and ran miles around my neighborhood. I don’t know if I thought the running would bring relief or make me feel satisfied without relief, but either way I finished as a heaving, sweating mess, and I thought of nothing but finding myself again. And then I found myself, and I was sad at the slightest touch. A can of beer on the television was enough to send my throat to my gut. My eyesight felt grayed around the edges.

I don’t know if you would have noticed that in me. Help is a funny word, because we don’t often say it. I’m going to say it now. I needed help. I need help. I don’t remember much about that first therapist. I remember that he was old, and kind. I remember taking the DC Metro there, out of the city where I lived and into Rockville, because I wanted to do it on my own. I remember not knowing what to say. I remember thinking I was broken. I remember wanting to be fixed. I remember thinking of it that way: that there was broken, and there was fixed. I remember leaving, and walking to the train. I remember highways and the singular anonymity of office buildings. I remember the way the world felt like the world does: too big. I remember the way I felt like I do: so small. I remember wanting an ending, thinking an ending would come. Some kind of feeling. Some sense of overcoming. It didn’t come.

***

Once, years ago, my father asked me to bend down to tie his shoes. I didn’t think much of it.

***

So much of our collective conception of the right kind of narrative has to do with ability. Most consumed stories of success have to do with setback and accomplishment. There is an arc to every conventional narrative. The setback — be it an injury, a fight, a loss — throws a wrench into the arc. But then the protagonist is reminded of their ability, and the arc resumes. It’s hard to find a widely-consumed narrative that does not fit this mold, a mold that labels injury as abnormality, aberrance, technical difficulty. Hello. Hi. Yes, you there. Is your life like this? Are you always soaring toward the top? Is injury just a small blip on the scope of your accomplishment? You don’t always feel like something is hurting? Really?

I wonder if our collective relationship and acknowledgement of injury is skewed because of the way mass-consumed sport is interwoven with trauma. The history of sport is a history of violence. Many nights of my own childhood were defined by the sound of Chris Berman’s voice on ESPN’s Sunday Night Football, going over the biggest tackles, hits, and sacks of the day. I ingested that without thought, relishing the amplified crunch of one human destroying another. Injuries in popular sports like football or basketball happen at once, suddenly, amid violence that ranges from a casual nudge to a visceral tackle. And though the consistent violence is a kind of trauma, the injuries are more acutely traumatic. A torn ACL. A concussion. A fracture. There are, in these sports, injuries that are “life-threatening,” “career-ending,” and “bone-breaking.” If these are the injuries we collectively witness, do they make us ignore the smaller, more ordinary injuries we walk around with on a daily basis? Sometimes I feel like I can’t admit my hurt.  

So many of my childhood memories of sport have to do with injury, often violent, sometimes even fatal. I can still recall the game where, while I was a catcher on my high school baseball team, an opposing team’s batter caught his cleat in a divot, tried to swing, and ended up forcing his kneecap out of its normal place until it wound up floating somewhere up in his thigh. I remember holding his shoulders as he squirmed. I remember Kevin Ware, the University of Louisville guard, and the stark white of his bone breaking through his skin. I’ve seen the countless replays of Bo Jackson’s career-ending hip injury and Joe Theismann’s broken leg. I spent many a night watching Mike Tyson knock people out. Sadly, I can’t erase the image of Dale Earnhardt’s fatal car crash, the hood flimsy and broken, like it was made of silk, not metal. And I’ve wound and rewound the footage of Derek Redmond’s father running out onto the Olympic track to help his son finish a 400-meter race after his hamstring gave out on international television.

As such, for a long time, I thought injury only happened one way: the crunch of one body against another. I thought injury had to make a sound. And I thought that sound had to be loud. In high school, I told the story of tripping over another runner’s heels during a cross country race and falling headlong into a root, suffering a concussion. I relished telling my friends who said running was not a “contact sport” about all the ways the metal on the bottom of a track spike could bloody a shin, all the bony elbows that would bruise ribs as people vie for position at the start of a crowded race. 

Injury can happen in the constant, repeated, hushed footfall of a sneaker against a park road in the predawn light, before a city knows it’s awake. Injury can happen in the words we say or don’t say, in all the little things we do. In his novel End Zone, Don DeLillo writes: “This is the custom among men who have failed to be heroes; their sons must prove that the seed was not impoverished.” The violence of sport allows for society, particularly men, to continually enact and reenact the process of achieving heroic status, and traumatic injuries allow for a kind of seriousness. Injury’s mythic status justifies risk. It allows for risk, and risk’s potential reward to exist as necessities on the pathway to success. But what do we ignore because of this? What do we live with as a result of this endless pursuit through, not away from, violence and stress?

***

Once, almost two decades ago, my father stood with me and my brother in an airport as we waited for my mother to come home from rehab. And then, a few years later, once more, too. 

***

My osteochondral lesion is a repetitive stress injury. It is not the result of some traumatic force. There was no singular moment when my cartilage fractured, and my body collapsed to the ground. It was the result of the everyday. Every day I woke up into an impending fracture. Every day I ran toward it. It was not violent until it was. It was lived-with. It was tolerated. I ran myself, as they say, into the ground. Why?

For my whole life, running served as my way to relieve myself of the stress of living in this world, a world that made me feel like not enough — or too much — at all times, a world that kept me in the in-between of who I was and who I thought I needed to be. I ran to feel in control of a life that sometimes never felt like my own. I ran to bring my parents back together. I ran to show my brother I loved him when there were years we hardly said a word to one another. I ran to lose weight when the world made me feel fat. I ran to feel loved. I ran to tell others that I wanted to be loved. I ran so far. I ran so fucking far. I have run around the world. And for what, for what, for what? Now, after all that running, I’m still here. And I cannot run at all. Where is the place for that in this world? Is there a word for being scared of the fact that you can no longer do what you do when you’re scared, and yet, you’re still scared all of the time?

One of the reasons running serves as such a stark and powerful metaphor is that there are so many things to run away from. I think of the worried and dreamy narrator in Tim O’Brien’s Going After Cacciato, and how he says: “It is one thing to run from unhappiness; it is another to take action to realize those qualities of dignity and well-being that are the true standards of the human spirit.” And I think, too, of how he asks: “If inner peace is the true objective, would I win it in exile?” So often, the contrast in this life is between inner happiness, or peace, and a life of stress and misery. We run from stress into a life of joy, somewhere, wherever it is. But what if we can’t? And what if that’s not a rhetorical question? 

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In her book The Unreality of Memory, Elisa Gabbert poses the thought: “I think sometimes that sadness, pain, and even suffering are part of happiness, that sadness and happiness are somehow alike.” If that is the case, which I think it is, how can we live with that? How can we not run away?

***

Once, years ago, my father walked up a flight of stairs by stepping two feet to every step, instead of one. I didn’t think much of it.

***

In May of 2010, Chris Solinsky, a muscular, powerful distance runner, ran 26:59 for 10,000 meters, breaking the American record in his first attempt at the distance. I was a freshman in college at the time. I wound and rewound that video. I watched it with my brother. We were astounded. Solinsky instantly became a star. That same year, Track & Field News interviewed him. When they asked, “How have you stayed injury free,” Solinsky said: “I’d say luck has a bit to do with it because I’ve trained pretty stupidly in the past, like I’ve just tried to push the limit as far as possible.” He continued: “Even when I tore my PCL last year the muscles around my knee were strong enough to hold it where my PCL almost wasn’t doing any work anyway. So even if I do get injured—knock on wood—it seems the body can compensate and help me keep training.”

A year later, after nearly three months of running weeks that totaled 120 or more cumulative miles, Solinsky tripped over his dog while walking down the stairs. Ninety percent of his hamstring tore right off his pelvic bone. He was never the same. In 2016, after years of trying to get back to the same Olympic-caliber shape of those previous years, Solinsky retired from track and field for good.

After my MRI, my physical therapist watched me squat. She felt me push my leg against her hand. She pushed down on my ankle as I pushed up. She said your hamstring isn’t firing. She said your entire posterior chain is weak. She said you’ve been compensating too much. She said your quad is working more than it ever should. She said your knee is being thrown this way and that.

It is compensation that causes a repetitive stress injury. The ways my body was trying to alleviate pain were the reasons why my femur, step after step, rammed itself hard against the top of my tibia until it fractured the cartilage meant to protect that impact. So many links built along the chain of protection, and so many links broken. My quads, without my permission or knowledge, became the dominant force of my upper legs. They overfired. They pushed and pulled my knee this way and that. They tried to do too much, to carry the whole load. They failed. They couldn’t do it anymore. They had to stop. They were a steam engine burnt out, smoke fogging up the tracks. It was compensation that ended Chris Solinsky’s career.  

In what ways are you, reading this, compensating right now? Are you gritting your teeth? How tight is your jaw? Have you thought about your shoulders? Are they by your ears? Are you walking as you read this? How hard is the grip of your hand around your phone? Are you on the train? Are you squeezing your legs together because you’d rather be invisible? When was the last time you breathed? Did you just breathe out? How did it feel, to be aware of that? Don’t worry. I’ve held my breath for the entirety of writing this paragraph. It is this act of compensation that allows us to walk, still, even though our backs are bent from all we carry in this world.

Sometimes, in therapy, my therapist will ask me a question that makes my eyes well up with tears. He’ll say what do you wish you could say to yourself as a child, and I won’t know the answer, even though I know that it will have something to do with love. When I had my first physical therapy session, my PT lodged her hand into my hip flexor. I felt like she was rooting around for my appendix. When she found my psoas — a little known but very important muscle that connects the spine to the hip — she gasped. So did I. You’re wound tighter than anyone I’ve ever worked on, she said. You must feel terrible.

***

Once, pushing 70, my father drove four hours to run a half-mile race on a track in New York City. He didn’t tell a soul.  

***

Why do we celebrate our ability to persist through stress? And how does such an ability endanger us to the consequences of stress, or keep us forever unwary of the risk such persistence continually places us within? I’m thinking not just of running, or of sport, but of the dogged persistence that is America’s hubris, a persistence that leaves us not just at risk of hurting our own individual selves, but also at risk of the disasters of climate change, the urgency of consumerism, and endless other fears. It is the failure to admit a small defeat so that we can prepare to fend off a bigger one. Oh, we are scared of retreat. I apologize for using the collective we. Maybe you are not. But I am. 

In his ProPublica article, “Climate Change Will Force a New American Migration,” Abrahm Lustgarten writes of pending mass migration due to climate change. Talking personally about rising sea levels in California, he writes: “The facts [of climate change] were clear and increasingly foreboding. Yet there were so many intangibles — a love of nature, the busy pace of life, the high cost of moving — that conspired to keep us from leaving. Nobody wants to migrate away from home, even when an inexorable danger is inching ever closer. They do it when there is no longer any other choice.” Earlier in the piece, he writes about California’s 2019 power blackouts, the moment he awoke to the dangers of not just climate change, but “imminent climate risk.” He writes: “When power was interrupted six more times in three weeks, we stopped trying to keep [our refrigerator] stocked. All around us, small fires burned. Thick smoke produced fits of coughing.” This is not a metaphor. 

One fact I know: There is certainly a future where there is, as Lustgarten writes, “no longer any other choice.” For the most vulnerable populations of the world, this is already the case. There are already climate refugees. There are prisoners fighting forest fires. When is the moment of collective realization of the ways in which our current compensations are only portending a future of something we cannot fix? Will it come? I am talking not just of climate change, but of human grace, of what it could mean to live in a world that resists the urgency of blame, of consumption, of solution-making. What could it mean to live in a world where we learn to recognize the ways in which we are individually hurting and then say: If I am hurting, you must be hurting too? 

In The Unreality of Memory, Gabbert writes that “only past disasters look 100 percent preventable.” She goes on to write: “Overreliance on the explanatory power of hubris is itself a form of hubris, a meta-hubris.” Similarly, in his book The Moth Snowstorm, Michael McCarthy closes one chapter with a long, at times hopeful, but ultimately sorrow-filled story about the failed attempt to return salmon to the historically polluted Thames. “The lessons, for me,” he writes, “are about our limits,” before concluding: “We can sometimes damage the natural world too severely for it to be repaired.” While reading these works about technological failure and natural disasters, climate change, and human hubris, I thought of those days, pain-ridden and groggy, when I got out of bed and said it’s alright, I can gut myself through another run, and I thought of the days, post-MRI and sore, when I hated that past self for its egotism, its impatience, its inability to admit my own vulnerability to injury. 

Now, I look at both selves and feel a deep sympathy. I wonder about the relentless drive in that first self, about the refusal to listen to pain, about how it equated rest with defeat. I think of how, in his poem “On Metal,” Jamaal May writes: “No one is happy to learn what an afternoon of chafed / knuckles, metal on skin, no longer solves.” I know how hard it is to sit down, to take a day off, to take — dare I say — a week. I know how much harder it is when the day off is a day of counted calories, a day of mirror images, a day of wishing you lived in a different, less vulnerable body. I hated those days. I would have rather been running through the pain. I’d have rather been limping. I’d have rather thrown every muscle into compensating, just so I could be in pursuit of something — whatever it was — than to be sitting in the stillness that I’d have to define, and, by defining, justify. I want to treat myself with more grace. I want the same for this world.

***

Once, my father seized up in pain for what seemed like no reason. He said it was nothing.

***

Twice a week now, I go to physical therapy in the evening. My body is prodded and my spine is bent and cracked. Fingers lodge into muscles, old wooden knots. I stand up and do small exercises to strengthen the muscles that stabilize my knee. I hold the smallest kettlebell in the world and rotate it around my torso as I balance on one leg. I wobble nonstop. Sometimes I fall, and my physical therapist catches me. I catch my own self in the mirror. I think I’ve gained weight. I imagine myself older, so old, impossibly old. I have some vague, undefined phrase in my head: I wish I was better, I wish I had been better, I wish I was, I wish I was. Everything I do now, I should’ve done, should’ve been doing, should have started and never stopped. 

One cruelty of this world is the way so many of the things we do to spare us from the cruelty of this world are also things that cause us harm. Our compensations relieve us from one form of injury but then cause another. How Sisyphean, I think. How cruel. And yet, if our bodies are to be used as metaphors, they will only be useful when we collectively listen to the lessons they are teaching us about the way we treat each other, or the earth, or anything remotely close to living. In what ways have I pushed my relationship with myself to the brink of it saying it’s too late? In what ways have we pushed the world to the same place? How many fractures must occur?

In another one of his poems, “Respiration,” Jamaal May writes: “So many of us are breathless, / you know, like me / kneeling to collect the pottery shards / of a house plant my elbow has nudged / into oblivion.” I think of those lines when I stub a toe, when something so small — a dropped fork — renders me almost on the verge of tears. There is a weight I am holding in that renders me breathless. It is the weight of the responsibility of work. The weight of miles I wish I had run. The weight of appearance, wealth, want, desire. I wish it were, always, the other way around. I wish I were breathless at the thought of the beauty of this world. I am sometimes. But I have to work at it.

***

Once, my father ran laps around my body for what seemed like years at a time, and, I imagined, years before that.

***

When I run, I don’t feel scared. I feel both in the world and out of it. I feel at once like I am apologizing and forgiving myself at the same time. I feel battered into freedom. Once, I left my grandmother’s house for a run along the shore of Lake Ontario. It was December, and the wind coming off the lake scattered what birds remained and chilled the air to something approaching zero. I wore shorts and ran along the side of Lake Shore Boulevard, where the snow warmed by the tires of cars collected, and started to freeze again. By the end of the run, the sides of my shoes were jagged with shards of ice that sliced and cut my calves with each stride. I know it is wrong to seek comfort in that kind of pain, but I seek comfort in that kind of pain. I don’t know what to do without it. I don’t just compensate when I run; I run as a compensation for my own life. I run because I am scared. I run because sometimes, in the morning, I wake up and don’t know how to live. When I run, at least, I know something about myself, for just a short time.

In therapy last week, I began the session by going on and on about my knee. I hadn’t told anyone else how angry it made me, how sad. I didn’t want people to think I was complaining about — what — not being able to run for a few months? I felt like Linus without his blanket. As I write this, I am worried about losing my preferred form of coping to deal with the stress that comes simply with being alive. The stress so many people face, not just of living, but of working to live, and not just of working to live, but of working to live in a year plagued by pandemic, a year where I ride the subway to the school where I teach and look differently at each passenger, wondering if I am safe, if they are, if we are, collectively. I used to watch people’s faces. Now I can only watch people’s eyes. They are almost always looking down.

During that session, my therapist nodded and let me speak. By the time I was done, I wasn’t talking about my knee. I was talking about my mom, who left my family after years of struggling with addiction. I said: When I think about my mom now, I think about how often I centered myself and my family as a victim of her addiction. I said: We felt helpless. But then I said: I wish I had thought about how sad she must have been. This is the kernel of pain that everything in my life comes back to. This is the injury of my life. I imagine, perhaps, that you have one too.

Part of being alive in this world is becoming aware of a specific kind of sadness. It is why I am drawn to Gabbert’s quote that “sadness and happiness are somehow alike.” In Marilynne Robinson’s Home, there is a moment when Old Boughton — the father of the wayward, prodigal Jack — says to Jack: “I always felt it was sadness I was dealing with, a sort of heavyheartedness.” He is talking to Jack about his behavior as a child, someone who would always run away, leave home without saying goodbye, until one day he ran away and didn’t return for 20 years. His father says, a few sentences later: “I should have known how to help you with it.” 

Earlier in the novel, Jack’s sister Glory looks at him and thinks: “He was so practiced at reciting what he was also practiced at rejecting.” I think of that line often now — both when I consider myself and when I consider the world. For all I have written about addiction, I still have a pack of cigarettes hidden inside a coat pocket in my closet. For all I have written about self-love, I still hold my gut between my index finger and my thumb. 

What does it mean, to ask for help? Where does it come from, this dogged, so American persistence? Sometimes, if I want to cry, I put on this forlorn outtake of The Band’s song, “Twilight,” sung by Richard Manuel, a man overcome and felled by addiction with a voice straight out of some unpublished Bible. “Don’t leave me alone in the twilight,” he sings, “twilight is the loneliest time of day.”

Do you ever talk about your pain? Are you lonely? Which inner muscle of your heart is working too hard to compensate for the other muscles of your heart? Do you sometimes feel like you have to go all night? Are you running on empty? How much mileage lives in your fumes? Can you make it? Do you want to ask for help? Do you know how? 

***

Once, my father held me in the middle of a marathon when I told him I didn’t think I could finish. He didn’t tell me to stop and didn’t tell me to continue. He just held me.

***

There is a sadness we are all dealing with. There is a heavyheartedness. And there is a part of us, I believe, that thinks it knows or should know how to help ourselves through it. The fact of injury is a kind of reckoning. Collectively, it is a kind of reckoning with what we have done to the world, and a reckoning with who is not given a choice to save themselves from suffering and who is privileged enough to cope. Personally, it is a reckoning with the thousands of dollars I’ve spent on running shoes and race entrance fees. A reckoning with the cumulative days logged on spin bikes and StairMasters in the time I’ve spent rehabbing from stress fractures and syndromes. A reckoning with what I don’t tell a soul, the pre-dawn walks when I can’t get a run in, the whiskey in the afternoon, the body I can’t escape. 

I have no idea how to cope with this. How do you compensate when you can no longer do what you do to compensate? That’s why, perhaps, I am writing this from a place of injury. And even that act of writing is a kind of compensation, my own form of distancing, my own form of self-control.

In Home, Jack’s sister, Glory, frustrated at the end of the novel, says to Jack: “If you’d just let us help you.” By that point, you know enough about Jack to know that he won’t. There is, I imagine, a little bit of Jack in all of us. A little bit, in each of us, that thinks we can get it done on our own. A little bit, in each of us, that thinks the help of others is a smudge on our record. A little bit, in each of us, that wants, for whatever reason, to be distinct from those we see as being one of many in a crowd. When I go for a run, I feel like Jack: lonely but free, wholly my own self, just slightly distant from the rules of both physics and society.

When professional runners are injured, they often have access to tools that heighten their recovery. One popular tool is the AlterG treadmill, an anti-gravity treadmill that eliminates the stress and resistance of running in a world with gravity. When I was hurt in college, I would go into the pool with a floating device around my hip and run in place, treading water, for an hour at a time. I’ve watched countless videos of elite athletes rehabbing their repetitive stress injuries in a small, insulated chamber literally devoid of the stress of this world. I look, jealous and fixated, at their feet bounding. One of those treadmills can cost as much as $75,000. That much money, to create a place where your feet can run without the risk of re-injury. And how much for a life that can be lived stress free? 

Perhaps there is no life that can be lived stress free. Perhaps we learn this from our bodies, which bear the burden of our stress more than we know. When my father, at the almost age of 74, had both of his hips replaced during the same surgery in the summer of 2018, I took off time from work and went down to be with him. For a week, I woke him up and held his hand on the walk to the bathroom. I scratched his legs and put his socks on in the morning. I felt like a disciple. I felt like I was doing something biblical with my work. But what I remember the most is seeing him in the hospital not long after the surgery. He was in the bed and he looked so old. I wanted to cry. I hated hospitals. I loved my father. I said: What’s next, dad?  And he said: I have to get up soon, to walk. I did not believe it. 

There is a part of me that wants to end the essay here, to hold this up as an example of persistence and resilience, to say he walked, and he was saved, but really I am growing tired of that metaphor. I wanted him to rest. He said: I have to, if I don’t, none of this will work. This was true for his body, which needed its new self to set into its old self. The truth is, my father needed two new hips because, for 74 years, he had been alive. The truth is, injury is not an exception to the narrative. Injury is, for each of us, the narrative. Sometimes survival is just surrender. Sometimes, there is a sadness we are each dealing with. A heavyheartedness. Perhaps you, like me, feel it in your bones. Perhaps you are hurt like I am. It’s okay. 

I want to tell you again: It’s okay.

***

Devin Kelly is the author of In This Quiet Church of Night, I Say Amen (published by Civil Coping Mechanisms) and the co-host of the Dead Rabbits Reading Series. He is the winner of a Best of the Net Prize, and his writing has appeared or is forthcoming in The Guardian, LitHub, Catapult, DIAGRAM, Redivider, and more. He lives and teaches high school in New York City.

***

Editor: Krista Stevens

This story was funded by our members. Join Longreads and help us to support more writers.

Deenie Hartzog-Mislock | Longreads | April 2020 | 13 minutes (3,341 words)

About two years ago, I stopped feeling beautiful. Around that time, my husband stopped touching me. “I don’t feel sexy,” I told our therapist from the gray, tufted chenille seat adjacent to my husband’s. I kneaded a wet tissue, worn into holes, between my thumbs. “When he doesn’t touch me, it makes me feel bad about my body. And then I treat my body poorly, and then I hate the way I look and feel.”

I knew better. I knew our lack of sexual intimacy wasn’t about the soft, expanding skin that stubbornly clung to my midsection, or my thighs, so much thicker, dimplier now than they used to be, my entire shape a soft, aging pear. So different from what it was when I was a dancer in college, spending whole days in pale pink tights — when I was leaner, younger. I knew this was about him, his childhood (always the childhood), his work, and his insecurities. But I needed my therapist’s advice. After two years of starts and stops, his reasons for not wanting to have sex, however valid, floated from his mouth and immediately vaporized into thick, gray clouds that followed me around, threatening to dampen my self-esteem at any moment.

It’s my body, isn’t it? Do you not love me anymore? Through the dim light of our bedroom, after another botched attempt to physically pull him out from under the emotional weight he couldn’t seem to escape, I would ask these loaded questions while tears careened down my cheeks and onto the crumpled sheets between us. No, I love your body, he’d say. Of course I still love you. But I didn’t believe him. And sometimes I still don’t.

***

We weren’t always like this. Nine years into our relationship, five years into marriage, as tensions arose financially and professionally; as the prospect of starting or not starting a family became difficult to ignore; as expectations and rifts in his identity grew more tenuous; our sex life dissipated. After a few months, I was angry, frustrated.

Then my husband disappeared into himself entirely. He stopped smiling. His laughter ceased to echo. I retreated into work. We shifted around one another. Months passed. We went to therapy. Once or twice he accepted my plea for sex, disguised as an invitation, but it was different now. Like a chore he’d been asked to complete. Each time we danced around the prospect of physical intimacy, I could feel his tension rising like the upward turning of a volume knob. More months passed. The New Year came and went. I pointed out the last time we’d had sex. “I’m well aware how long it’s been,” he said.

“You know, intimacy comes in many forms,” our therapist said as she handed us a large, artfully illustrated sex therapy guide, thinking we could get “inspired” by looking at the visuals. Thanks, but I know what a blowjob looks like.

I’ve quietly cried myself to sleep in bed next to him. I’ve cried in front of him at restaurants, in our kitchen, and in the car; alone in the hallway and outside with the dog. I’ve ceremoniously lost my shit, yelling about all the other men I’ve dreamt of sleeping with — celebrities, that shirtless guy in my yoga class, the faceless composites of men who can give me the one thing in fantasy that my husband no longer offers me in reality: desire.

“If you really want to have sex with me, like you say you do, then wouldn’t you just do it?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he said. “But it’s not that simple.”

I’ve tried nearly everything to buy us more time — tended to my emotional wounds with long outdoor walks, gone away from him for weeks to focus on my writing, extended vacations with girlfriends — because I married a good man. A responsible, kind, loyal man with a big heart; my creative equal. I make sense of the world through words. He does it through music. And when I hear him in his studio, plucking strings and punching pedals, making ambient sounds that permeate every corner of our home, I know he’s trying to say what he can’t articulate verbally — or physically. So I stay on the sidelines, crying, dreaming, waiting.

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I can’t accept that sex should be this complicated between two people who love each other, who’ve been having satisfying sexual experiences for years. Why can’t you just have sex with me? I cry at how pathetic it sounds to ask him this. It makes me feel like a child asking for candy in the grocery store, ashamed because I already know the answer.

I can’t accept that my husband is allowed to be unhappy and that it has nothing to do with me, the woman who has been tasked to keep him happy. That his unhappiness — not his love for me — has stripped him of all desires, and not just for sex, for life, too. No, I’ve believed that there is something wrong with me, with the way my body must feel in his hands, against him, because that’s what women have been led to believe all our lives. It’s our fault.

I recognize that I have fallen prey to two very dangerous and false ideas: That men are expected to desire sex always, in perpetuity, and that their masculinity is defined by this. Secondly, that arousal is subject solely to physical appearance. But the logic necessary to dismantle false ideas is rarely anywhere to be found when you’re near ready to detonate your life.

***

“I want you to do something every day that makes you feel sexy, all on your own,” our therapist said. I thought to myself about all those fantasy men. I don’t think that’s what she had in mind when she said, “all on your own.”

“What makes you feel sexy?” she asked.

“Being active,” I said. “After a run or a hot yoga class, when I’m covered in sweat. I feel sexy when I feel strong.”

When my muscles feel as though I’ve stretched them to the furthest corner of my skin, it puts me back in my body like when I was a dancer — the feeling that breath, brain, and limbs are a cohesive, connected system. In duets, I loved the way our shapes curled against one another, the elegant, tactile nature of handling a torso, the way we’d bend and sway, passing our weight back and forth with nothing between us but a thin black leotard. Back then the flick of a wrist conjured enough emotion to crack the ceiling; the soar of a grand jeté or the scooping gesture of a deep plié were centered, focused manifestations of something bigger than me. My body was a conduit for feeling, but also a disposal of it. “Use it, or leave it at the door,” my dance instructor used to say. So I used it on the floor. I moved through it.

“Also, I feel sexy when he thinks I’m sexy,” I said looking to my husband. “How fucked up is that?” I asked her. “I’ve believed, all this time, that I’m only as beautiful as he thinks I am.”

***

Appearances, especially those of the body, were not something I was taught to value, at least directly. Though in the deep south of the 1980s, that’s exactly what one was subconsciously taught to use as a standard of self worth. But I was a chubby, energetic kid, so I was lauded for other traits, like good grades. I was taught the importance of being a kind and moral person. I got laughs for being funny. I was quirky. My family raised me to be confident at every age and size, surrounded by a slew of Lebanese aunts who would have told me I was gorgeous if I had the face and body of a groundhog.

My weight fluctuated dramatically all my life; I’ve cycled through more denim digits than I can count. Attention for my appearance didn’t come until I grew older — until I got skinny. In college, when I was throwing up cheeseburgers in order to compete, aesthetically, with the other dancers, men and women praised me for dropping down to a size 0. I was so thin I could pull on a pair of jeans, button and zip them, and slip them right off, gliding past my bony hips that way. It was such a novelty it might as well have been a party trick. I’d never been so small, and the message I received was not new or revolutionary, but it was simple and powerful: The thinner I was, the more positive attention I received. Even then, though, I was never as thin as the best dancers. My meaty ass still got in the way of my arabesque.

I stopped dancing a couple of years after I graduated in 2005, when I moved to New York City. All those years obsessing over my size had exhausted me. I stopped reading books like Diet For Dancers, which recommended diet plans as low as 1,000 calories a day (after a day of rehearsal!). I saw a health coach to reeducate myself on how to be a non-dancer living in the world of wellness. I skipped workouts. I started eating French fries. (Gasp!) My shape changed again, and this time, I allowed it to. I just wanted to be normal, to stop calculating the number of calories in every bite and how many God-Awful-Boring-Hours-On-An-Elliptical I’d have to endure to lose it. I thought, finally, I could be content with my body.

***

Now, in my late 30’s, the prime of my youth has passed, and time continues to show me what it can do to an aging body, breasts, and skin. My features, the ones men once admired, have changed — less taut, less petite, less lean everywhere. At my best, I’m unconcerned, grateful for a strong, feminine figure. But old habits die hard.

In the absence of sex, I’ve been frustrated that men do not look at me the way they used to. And yet, furious that I care at all. What angers me more than the south-sloping evolution of my physical identity is that the very people I seek approval from are the people I want to educate, whose hold over me I want to diminish, whose minds I want to change: Men. When I catch their eyes, I get a familiar shiver of exhilaration, a feeling I’ve known ever since I was old enough to understand it: Power.

“You know,” I told my husband a few years after we married, “I seek nearly all my validation from you now. Just you.” I used to get it from strangers on the subway, in bars and restaurants, on the street. I collected glances from men and used them as ammo for my self-esteem. It’s not that I think we ought to stop flirting after marriage (puh-lease). But I thought that by drawing the bulk of my physical validation from my husband, by focusing my efforts in one place, I’d be less likely to stray in this marathon of a relationship. The problem: Drawing validation from somewhere that is not self-generating, but a fallible external source like another human, is as likely to disappoint as the series finale of Game of Thrones.

In a world where women are made to feel that we are lesser than, weaker than, we are often taught that sex and appearance are our only weapons with which to compete — and it’s pervasive: in the workplace, on social media, even in politics. I don’t disagree with using sexuality as one way to move through this world. The issue is that society has made this our primary mode of leverage, and if we exist or age outside of society’s prescribed standards of beauty — narrow ideas about age, race, shape, size — we often lose our perceived power. As single women, as wives, as figures of desire.

Is this not the most backwards shit you’ve ever heard? And still we are told that in order to be deemed sexually desirable by the world, we must fall within a range of an acceptable prototype. Does the world not gauge us based on size (among other things) with a scale that ranges from “hot” to “socially accepted,” and then a quick phase out to “invisible”?

Cellulite! Back fat! For many women, these are the most natural characteristics of the female body — as natural as giving birth, as growing old — and yet, somewhere along the way, through so many forms of messaging, we were taught they were unnatural and meant to be concealed. Mainstream media is moving at a crawl to be more inclusive. Be Yourself! they say. But look gorgeous (and effortless!) while you do it! Don’t care what other people think! they proclaim. But only if you look how we want you to look. Otherwise you’ll be trolled.

***

Gen Z-ers are growing up in a world drastically more body positive than the one I was brought up in, but I wonder what it will take to rewire my history? My inner dialogue must be the most toxic, damaging aspect of my conundrum, one so deep-seated I couldn’t possibly trace its origin — though perhaps it was cemented the day another fourth grader, a boy, called me fat in front of the class. Or each time I bought into the lie that this dress will be the one that makes me love my body.

The amount of time, energy, and money most women spend trying to change their form or conceal their shape is certifiably ludicrous. If we materialized the physical insecurities of every woman and spread them out like a blanket over the earth, would they cover more ground than all the oceans combined? I want desperately to be free of guilt, shame, and failure around the expansion and reshaping of my form, but there is a man’s voice in the back of my head reminding me that soon enough, I will fade into his periphery.

In Shrill, Lindy West brilliantly articulated a larger frustration when she wrote, “When you raise every woman to believe that we are insignificant, that we are broken, that we are sick, that the only cure is starvation and restraint and smallness; when you pit women against one another, keep us shackled by shame and hunger, obsessing over our flaws rather than our power and potential; when you leverage all of that to sap our money and our time — that moves the rudder of the world. It steers humanity toward conservatism and walls and the narrow interests of men, and it keeps us adrift in waters that are secondary to men’s pleasure and convenience.”

***

So, OK fine, fuck the world. And the patriarchy. But what happens when we turn into our most intimate relationship — our long-term partnership or marriage — the one that is not of the world, but made of our deepest, most sacred selves, and we are rejected sexually? Where do we have to go? How long can I maintain unwavering pride in a body deemed unfuckable by the one person I threw in all my chips for? In sexlessness, it’s been impossible for me not to recall the validation I received back in college, impossible not to wonder, If I make myself smaller, will he see me?

In a quest for balance, I avoid wellness propaganda that exists for the wrong reasons. I don’t care about summer-body six packs. I just want to put on a pair of pants without feeling as though I’m a moral failure for allowing them to tug so passionately across my hips. I don’t subscribe to routines that encourage scales, measurements, and restriction. I am thoughtful about the language I use around food and fitness, careful not to encourage thinness or dieting. I want to be educated on every body’s struggles with self-image, and understand how I can help create a world in which narrow, specific ideals of beauty are no longer the norm. I want to stop thinking about my body so much.

And yet, I don’t wear shorts because I hate my legs. I’d rather wear a bedazzled Glad bag with drawstring ties than a body-skimming dress that might — God forbid — reveal the pillow of my belly in its entirety. Once a friend of my father’s, while slightly inebriated, told me he saw a photo in which it looked like I’d “eaten too much strawberry shortcake.” I was too shocked to tell him to fuck off. And now I think about it every time I wear that pair of jeans.

If, at my thickest, men do not see me, I default to old habits of blaming myself. If my husband doesn’t touch me, I am certain it’s because he is repulsed by the idea of getting in bed with a skin-toned marshmallow. Regardless of how beautiful I find my shape and size to be in all its iterations, I don’t know what to believe about my body if someone is not telling me what they think about it. And with that, I am perpetrating a toxic cycle that won’t change until I do.

I am honest with my husband about my struggles. I don’t know what else to do, or how to move past a lifetime of body image trauma without first acknowledging it in front of someone I trust. My therapist will continue to insist this is intimacy. While I know she’s technically right, I scoff at this soft-core emotional foreplay. There are only so many hours we can spend hashing out our emotional hang ups, only so many nights I can fight my disappointment as he kisses my shoulder and then turns his back to me, again, uninterested in what my body has to offer.

I want a physical conversation. I want him to be greedy with me. I want to feel the weight of his body without the weight of his anxiety. I want it to be easy. I want to pretend that marriage is not so complicated. I want to be back in the dance studio, sliding limbs across limbs. I want to be yanked by their hands, flung into their arms, hooked by my ribcage.

***

“Would you be up for trying something a little different?” my therapist asked in one of our last sessions. God, what was she going to ask us to do now? We’d already been asked to hop into the driver’s seat of an imaginary car to revisit our childhood selves; point to basic emotions on a laminated piece of paper; and gaze, unflinchingly, into each other’s eyes without laughing.

“Uh, sure.”

She sat us on the floor with our backs touching and our sitz bones stacked on a pillow.

“I want you to move slowly back and forth, keeping your backs aligned.” She spoke in a soft, soothing tone. “Move left and right, and forward if you like, supporting the weight of each other as you move.” And we did.

I could have swayed like that forever, his weight propped against me. For once, he held no tension in his neck. He did not resist me when I pushed my spine into his. He followed the curve of me when I leaned forward, releasing his body onto mine. For a moment, I was back in the dance studio, back in my body. Afterwards my therapist asked how that made us feel. “It made me feel beautiful,” I told her.

Back in the tufted chenille chairs she asked what we were thinking; what did we want from the future? I said I wanted more surrender from him. He said he was working on articulating his more complicated feelings, on expressing them instead of hiding them. Just as I was about to move on to the next thing, my husband interjected. “And healing.” He turned his piercing blue eyes onto me. “It’s about healing.”

* * *

Deenie Hartzog-Mislock is a writer and copy director living in Los Angeles.

Editor: Sari Botton

This story was funded by our members. Join Longreads and help us to support more writers.

Susan Shapiro | Longreads | February 2020 | 28 minutes (7,036 words)

Rushing to see him that Friday evening in August, I turned the corner and was shocked to catch Haley leaving his brownstone. What the hell was she doing here? I prayed my eyes were wrong and it was another tall redhead, not my favorite student. Inching closer, I saw it definitely was her — in skinny jeans, heels and a pink blouse, her unmistakable auburn hair flapping down her back as she flounced away. I froze, so crushed I couldn’t breathe.

Darting inside, I shrieked, “I just saw Haley walk out of here. You lied to me!”

“I never lied to you,” he insisted, quickly closing his door.

“Don’t tell me you’re sleeping with her?”

“Of course not.” He looked horrified.

He wasn’t my lover, cheating with a younger woman. He was the long-term therapist who’d saved me from decades of drugs, alcohol, and self-destruction. I couldn’t believe that right before our session, Dr. Winters had met with my protégée, whom I’d loved like a daughter. For the past three years, she’d sat in my classroom, living room, beside me at literary events, and speed walking around the park. She was the only person I’d ever asked him not to see, and vice versa. I felt betrayed from both sides.

Earlier that day, Haley had emailed to see if I’d recommend my gynecologist, housekeeper and literary agency. “Want my husband too?” I’d joked. In the spring, when I’d first sensed she was ransacking my address book and life, I’d asked Dr. Winters about the eerie All About Eve aura.

“She sounds nuts,” he’d said.

“That’s your clinical assessment?” I asked, adding “Don’t be flippant. She’s important to me.”

He’d sworn he wouldn’t treat her, laughing off my paranoia.

Now I could barely speak as I realized she’d broken her vow. And he’d let her in, giving her the slot directly before mine, then ran late, as if he wanted me to catch her. Perched at the edge of his leather couch, I imagined Haley sitting right where I was, leaning on the embroidered cushions, spilling secrets she’d previously shared only with me to my confidante. His plush work space morphed from my safest haven for 15 years into the creepy crawly Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.

“Then why was she here?” I couldn’t process her so out of context.

“That woman is not my patient,” he insisted.

His technical wordplay sounded like Bill denying Monica. I craved a drink, joint, and cigarette.

The charming acolyte, who’d reminded me of me, hadn’t been harmlessly competitive, as I’d rationalized. She’d ruthlessly conspired to be my replacement, and succeeded. She’d somehow become my rival, whom Dr. Winters preferred. She was 20 years younger, prettier, breezier. At 29, her youth mocked me. A time machine was suddenly transforming me into a distorted funhouse reflection of myself, like the actor in the Truffaut film “Two English Girls” shocked by seeing his image in the car window, yelling “I look old!” I went from hip urban success story to pathetic, needy middle-aged, hair-dyeing wannabe.

On my way to his West 9th Street office, wearing a flowery summer skirt, T-shirt and sandals instead of my all-black armor, I’d felt lighter, envisioning how proud he’d be when I handed him the first signed copy of my novel, hidden in my purse. After spying Haley, my world twisted darker.

“You’re not having an affair with her?” I asked, recalling she’d recently split with her fiancé.

“No, of course not. I would never touch a patient,” Dr. Winters insisted.

“Aha. You just called her your patient!” I yelled, all the impulse control he’d taught me flouncing down the street with Haley. “Is she paying to see you? Or not?”

“I am not her official therapist,” he repeated, sitting down.

“You’re arguing semantics?” I yelled.

He should have been straight and said, “I need the money,” or “I’m sick of your boring issues. I want new blood.” I could have handled honesty. If I understood, I’d forgive him anything. I respected his candor. Once, when I asked why he called me his “most taxing patient,” he told me: “You have a chronic anxiety level connected to a hyperactive mind that’s plugged into an analytic level of consciousness. There’s no rest or rhythm. It’s all high-pitch. There’s a continual idiosyncratic intensity that’s exhausting.”

Captivated by his weirdly apt description of me, I’d scrawled it down in my notebook and quoted my personalized diagnosis everywhere, like an alibi to get me out of acting normal.

I knew I’d relied too heavily on Dr. Winters. With his short, brown hair and glasses, he was nerdily handsome like my chain-smoking Midwest dad, but 20 years younger. The shrink who’d helped me nix nicotine dressed more fastidiously, in khakis, buttoned shirts tucked in and slim ties. At 6 feet and 160 pounds (I asked), he was also thinner and more diet obsessed than Dad (or anyone in my family.) Perhaps that was why Dr. Winters could help me give up all my bad habits — including the Juicy Fruit gum I’d chewed compulsively post-cigarettes, joints and vodka. I’d even lost weight while giving up tobacco, which felt miraculous. When he advised me to “depend on people, not substances,” I told him that a feminist dependent on a sexist male like himself was ridiculous.

“To stay clean, you have to trust me,” he’d said. A chain smoker himself for 20 years, he confided that his mother was a raging alcoholic who chose booze over him. Softened by the disclosure, I lost my skepticism, anointing him my sage, sponsor, and higher power, though he was only eight years my senior. As I battled what he called “the worst nicotine withdrawal in history,” he taught me to “suffer well.”

While I relinquished my toxic habits, he revamped my existence: pushing Jake to propose, helping me land more teaching gigs and book deals in my 40s, tripling my income. When my dad trashed my memoirs, Dr. Winters said, “He’s threatened. He’ll come around to seeing how important your work is.” He urged me to teach, do charity, “Err on the side of generosity.” In his office-sanctuary, he was the WASP rabbi I confessed to with religious devotion. “Everything is too important to you,” he declared. If I felt snubbed, he said, “The slight is never your imagination but then you overreact.” Was I overreacting now? I couldn’t ask him or be rational when he was the one I was slighted by. The only compulsion I was still addicted to was him.

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What happened when your crisis management strategy became your crisis? With our trust broken, my sobriety and success could unravel, my fierce reliance on him going haywire.

“This deceptive mind game is counterproductive.” I tried to breathe.

“I’m not playing mind games. I don’t lie.” He crossed his legs, ruffled.

“I just can’t fucking believe Haley was here,” I said.

“I don’t want to talk about it anymore.”

“What happened to ‘Always lead the least secretive life?’” It felt like he was parodying his mantra, which I’d repeated in my classes and books, like a chanting Moonie. I imagined tossing a chair through his window, shattering glass on his gray carpet, storming out for good. But after 15 years, I needed an explanation. Plus he’d charge me $200 for the appointment regardless.

“Is this about finances?” I demanded, recalling his fee was higher for new patients.

“If you don’t like how I run my practice, let’s cancel all your sessions,” he snapped.

I winced. I had an intense, unconventional link with Dr. Winters, but this threat was out of character. Sensing I’d been deceived by the doctor who knew everything about me, I never felt so abandoned or vulnerable. Being trustworthy was his job.

Had I been deluded to believe I was important to him? He’d shown me poetry about his abusive mother. He’d described being distraught when his Battery Park townhouse was destroyed in the 9/11 attacks. He answered my emails quickly. Unlike my real dad, he loved my work. We’d discussed one day co-authoring a substance abuse book together. My best friend Claire viewed our rapport as inappropriate. I argued that addiction therapy was unorthodox. I was convinced I was special, more like a colleague he confided in, a prized pet, his star protégée, the way Haley had been mine.

“You realize you colluded with my student to deceive me?” I asked.

“I hope you can forgive the imaginary crime you envision I’ve committed,” he sneered.

I was stung by this sarcastic non-apology. “I didn’t imagine you’d treat the one person you agreed not to. Haley’s a former student now in my private writing group. She’s my exercise buddy and good friend…”

“That woman is not your friend,” he interrupted.

“What the hell does that mean?” The thought of Haley as my enemy poured gasoline onto my heart-flames. His statement was out of line on so many levels, my brain was exploding. “So she was just sitting here, trashing me?” I asked, mind-fucked, tangled in an Oedipal tornado that wouldn’t stop spinning.

“Susan, what do you want from me?”

“An apology for screwing up, and an end to this disturbing triangle. Can’t you refer her to someone else?”

“You don’t tell me which patients I see,” he yelled. “It’s my institute. You don’t control my baby!”

I’d never heard him raise his voice or refer to his practice that way. Now it was official: The person in charge of healing my psyche was even crazier than I was.

***

When I met Haley in my feature journalism course three years before, her beauty was hidden under overalls and a fishing hat. “Lighting Up rocked my world,” she said with a Southern twang as we went around the room, introducing ourselves. “I knew your husband Jake when I studied at NYU. The best professor there.”

Man, this chick aced Networking 101. I was a 46-year-old childless teacher known only within my 12-block radius; her flattery was intoxicating. The memoir she cited chronicled my extraordinary treatment with Dr. Winters, the dashing rule-breaker who’d let me explore in print his provocative disclosures about the violent alcoholic mother who hated him. Some critics felt it made his ardent theories credible. Others branded him a renegade for sharing personal details with a patient. Yet he was the only one who could rid me of the toxic habits I’d wrestled with since I was a teen. He was my “core pillar,” as he called it, along with my husband, a curly-haired charmer addicted only to me.

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I’d been jolted by Dr. Winters’ move to Arizona the year before. Our twice weekly sessions switched to monthly, when he’d fly to New York. Jake took a gig as a producer with long hours on a TV cop drama. Having given up my scene of drinkers and partiers, I was lonely. “Just when you think you lost everything, you find you have even more to lose,” Bob Dylan sang. I was so substance-restricted, when my best friend Claire came to town she asked, “Hey, let’s go out and get some water.”

“Teach more,” Dr. Winters had advised. “You’re doing good in the world.”

Teaching at night became a balm for social isolation, especially since students chronicled their estrangements and emptiness. For my assignment on “your most humiliating secret,” Haley wrote how she and her fiancé spent a year buying her fantasy downtown loft, but broke up an hour after they moved in. She was the first to sell her piece to an editor who spoke to our class. Yet some time between rough draft and publication, she changed her last line about the breakup to “I finally found my true home.”

“What happened to your original ending?” I asked.

“We got back together. You said in nonfiction, you can’t lie,” she told me.

“If you stay in past tense, you’re not lying,” I said, not one for corny endings.

A week later Haley brought her fiancé to my Cooper Union event. Donald was tall, slim, well dressed. In her miniskirt and heels, with makeup and wearing her red hair down, she was a bombshell. She followed me to the ladies’ room. “I saw you at another panel here a year ago,” she confided, tinting her lips pinker in the mirror. “The way you showed off about your successful students made me want to study with you. So I tracked you down.” I was just moderating the star literary headliners. To Haley, I was the rock star.

Months after my six-week course ended she requested one of my walk-and-talk office hours, speed walking around Washington Square Park.

“Sue, can I ask you something?”

“Sure.”

She fired off questions about how I’d quit addictions, and found my husband, agent and editor for my upcoming autobiographical comic novel. Haley wanted my life. I did too — at least the external, effortless version. I urged her to lose alcohol and her non-committal rich guy, and make her own money. I recommended her for an assistant newspaper editor job she wound up landing. She thanked me by buying the essays of several current students, making my new class exciting.

That season I missed my husband — always on the set — along with my best friend, Claire, and my shrink, both now thousands of miles away. Haley’s fiancé was jetting off on foreign business, leaving her alone too. She worked only 20 hours a week. She joined the private workshop I ran from home, line editing my rough drafts. After each session, she’d stay to teach me yoga while discussing which of my pages she’d liked best.

My novels had been rejected since I was her age — until this one, inspired by my obsessive quest to find a local weekly replacement for Dr. Winters, screening eight shrinks in eight days. Instead of Speed Dating, I’d been Speed Shrinking. Finally selling my fictional debut with that title, I felt reborn. I went out every evening, handing out postcards with the aqua cover of a girl on a couch in a row of eight different shrink sofas. I turned Haley on to the old guard, whispering “Dan was the New Yorker editor I worked with in the ’80s.” She brought young lions to meet me, saying “Kurt’s the new book editor at newyorker.com. You have to speak to Sue’s class.” We were the perfect literati-hunting team. I gave her gravitas; she made me hipper. Book events (where nobody smoked, drank or ate) bored everyone I knew — except Haley. She was insatiable for fame and my attention, which she seemed to have conflated.

Once, teaching me to instant message on Facebook, she called my landline while texting me, our wires all literally crossing. If we didn’t speak for a day, she’d email “I need my Sue-fix,” like I needed my daily dose of Dr. Winters. I didn’t see I was shifting my codependence on him and Claire to Haley.

When Haley said she wanted to do something special for her 29th birthday in May, I suggested she throw herself a party in her spacious home, a rare commodity in our suffering artist scene. My urban frontier days, where dozens of poets crammed into my old 300 square-foot studio for free beer and popcorn, were a far cry from the possibilities in her Lower East Side penthouse duplex with a wrap-around terrace. I looked forward to a late bash I didn’t have to plan, finance, or schlep to Brooklyn for. “Come early,” she emailed. “I need your eye.”

At 9 p.m., I stepped from the elevator into her majestic 2,500 square-foot palace, taking in the chic minimalism. Clearly her fiancé paid for the luxury pad. She hugged me, wearing cut-off shorts, high heels, and a glittery top.

“Sue! You’re here! I’m so psyched you came!” she gushed like I was a dignitary.

“You look hot,” I said, handing her a Strand bag filled with books, crudités, hummus, cheese and crackers.

“Thank you, Jewish mother,” she laughed as a few others she’d hired to help dribbled in to set up.

Haley unwrapped my gift, the novels High Maintenance and Little Stalker by my colleague Jennifer Belle since Haley too wanted to write urban fiction. “And here’s a signed advance copy of my book, like you requested.”

“Wow. I’m so honored. I can’t wait to read it.”

“There’s still some mistakes,” I said. “And you’ve seen it in the group 10 times.”

“But not in print. What a rave in PW! Is that why you look so pretty and lit up?”

I smiled, feeling youthful and festive in my swingy summer skirt and high sandals. “When I sent the review to my mom, she said ‘Go ahead, tell the whole world you’re in therapy.’” I used a Yiddish accent.

“My mom says that too! ‘All you crazy New Yorkers with your therapists,’” Haley said, mimicking her mother’s Alabama twang. “Sue, can I ask you something? Do you really think that without Dr. Winters you wouldn’t be sober, published and married?”

I nodded, sensing something wrong. “Where’s Donald?” I glanced up the winding staircase.

“After we had a fight, he jetted off to Belize this morning,” she said.

On her birthday? Damn him. The timing of his exit before her big soiree made their romantic troubles seem melodramatic. Then again, my best party at her age was motivated by the loss of my heart to a sociopathic biographer I’d also stupidly moved in with too soon.

“I keep begging Donald to try couples therapy,” she said, looking fragile.

“Jake only tried when I walked out on him,” I told her. “What did Paula say?” I’d recommended my old therapist, Paula Goode, who Haley was seeing. “Remember ‘Love doesn’t make you happy. Make yourself happy. Then you’ll find love,’” I said, quoting Paula.

“Last night in bed I was reading Donald the scene in your memoir where Dr. Winters said you’re not allowed to criticize your husband. Donald said, ‘Now that doctor is smart.’ You think it’s bad to criticize your guy?” Haley asked, forgetting the whole “Make yourself happy” part.

Picturing her reciting the dialogue between Dr. Winters and me to her fiancé in bed made me cringe. It felt too intimate, even for an over-sharer like me.

“Can I call Dr. Winters?” she asked.

I said no, explaining that the patient-therapist relationship is based on confidentiality and transference and that therapists weren’t like dentists. There was an unspoken rule not to see the same shrink as your close friend, relative or teacher. I certainly didn’t want to bump into her in his waiting room, my safest harbor, where I removed my teacher/author mask. That was why I referred her to Paula. “Would you prefer I recommend another smart, male shrink?” I asked.

“You’re so generous, Sue.” She leaned her head on my shoulder. “I won’t call Winters. I didn’t mean to overstep.” Then she asked, “Is the number of the Jungian astrologer you wrote about listed? He has a Ph.D in clinical psych, right?”

Before I could reiterate that she should stop shrink-stalking me and find one of the other 20,000 head doctors in the city, she spun off to greet guests. Two students from my last class stepped off the elevator.

The girl with a nose ring shouted, “Hey, Prof Sue, what are you doing here?”

“I’m helping her promote her dazzling roman a clef, Speed Shrinking, coming out in August, the month shrinks are away,” Haley said, flitting by. “There’s a keg, and red and white wine by the bar.”

She was a fun hostess, like I had once been — before I quit alcohol and drugs and became a workaholic.

“My shrink is actually coming to town in August,” I clarified.

“So cool about your novel,” said nose ring, who also had a silver hoop through her lip.

I handed her a postcard, wondering if it hurt when she kissed.

By 11pm, the space was packed. My editor Robert walked in. “Aside from the fact that a newspaper assistant making $200 a week lives in a $5 million loft, notice anything strange?” he asked.

I looked around, clueless.

“Is there anyone here you don’t know, Sue?”

“No wonder I’m having a good time,” I said.

“Everyone upstairs for a surprise,” Haley yelled, guiding the crowd up the winding stairway.

“My back is too old for that staircase,” Robert said.

We sat on the couch together, catching up. The nose ring girl came back downstairs ten minutes later.

“What’s happening up there?” I asked.

“A flame-thrower’s eating fire on the roof,” she said on her way to the loo.

“Weird. We met the flame thrower at a book event I took her to last week,” I said, miffed that Haley hadn’t mentioned hiring her.

“That your agent?” Robert pointed. I nodded as he added, “So you trust red-headed Vampira?”

“Of course,” I answered. “With my life.”

***

“Is it weird that Haley had 100 of my friends at her party?” I asked Dr. Winters at our next session. “She sees my old female therapist and wants to call Stargazer and you. Is it unhealthy if she’s shrink-stalking me?”

“If she calls, I’ll recommend a colleague,” he’d reassured.

Cool. Case closed. Until four months later, when I learned they’d been shrinking behind my back. After catching her leaving his office, I stumbled to my apartment, mumbling to myself, then picked up my landline.

“Why did you call Dr. Winters when you said you wouldn’t?” I asked her.

“I can’t fathom what business of yours my therapy is,” she replied.

“It wouldn’t be if you hadn’t called my therapist after I asked you not to. You can’t just co-opt my editors, saviors, and existence. That doesn’t even work,” I told her. “How long have you been seeing him?”

“Since May,” she said, quietly.

Since her party? “So you ask if you can call my shrink, I say no, and you steal him anyway?”

“Sue, I adore you. I’m closer to you than my family. But seeing him has nothing to do with you. I’m quitting the newspaper and your workshop. I can only have one guru. I need to listen to Daniel now.”

Using his first name while dumping me — and the editorship I’d recommended — stung. I hung up in disbelief, emailing Dr. Winters: “You’ve been seeing Haley for four months?”

He responded right away that she was getting smart advice from him, and I should “Let people move on.”

They acted like I was crazy to care if he saw her, or that they’d double-crossed me. Was I?

That night, I had a nightmare my father was eloping with the daughter I never had. I couldn’t concentrate or eat. I lost 13 pounds over the next 13 days. I wasn’t sleeping. Paranoia reigned. “Don’t tell Sue. It’s just between us,” I pictured Haley whispering. “Don’t listen to her. She’s not a doctor, she just repeats what I tell her,” he’d answer. As daily cyber arguments with Haley and Dr. Winters built, so did my resentment. One Wednesday, when they both ignored my emails, I really lost it.

That stormy September dawn, as Jake snored, I broke free of his arms. I sneaked to the living room, opening the windows. The lightning outside mirrored my frenzied mood. I turned on the old rhythm and blues mixtape my first heartbreak had made me in high school. I’d never officially hexed anyone before but recalled the time my mother, invoking her maiden name, whispered, “The Goodman women are witches.” Sitting on the floor, lights dimmed, I lit a wildflower candle. Groggy and frazzled, I put a double curse on Dr. Winters and Haley. I chanted in Yiddish, adding confessional poetry and Edith Piaf, scrawling in my secret notebook that the identity thief was forever banished from New York and Dr. Winters should hurt as much as I did.

Eight hours later, Haley emailed that she was on a plane to Europe. My curse had chased her bad juju away from my city. Next Dr. Winters responded that he’d been bedridden, in pain from kidney stones; he could barely move. Wow. I felt wildly powerful. Then I was petrified she’d die in a crash and my spell would kill him. Sleep deprived, my sanity was slipping.

“Sorry you’re sick,” I typed, freaked out, imagining he was doing daily phone sessions from the hospital long distance with Haley, where they kept insulting me:

“You should see the sucky first drafts Sue brings to the group,” Haley would tell him.

“You should have seen her while she was drinking and smoking,” Dr. Winters would confide.

Jake woke to find me sobbing at my desk. “Step away from your computer,” he commanded, imitating the voice of a policeman from his TV show. He read the email chain.

“Remember the nickname I gave Haley the first time I met her, when she acted like she’d been my best NYU student and I had no idea who she was?” he asked. “Crazypants.”

I wondered if my loneliness had caused me to misjudge her affection — and sincerity. Patting my head, Jake said, “It’s time we lose Haley and Dr. Winters altogether.”

I told Haley not to call me again. Insisting I break off all contact with Dr. Winters, Jake left a phone message on his machine instructing him not to contact me anymore. That provoked an incendiary email: “So your husband speaks for you now?”

For the first time in 15 years, I didn’t respond.

Haley’s Facebook post read: “Lead the least secretive life = best advice I ever got from a fortune cookie.”

She’d stolen my favorite saying and the shrink I’d taken it from.

***

I didn’t hear from Dr. Winters or Haley until six months later, when he emailed me an apology. Tears fell before I could process his words, asking if I’d meet him at his office so he could say he was sorry in person. Defensively, I refused. He offered to meet me for coffee, anywhere I chose, with Jake — if I preferred. My husband pushed me to go alone. “He was kind for 15 years. At least let him explain what happened.”

“How’s Jake doing?” Dr. Winters asked, sitting across from me at a local diner.

He hates you, I didn’t say. He had to save me from you. “Good,” I answered. “How’s your wife?”

He’d mentioned a year ago that his spouse, Karen, had needed an operation to remove a benign tumor. It had something to do with 9/11 fumes. When I’d asked about her over the summer, he said she’d be fine.

“Not well,” he said now, his voice cracking.

“What happened?”

“There was nerve damage after her neurosurgery that hardly worked. She’s half-deaf, can’t drive, can’t walk without a cane, work, or fly without seizures.”

“I had no idea!” I said. “I’m so sorry.” His eyes no longer seemed menacing, just agonized and haunted. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Hard to talk about,” he mumbled. “At first, they said she was dying. There was nothing we could do. It threw me back to the nightmare of my childhood. I was scared I was losing my wife. I couldn’t fix her.”

My Jewish guilt toward my Protestant shrink ricocheted all over the place. I wanted to reach for his hand to comfort him. But physical contact was the one boundary we never broke. He morphed from monster into a healer who couldn’t save his own wife, a proud man too overcome with grief to focus on work. I felt lighter; the unbearable burden of believing he’d wanted to cause me harm was lifting off my skull.

“You’ve been having a rough time,” I conceded, becoming his shrink.

“I mishandled everything,” he said. “I feel like I lost the whole year.”

I was guilty of mishandling it all, and losing the year too.

I’d naively expected complete disclosure on both sides, assuming he’d reveal what was going on in his life and ask if I could handle him seeing my protégée. Over the months we didn’t speak, I’d transferred our intense bond to my husband, now my closest confidant. Yet there were weaknesses and secrets I’d rather share with my shrink than my mate. Like how distressed I still felt that Winters had become closer to Haley than to me.

“It still pains me that you’re treating my student after you promised not to.”

“I’m not treating her anymore,” he said.

I was shocked. “Not at all?” I heard his past voice saying, “Susan, everything is too important to you.”

“I haven’t seen her in five months. It was a mistake,” he now told me.

“So you’ll have no contact with Haley?” It came out like an ultimatum, as if I’d been betrayed by a cheating lover and was debating whether to take him back.

“I will not see or speak to Haley again,” Winters said.

I was sure he was sincere. Haley was out. I was elated! But wait — I didn’t want to get back in.

The waiter brought the check. The thought of bidding Daniel goodbye forever felt paralyzing.

“My mind is racing,” I said. “I keep coming up with different subtexts for what happened.”

“Like what?”

“You scheduled Haley right before me, then ran late so I would catch you lying. You felt guilty. So having me see her leave your office was a way to get out of the deception,” I tried. “You alienated me, expecting me to cut you off, like your mother did. Then you apologized and wanted a reunion, knowing I’d forgive you.”

“How would I know you’d forgive me?” he asked.

“Unlike your mom, I’m not a raging alcoholic. You fixed my addictions the way you couldn’t fix hers,” I said, adding, “I read over the addiction book we worked on. We should revise and publish it.”

“We should.” His eyes lit up, like it was the best idea anyone had ever had.

I felt like we were a married couple, seconds away from getting a divorce, deciding to have a baby instead. Was I being competitive with Haley? She may have seen him, too. But if Dr. Winters and I were coauthors, I’d be the one having his metaphorical child.

***

Enveloped in the magic dust of our reconciliation, I reached out to Haley. My six-month period of hating her haunted me. She was a small town kid estranged from her mother. Even if she’d acted reckless or insatiable, I’d once been a hungry girl devouring the city and everything in it too. I recalled she was turning 30 the following week. I wanted to liberate her the way my former guru’s mea culpa had just freed me.

“Dr. Winters and I reconciled. I hope we can too,” I emailed.

“Thanks. I never meant to hurt you,” she instantly replied.

Six months of fury melted to memory. I almost said, “Let’s take a long walk.” Then I caught myself.

“Protégés aren’t real friends,” Dr. Winters had warned. “Mentors have all the power.”

At 9am the next morning, my phone rang. “Oh Sue, I’m so glad to be back in touch. I just hated fighting with you,” Haley said.

I usually resented being interrupted from work. But I was drawn in by her slow lilting voice. “Me too,” I told her. “I’m sorry.”

“The first thing I told Winters was, ‘Sue is like a mother to me,’” Haley said.

I was moved. Until she added, “His response was ‘Get rid of her.’”

I flinched. Man, that was ugly. He’d probably told her to lose me on the same day he’d told me, “This girl is not your friend.” Yet I accepted that his wife’s illness had induced a kind of temporary madness. In my mind it was already history.

Haley asked if she could come to a reading I was hosting at a soup kitchen that Sunday. I was flattered; that charity event meant a lot to me. “Sure,” I said.

Standing at the podium that night, I saw a shock of red hair slip into the back row. She looked lovely in a flowery dress. When she greeted me afterwards, I gave her a present: a Tibetan notebook with a silver pen.

“That’s so sweet of you. Let’s get together,” she said.

I thought this was getting together. She told me she and Donald had split for good, and she’d be leaving New york soon. Did I have time this weekend, before she left?

I felt sad for her. “How about coffee after work on Friday around 6?”

“Let’s have dinner.” She upgraded my offer.

Jake was out of town. I had no plans. “How about — I’ll take you out to eat for your big 3-0?”

“Let’s see a movie too?”

Familiar red flags flew. We’d never done dinner and a movie. While I hoped Dr. Winters and I would be linked forever, I only wanted to make sure Haley was okay. Realizing it could be the last time I see her, I offered to see Sex and the City: Two, as if to transform our Felliniesque drama into a comedy, just a couple of gal-pals on the town. She met me at the café next to the theater, already seated, wearing a soft pink sweater.

“Happy birthday,” I said.

She thanked me, then said, “Sue, Can I ask you something?”

“Anything.”

She launched into a story about Donald ordering her out of their penthouse the day our colleague Ann said she was staying with him at his place in France the next week.

I thought I was incapable of small talk. I saw why we’d bonded. But she was still stuck in an endless breakup cycle. Done with my Oedipal triangle, she’d already found another. Ann was a 50-year-old sharp redheaded critic from my workshop. I wondered if Haley’s mother had red hair like hers, Ann’s, and my mom’s.

“You and Donald don’t work,” I said. When my advice didn’t get her wed, she’d called in the shrink who’d helped me marry, to finish the job. She was grasping for help to heal her heart, like I had.

“Want to share the cheese fruit platter and a salad?” I asked.

She nodded, moved closer, and conspiratorially asked, “Don’t you think Ann’s being disloyal?”

I was not taking the bait and re-triangulating. “Ann’s only said how smart and talented you are.” I sipped water. “She’d never touch Donald.”

“Then why is she at his apartment?”

“Because she’s your friend and broke. He’d probably offered her a free place to stay in Paris when you guys were still together,” I said. “You know, when I turned 30, my boyfriend left me and my boss fired me from my book reviewing job. I thought life was over. Then I met Jake and decided to be an author, not a critic.”

“You think I should start over, get rejected daily, and live in Brooklyn with a bunch of roommates?” she asked sarcastically.

“Yes. You’re still young. I was 43 before I nailed love, work and a good apartment — the New York trifecta.”

“Sue, I want your life,” she confessed.

“I know. But it took me decades of sweat. And I’m still struggling. You can’t just latch onto rich successful older men to save you.”

“Didn’t you?”

“No!” I yelled. Then I softened, remembering I had the husband, shrink, square footage and career she coveted. “I worked 80-hour weeks. I still do. Jake was unemployed when we met. He was impressed by my book column. He found Dr. Winters.”

“I thought he’d help me and Donald the way he helped you,” she said quietly. I suddenly wished Winters and I could have put them back together again.

“It seems like he tried,” I said.

“He traumatized me,” she jumped in.

“How?” I was dying to know what actually had transpired between them.

“I had three appointments with him, for $400 a session, which Donald paid for,” she said. “Then Winters went to Arizona and was never available. He didn’t return my calls. I was chasing a ghost. In March, I get a message saying he’s referring me to another therapist.”

I’d envisioned the two in harmony, the way he and I had been. I was thrilled to hear he’d charged her his new high rate, had quit her (maybe because of me?), and they’d never clicked, as if a woman who’d slept with my husband was revealing he couldn’t get it up with her. Then I felt embarrassed about falling back into an immature rivalry I had to get us out of.

“I know he’s really sorry. So am I,” I said pouring the tea. “Winters’s wife was sick. Really sick,” I lowered my voice. “If I thought Jake might die, I’d lose it too.”

“Sorry to hear,” she mumbled, taking a tiny bite of cheese. “But you know, you wrote about Winters in your book. It was obvious who he was. His number is listed. Anybody could have called him.”

“You weren’t anybody. You were a student who joined my workshop, working a job I recommended, seeing my former female therapist. We over-connected. It was a perfect Freudian storm.” I wanted her to know how threatened I was, as if I’d been erased. “You had 100 of my friends at your party. It was spooky.”

“I knew them, too,” she said.

“Through me,” I pointed out. “For three years I was your guru. Then I get an email you’re quitting your job, me and my workshop, and find out you’re lying to me.” What changed in May, after her party?

I treated for dinner. She bought the movie tickets, but I wanted to play the magnanimous mentor, sure this night of repair should be on me. “I’ll get popcorn,” I offered.

Post-movie, we strolled downtown, deciding I was career-crazed Carrie; she was marriage-minded Charlotte, analyzing the script, and wondering aloud whether, in real life, Mr. Big returned. After six years off and on, mine did. Haley’s didn’t. The next day she was leaving her penthouse to bunk with a buddy in midtown. Recalling how it felt to be up in the air at 30, I walked her back to the regal home she was losing.

“Why were you so mad at me last May?” I asked. “I came to your fun 29th birthday party and…”

“Yeah and what a present you gave me,” she said, “— the book where you trashed me!”

“What?”

“After the party, I stayed up late reading your novel. Lori was obviously me, your redheaded yogi student, a raging alcoholic and food addict with a rich fiancé who dumps her.” Tears fell from her green eyes.

“Wait.” I stopped. “You mean the AA and OA meetings I went to with Kim? I wasn’t talking about you.”

“Who’s Kim?”

“Another student. She had red hair too. It was a composite character, for dramatic effect. I did use the yoga and your breakup story,” I admitted. “But I never thought you were an alcoholic or food addict.”

“You didn’t?” She turned to me. “I have addiction problems, so I assumed…”

“I never saw you drunk or overeating,” I said, confused.

“Gosh, I used to go through tons of wine and devour boxes of cookies at three in the morning,” she said. “I showed you a piece about it.”

“I grade 100 student papers a week.” I shrugged.

She insisted it was a mean parody of her.

“It wasn’t. I’m used to doing memoirs. I have no imagination whatsoever. So I just glommed the characteristics of a few students together,” I admitted. “Why didn’t you tell me you hated it?”

She admitted she should have as we stood outside her building.

Since this was goodbye, I tried to wrap it up better. “Listen, Haley, you’re so sharp and special. You’ll figure it all out.” I wanted her to heal faster. “Thirty is when everything great starts.”

When I hugged her, she held on like she didn’t want to let go. We’d had five hours together, the longest I’d spent with a friend since Claire moved away. Haley was leaving her impossible penthouse and losing her love. Suddenly I was relieved to be older, boring, sober, no longer chaotically fighting to find myself. Our ending appeared poetic — unlocking mysteries of our turbulent year. But it wasn’t over.

At home, I stayed up late, rereading my pages on the student in my novel, searching for what had hurt Haley. I found it in a scene where I’d trashed the drunk red-headed yoga teacher’s breakup with her rich ex. Worse, towards the end my heroine admitted, “I was using protégés to fill in my emptiness. Yet there was no substitute for important people in your world. They were irreplaceable.”

No wonder Haley felt insulted. She thought I was saying she meant nothing to me. That was why she’d quit me.

At 9 a.m. the next morning she called. “Will you look at my book review before it’s due?”

A final reparation? I carefully went over her work so I could edit myself back into being the good mentor, not a middle-aged monster who’d wished her dead. Maybe she needed a last blessing over her words.

Then Haley returned to her Southern hometown. Months later, on Facebook, I saw she moved in with a river boat captain. Then she unfriended me. Scrolling down, I noticed she’d become “friends” with her mother, which seemed a healthy transition.

In Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Joan Didion wrote, “Writers are always selling someone out.” I’d sold out my favorite student during our overlapping desperate dashes for success. Trying to publish a first novel for decades, I’d had artistic megalomania, treating my literary agenda as more significant than the humans behind it. I was the one guilty of crossing boundaries. Yes, she’d tried to poach my friends, editors and role models. Yet by using details of Haley’s life, I’d stolen hers first.

* * *

Susan Shapiro, a New School writing professor, is the bestselling author of Unhooked, Five Men Who Broke My Heart, The Byline Bible and the new memoir-in-progress, The Forgiveness Tour. 

Editor: Sari Botton

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Also In the Fine Lines Series:
Introducing Fine Lines
Gone Gray
An Introduction to Death
Age Appropriate
A Woman, Tree or Not
Dress You Up in My Love
The Wrong Pair
‘Emerging’ as a Writer — After 40
Losing the Plot
A Portrait of the Mother as a Young Girl
Elegy in Times Square
Every Day I Write the Book
Johnny Rotten, My Mom, and Me
Everything is Fine
Barely There
Bracing for the Silence of an Empty Nest
To Grieve Is to Carry Another Time
Game of Crones
Father’s Little Helper
Whole 60
Conversations with My Loveliest
What is Happening to My Body?
Keeping my Promise to Popo
Hello, Forgetfulness; Hello, Mother
Old Dudes on Skateboards
I’m 72. So What?
Learning From Perimenopause and a Kpop Idol
The Art of Losing Friends and Alienating People
We Are All We Have
Searching Sephora for an Antidote to Aging — and Grief