Life Will Be the Death of Me: . . . and You Too!(6)

Every therapist I saw before I reached the age of forty-two made me feel like I was running in place. I would go for a period of time and then I would eventually get bored. Often, I knew I was running circles around them. Some therapists were just not the right fit, and some of them were good but felt more like enablers than instructors, and I wanted to be taught how to be better at being a whole person. I wanted to break my pattern of ending friendships and relationships on a dime because someone did something that I found unforgivable. I would go to the mat for my friends, and sometimes for people I barely knew, and when it came time for them to return the favor or defend me, and they weren’t capable of the same bullish determination I had shown them, the earth became scorched, and I wrote them off forever. Everything with me had always been black and white. Life or death. I wanted more gray. I wanted to learn how to forgive.



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On an episode of my show about education, I interviewed a neuropsychiatrist and researcher named Dan Siegel, who’d written several books on developing brains, including one that focused on adolescent brains. I wanted to know when brains develop, at what age you learn the most, whether it’s possible to increase your IQ, and at what age drugs and alcohol do the most damage in terms of slowing down your learning process. The last question I slipped in about three or four times throughout the conversation until I finally got the answer I wanted, which was that my brain had fully developed before any brain damage had occurred and that any extracurricular activities I was up to were just fine—at least that’s what my takeaway was.

In addition to writing several books on childhood brain development and meditation, Dan lectured all over the world about mindfulness and being present, and he explained the brain to me in a very linear, non-obscure way that I could understand—with pictures.

A couple of months after the election, I had Brandon call Dan and set up an appointment.

I spent our first session talking to him about meditation, how to slow down, how to be less reactive and not end friendships every time someone hurt my feelings. I explained to him my interest in wanting to know more about the amygdala, hippocampus, and prefrontal cortex; the science of the brain would be a good non-emotional buffer while I figured out if this doctor was smarter than me.

    “I like my language literal; I like logic. I can’t follow anything abstract, or math, for that matter. Physics can also go fuck itself,” I told him. “Also, feel free to use metaphors. I’m into those.”

I kept blathering on like someone who was on a first date but was too embarrassed to admit that she was on a first date, even though she was at a restaurant with a stranger she had met online.

“I tend to lean toward my own experiences and not think outside of that perspective. It’s called being selfish. It’s why I’m here. To find out more about others and less about what I like. To become less self-centered, more evolved, and involved with things I know nothing about. I’m starved for a real conversation about struggle, not who the best spray-tanner in town is. I am officially dehydrated from my life.”

“Okay.” He nodded. “Tell me about that.”

“I’ve decided to take this year off and throw myself into helping women and people of color get elected, because I believe we are in an emergency situation in this country, and I want to be part of the solution, not the problem. In order to do that, I feel like I have to get real about how spoiled and entitled I have become. I read somewhere that in order to be of use to others, you need to clean out your own injuries.” I exhaled. “Or maybe I dreamed it. I don’t know.”

    Dan looked at me curiously and asked me what it was exactly that I wanted to tackle, what I didn’t like about myself.

“Well, I think we have to start with the fact that I can’t do very simple things.”

“Okay,” he replied with his hands folded in his lap, legs crossed, sitting about three feet away from me. I took a deep inhale and then let it rip.

“I’d say my biggest weakness is my short fuse and my lack of ability to do any menial tasks. I’ve spent the last fifteen years being paid to talk for a living, so I know a lot of words and I have a lot of facial expressions and a lot of free clothes. I want to become more self-sufficient this next year. I’d like to be able to understand all these apps that everyone uses, or at least know how to download them without asking one of my assistants to do it. I’d like to know how to use the coffee machine in my kitchen; I don’t drink coffee, but I’d still like to know anyway. I’d like to know how to clean up dog urine when one of my dogs pees on the rug, instead of going and sleeping in another bedroom. (I can, in fact, clean up urine when it’s on a hard surface, but that rarely happens, because I believe my dogs are acutely aware of my impotence and, like typical teenagers, they like to fuck with me.) I’d like to not take scalding hot showers every day I’m home because I have no idea how to change the temperature on my own, even though it has been demonstrated for me numerous times. For the record, my shower is very complicated, but I can only take a shower when my cleaning lady is home, which means we’ve showered together on multiple occasions.”

Dan was listening intently and seemed to be taking me very seriously, and I wanted to disabuse him of the notion that I took myself seriously. I thought about telling him that the night before meeting him, I slept with a towel around my head because I couldn’t figure out how to turn the music off in the house, but in that moment, I decided not to pile on.