When a client I’ll call Fred first came to see me, he complained of feeling ugly, unimportant, and vastly underappreciated. He said that he’d once been a grand personage — exalted, even — but a dreadful event had transformed him into someone small and insignificant. He hated his body.
He hated his voice. He hated his skin.
I listened. I imagined that this “dreadful event” in his past held a key to his current state, but I didn’t push. By and by is my motto. Cynics might say that’s because I charge by the hour.
But so much of what I do is based on being patient, calm, and accepting.
Years ago, when I was a graduate student in a dusty desert town, I bicycled almost every day past a mosque. When you hear mosque, you may think of an elaborate edifice with a dome and a minaret, but this mosque was a blockish building made of concrete, formerly a hardware store, and painted on its side, facing the street, in big letters, was the mosque’s slogan — though I’m sure there’s a better word than slogan — “Happiness is submission to God.” The script didn’t even look Arabic. Big block letters on a big block of a building: Happiness is submission to God.
I passed that slogan twice a day. It didn’t always catch my eye, but it often did, often enough that I contemplated those words even when I wasn’t glimpsing them from my bicycle — in the shower, say, or on a hike.
I didn’t believe in God, and the idea of submission repulsed me — I saw myself as a rugged individualist, a secular humanist — but that slogan lodged in my head, burrowed into the soft tissue of my brain and made itself at home.
After I became a father, I understood the slogan differently. Its meaning transformed. Submission softened to surrender. God changed to what is. Happiness, I came to believe, is surrender to what is. That’s not all happiness is, of course, but if you can’t surrender, if you refuse, happiness will remain forever out of reach.
My beliefs may be entirely mistaken, but I’m trying to give you an idea of my perspective as I listened to Fred over the course of several months.
Eventually, he did tell me of the dreadful event that led him to be turned into a frog. I won’t bore you with the details. Suffice it to say that he confessed to behaving badly, acting callous, selfish, and rude, but he still felt terribly wronged.
“I know I was a total ass!” he wailed, tears streaming down his cheeks, “but doesn’t the punishment far exceed the crime?”
I didn’t answer, though I secretly agreed. My view was incidental — it was Fred who needed to forgive himself — and everyone else.
But how does one accept being the victim of an evil spell?
I consulted my own therapist, Fred’s case nagged at me so.
Some people pay such a heavy price for their mistakes, while others skate heedlessly across the frozen pond of life. They may hear the frightening crack, but for them the ice never breaks. They never plunge into the cold, dark, unforgiving abyss.
“’Tis a puzzlement,” my therapist said, which reminded me of my mother — but let’s keep her out of this.
I listened to Fred with all the compassion I could muster, I’d like to think I never judged or preached, and gradually he seemed to accept his lot on the lily pad. When we ended our therapeutic relationship, I strongly believed that he had attained if not happiness at least an amused detachment. Yes, he was a cynic, but he could be hilarious. No other client has ever made me laugh like Fred!
Naturally, I was surprised when, only last week, I had a drop-in session with a man I’ll call Prince Frederick. Indeed, my Fred had been transformed again. He was classically tall and handsome, with a becoming dimple in his chin.
“Do you know who I am?” he asked.
“Yes, I think I do.”
“Well, I don’t,” he said. “I don’t have the slightest clue.” To this, I said nothing. I met his gaze and waited.
In truth, I saw the sorrowful droop at the corners of his mouth, the melancholy furrowing of his brow.
“I’m married,” he said. “I just met her, but she’s perfect.”
“Mm-hmm,” I said.
“She’s kind and funny. She loves me for who I am. Whoever that is,” he added with a bitter croak.
“Yes?” I said.
“I’m just not comfortable in my own skin,” he said. “I miss the lily pad.” He hung his head. I sat with him until he raised it.
The therapist-client relationship is so uneven. Clients bare their soul. Therapists conceal theirs. The goal is to keep the dreck of one’s own life from leaking in — or at least that’s one of the goals.
“Let me tell you a story,” I said. “When I was in grad school, I used to bike past this mosque, only it didn’t look like a mosque, it looked like the hardware store it had formerly been, and on the side of the mosque, facing the street, in huge block letters was written the mosque’s slogan — well, I’m not sure slogan’s the best word, but you know what I mean…”
Fred listened. He nodded. At one point, he reached out and patted my hand. And at the end of the story, at least one of us felt a little less bad.
David Schweidel is the author of Confidence of the Heart, winner of the Milkweed National Fiction Prize, and co-author of What Men Call Treasure, a Western Writers Award finalist. His stories and essays have appeared in such places as Epiphany, Smokelong Quarterly, and Permafrost.
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